After the Storm Read online

  Time away and work were what would make him happy. The more he had to focus on a case, the better off he’d be.

  Still looking at his computer, Nick read what he’d found out about Flynn. “He was just a regular lawyer who handled a lot of basic personal injury cases. You’re average, run-of-the-mill legal eagle. Nothing special. He has no reputation for any special kind of cases which would make him a mob lawyer or anyone associated with the mob.”

  He turned to face Roman and said exactly what was running through his mind at that moment. “I wonder why the New Orleans police tagged this as a possible mob hit.”

  “Must be because of the way the two victims were killed. I’m guessing something pretty damn violent if they’re going with the mob as being behind this. The mob likes to make sure killing someone gets the point across. Never really ones for subtlety.”

  Nick rifled through a small stack of papers on the other side of his desk and picked one out of the pile. After scanning it for a moment, he shook his head.

  “No. They were both found shot in the head, but there’s nothing to even hint at a mob hit. The client, Samuel Darnell, was a carpenter. Why the hell would the mob give a damn about someone like him?”

  Roman had no answers for him. All he had were more questions. “So what was this carpenter’s case Flynn was working on? Maybe that’s what got them killed? That might explain why the legal assistant thinks her life is in danger.”

  A few more seconds of reading through notes and then Nick shrugged. “Weird. We have nothing on what the case was. I wonder why the cops didn’t bother to share that information.”

  “Maybe they didn’t think it was related?” Roman suggested, knowing how ridiculous that sounded.

  “A guy and his lawyer are killed on the same day and cops don’t think the case that connects them is related to their murders? This isn’t some backwater small town we’re talking about, Roman. This is New Orleans. Let me ask Persephone.”

  Nick yelled over to the other person who ran Project Artemis, and she held up a single finger to tell him to hold on while she talked on the phone. A few seconds later, the woman who founded the group Roman worked for walked over to join them at Nick’s desk.

  “Sorry, I was on the phone. Nick, I think I have a case for Julian, so let him know when you’re done here. He’ll have to leave as soon as possible.”

  “Okay, but first, Roman and I are trying to figure out why we don’t know what case this Flynn guy was working on with the client who was also murdered in the New Orleans assignment with this Sheridan woman. Seems like an important detail we should have, doesn’t it?”

  For a moment, Persephone stared at Nick and then looked over at Roman, her dark eyes narrowing as she thought about what she’d just heard. “Hmmm. I don’t know. The officer who called me told me they didn’t have a lot of details on what was going on, but they thought it might be a mob hit. We’re not going with her being in danger of being the next victim?”

  Nick shrugged. “No, that’s not it. She very well might be a target of the person who killed her boss and his client since she probably knew about the case, but it seems strange we don’t know what that case was about.”

  “I can call him back, but I think this Kate Sheridan is in real danger, gentleman. Why don’t we start working this case, and when I find out the details about this legal case, I’ll send it to Roman.”

  The two men agreed, and as she began walking to her desk, she looked back at Roman. “The plane is waiting for you. Tess can have the helicopter ready to go when you are, but I don’t think we should wait much longer to get going.”

  Roman had worked for Persephone long enough to know when she was truly worried about a client. She didn’t show it on the outside, remaining cool and collected like always, but concern hung off every word. She had a sixth sense about this kind of thing, and he couldn’t explain it other than the fact that she herself had gone through something hellish that made her start the group to help women in danger. Whatever it was, he didn’t doubt her gut feeling on things like this.

  It dawned on Roman that he had no idea what this Kate Sheridan looked like. “I need to see a picture of our client and then I’ll be on my way.”

  Nick spun his laptop screen around to show him a picture of a woman with brown shoulder length hair and blue eyes. Next to it, he read her vitals. Twenty-eight years old, single, five foot seven. He found himself staring at her image because something about her screamed smart and confident even with her girl next door looks.

  He had to admit he liked the combination.

  Standing to leave, Nick stopped him with a serious glance. “Watch yourself down there, Roman. Mob hit or not, something sounds wrong with this case.”

  “Don’t worry. You know me. I take care of business and then I leave. I’ll probably be finished before the weekend and then I’ll be back to dealing with going stir crazy in this house again.”

  Roman hoped that wouldn’t be how it went down, though. He craved some excitement in his life. The last thing he wanted was another schoolteacher case he could wrap up in a couple days.

  At the very least, he hoped this Kate Sheridan would turn out as interesting as he’d decided she was from her picture.

