“Katie, you know her better. Describe her to the bartender,” Dan said.
The bartender was a very pretty topless woman with little specks of silver on her nipples. It didn’t give Katie pause.
“I... Wow, I think I did see your friend!” she told Katie after hearing the description. “Her hair was all messy, and she looked as if she was in a hurry. She headed out the back. It leads to a new place down the back, an all-night diner. If you hurry—”
“Thank you!” Katie called, already heading out.
But the back door just led to the side street off Bourbon. The diner was a door down. Katie hurried toward it, rushing in.
Couples and groups sat about at tables, many looking the worse for wear from their night on Bourbon Street already.
There was no single woman there.
And she wasn’t with any group there.
They hurried back out to the street. But away from Bourbon, all was quiet. There were dozens of directions in which she might have gone.
“Hey. We’ll find her again,” Dan told Katie.
She looked at him, frowning, then lowering her head and nodding. “It was her.”
“I believe you,” he said.
“Maybe the wig can give us something? DNA?”
“Possibly. I’ll make sure Axel gets it into the lab right away.”
“But her DNA might not be in the system.”
“Right again. Katie, we will find her. The likenesses you gave us of Neil Browne and Jennie were excellent. They haven’t put them out to the public yet, but officers everywhere have them. They may well find her tonight. And anyway, now we know she’s here. We will find her.”
“Okay,” she said and breathed deeply. “You believe I saw her, right?”
He smiled. “Yes, I believe...in you. And we have the wig.”
“Right,” she said. “Of course you believe me now. We found the wig.”
Well, maybe it was natural that she didn’t trust him. Their time together had been intense, but it had barely been a day since she had accepted the fact they might be on the same side.
He was surprised himself when he took her face in his hands. “I said I believed in you. We were on the hunt before we found the wig. So, if it’s all right with you, we’ll leave this to the police and the agents for now. We’ll go back and get my credit card and then we’ll head out to see George, all right?”
“Ah, right.”
He dropped his hands.
She looked at him curiously. “You forgot your credit card?”
He stared at her, gritting his teeth, then shaking his head.
“No. I chose you over the card, but now that I know you’re all right, I’d really like to get that card back. Now...”
“Right,” she said, and turned back in the direction of the restaurant. “Oh! What about the wig?”
He had his phone out. “It’s okay. I’ll have Axel meet us at the restaurant.”
Axel was already near. He’d come with a group of agents to join with the police in the hunt for the mystery woman.
He made it to Antoine’s before them and was waiting at the door with an evidence bag.
“The woman you knew as Jennie, she knows you saw her,” Axel said, looking gravely at Katie as they waited for the confused waiter to get Dan’s card and the receipt for him to sign.
“I... Yeah, she saw me,” Katie admitted.
“And she ran,” Axel said. “She knows we’re looking for her. If we don’t find her tonight, she’ll go deep underground.”
“We’re heading across to Gretna to meet up with George Calabria,” Dan told him.
“Right. Well, I’m heading back to help the local agents search for our chameleon,” Axel said.
“The wig—” Dan started.
“I’ll have an agent get it straight to the lab,” Axel promised. They went out to the street. Axel offered Katie an encouraging smile and gave Dan a look he understood too well.
Katie could be in trouble.
She was the only one—besides George Calabria-now-Calhoun—who could identify the woman who had been on the boat twelve years ago.
That could mean an even greater danger for her.
“Let’s go to my place and get my car,” Dan suggested when Axel had gone on.
“All right,” she mumbled.
She was silent as they walked. Finally, she blurted, “None of this makes any sense. A killer who struck twelve years ago, six years, and then now. But here, there was a killer who acted in the same manner, but over a hundred years ago. And the number six. Dead goats years back—six dead goats. I mean, I majored in history, but the world has seen crime shows. Serial killers don’t just stop, unless they’re caught or killed or...or on the moon or something. What could make someone kill strangers in different places and...do it in such a manner?”
“You know, I had a case in Florida once when a man poisoned five people in order to kill his wife and make it look like the work of a crazed serial killer. Motives are not always easy to find. This may be random, but there have been a lot of coincidences. Don’t be so disheartened. Mystery Jennie is here. They might find her tonight.”
“She’s going to have disappeared into the Bourbon Street crowd.”
“Maybe. But we know she’s here.”
They’d reached his house. It was an old building, constructed after the fires that had ravaged the French Quarter at the end of the 1700s and early 1800s.
Dan had always loved it. The place had a small front porch with columns and a balcony that ran the width of the second floor. His grandfather had always kept it painted a soft mauve, and he did the same, with white trim work. A wall surrounded the courtyard to the side of the main entrance, dividing the open side of the horseshoe from the street.
“This is yours?” she asked.
“Yes. I didn’t live here growing up, but I visited often enough. My sister and I are all that’s left, though, and as I said, she’s in Baton Rouge.” He paused. “She’s a media consultant. You’d like her.”
“The house is really nice,”
