Prodigal Son Read Free Page B

your pick.”
    Ignoring the bag, snatching the doughnut from his hand, Carson said, “I’m crazy for maple.”
    Tearing off a huge bite, chewing vigorously, she swung the car away from the curb and rocketed into the street.
    “I’m crazy for maple, too,” Michael said with a sigh.
    The yearning in his voice told Carson that he longed not only for the maple-glazed doughnut. For more reasons than merely the maintenance of a professional relationship, she pretended not to notice. “You’ll enjoy the regular glazed.”
    As Carson took Veterans Avenue out of Jefferson Parish into Orleans Parish, intending to catch Pontchartrain Boulevard to Harrison and then head to City Park, Michael rummaged in the doughnut bag, making it clear that he was selecting one of the other treats only from cruel necessity.
    As she knew he would, he settled on chocolate—not the glazed that she had imperiously recommended—took a bite, and scrunched the top of the paper bag closed.
    Glancing up as Carson cruised through a yellow light an instant before it changed to red, he said, “Ease off the gas and help save the planet. In my church, we start every workday with an hour of sugar and meditation.”
    “
I
don’t belong to the Church of Fat-Assed Detectives. Besides, just got a call—they found number six this morning.”
    “Six?” Around another bite of chocolate doughnut, he said, “How do they know it’s the same perp?”
    “More surgery—like the others.”
    “Liver? Kidney? Feet?”
    “She must’ve had nice hands. They found her in the City Park lagoon, her hands cut off.”

CHAPTER 4
    PEOPLE CAME TO THE fifteen-hundred-acre City Park to feed the ducks or to relax under the spreading live oaks draped with gray-green curtains of Spanish moss. They enjoyed the well-manicured botanical gardens, the Art Deco fountains and sculptures. Children loved the fairy-tale theme park and the famous wooden flying horses on the antique merry-go-round.
    Now spectators gathered to watch a homicide investigation in progress at the lagoon.
    As always, Carson was creeped out by these morbidly curious onlookers. They included grandmothers and teenagers, businessmen in suits and grizzled winos sucking cheap blends out of bagged bottles, but she got a
Night of the Living Dead
vibe from every one of them.
    Centuries-old oaks loomed over a pool of green water fringed with weeds. Paved paths wound along the edge of the lagoon, connected by gracefully arched stone bridges.
    Some rubberneckers had climbed the trees to get a better view past the police tape.
    “Doesn’t look like the same crowd you see at the opera,” Michael said as he and Carson shouldered through the gawkers on the sidewalk and the jogging path. “Or at monster-truck rallies, for that matter.”
    In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this area had been a popular place for hot-blooded Creoles to engage in duels. They met after sunset, by moonlight, and clashed with thin swords until blood was drawn.
    These days, the park remained open at night, but the combatants were not equally armed and matched, as in the old days. Predators stalked prey and felt confident of escaping punishment in this age when civilization seemed to be unraveling.
    Now uniformed cops held back the ghouls, any one of whom might have been the killer returned to revel in the aftermath of murder. Behind them, yellow crime-scene tape had been strung like Mardi Gras streamers from oak tree to oak tree, blocking off a section of the running path beside the lagoon.
    Michael and Carson were known to many of the attending officers and CSI techs: liked by some, envied by others, loathed by a few.
    She had been the youngest ever to make detective, Michael the second youngest. You paid a price for taking a fast track.
    You paid a price for your style, too, if it wasn’t traditional. And with some of the cynical marking-time-till-pension types, you paid a price if you worked as if you believed that the job was