  Chapter Three

  Her eyes fluttered open, and Kate saw the reality of the room around her hadn’t all been just some horrible nightmare. The bedspread with its bizarre red and brown geometric print and triangles that looked like they would stab a person in their sleep still lay underneath her. She’d pulled it back when she got to the room and there in front of her eyes were dingy white sheets with stains she didn’t even want to think about or guess where they came from.

  Or who they came from.

  Eve hadn’t been wrong. The Bayou Motel could best be described as a dive. The idea that cheating spouses came to this place to have their sexy rendezvous made Kate’s stomach turn. She’d had to talk herself into sleeping on top of the bedspread. No amount of convincing, even if it was from the sexiest man on the planet, would ever get her beneath those sheets.

  Rolling over, she looked down at the floor and the worn green carpet that matched nothing else in the room. Green floor, strange red and brown pointy triangle bedspread, and draperies that had been white at some point in their existence but now appeared like what she thought the color white would look like if all the other colors in the spectrum had ganged up on it, beating white senseless and leaving nasty streaks of their colors on it after their brawl.

  The entire feel of Room 12 at the Bayou Motel made her sick to her stomach.

  Inhaling, she couldn’t say the smell helped either. The room had a putrid odor to it, but she couldn’t place the scent. Possibilities ran through her mind, each one worse than the one before. Did dried blood smell like that? She thought she caught a whiff of vomit in the mixture that threatened to make her add to the horrible smell around her.

  The thought of putting her feet down on that carpet caused her to cringe, so she’d slept with her shoes on. The only other choice would have been to recreate the game of lava floor she and her sister had played when they were kids. The problem with that was there was nothing to climb on to avoid touching that ugly carpet with God only knew what stains on it. Even the pillows at the top of the bed looked disgusting with their dingy off-white color, so she couldn’t use them to create a pathway around the room either.

  Staring up at the ceiling with its brown water stains, she mumbled, “I can’t believe this is what my life has become.”

  The truth of it was her life would now be her on the run until she figured out what to do. With Jonas dead, she had no job, but even worse, whoever killed him and his client would likely be looking for her too because they’d guess she knew the details of the case as well as Jonas.

  Even if she didn’t.

  That fact made everything that had happened so much worse. Jonas had kept her in the dark about much of the Darnell case. She’d asked him over and over about it because each time he gave her something to do regarding it, she had nothing to work with. Being in the dark about the details, she constantly had to ask him for help. But each time, he refused to give her anything more than the sparsest details she needed to do what he wanted.

  Even thinking about it now, she still had no clear idea what Mr. Darnell had come to Jonas for. A carpenter from Slidell, he hadn’t been in an accident of any kind. Those were usually the kinds of cases Jonas represented, but Samuel Darnell wasn’t disabled from a car crash or industrial mishap. In fact, she’d only seen this mysterious client once and he’d looked perfectly average and healthy to her.

  A white man in his early fifties or so, he didn’t walk with a cane and appeared fit. So why had he hired Jonas Flynn, a lawyer who spent much of his career on what many would consider ambulance chasing? Whatever personal injury his client had suffered, Kate had never been able to ascertain exactly what it was and how it affected him.

  Or why he’d need an attorney.

  Jonas had kept her so much in the dark that she didn’t even do his filings for that case. Her job had been relegated to looking up old newspaper articles about Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath in Lafayette. And when she’d ask him why, he simply nodded his head before returning to whatever work he was busy with.

  Except for two nights ago. Then, she asked why he needed all this information, and his eyes grew wide. Never before had she seen Jonas look afraid, but that night in his office, the terror she saw in his eyes told her something or someone had scared the hell out of him. And then he said the words she’d never forget until the day she died.

  “This case is going to cause an earthquake in this state, Kate. I’m doing everything I can to protect you, but if I fail, trust no one, especially the police and the go
vernment.”

  He refused to say anything more, and she was left with two statements that made little sense and even less when put together. His words rang in her ears now as she sat in that horrible motel room near the river, sending a chill down her spine like they had when he’d first said them.

  Kate had no idea what her boss had tried to protect her from or who, but he’d failed and in that he’d lost his own life. Tears welled in her eyes at the thought of Jonas gone. In the four years she’d worked for him, never once had she heard even the hint of a complaint from a single soul about him. Sure, he wasn’t a crack attorney who’d ever take a case to the Supreme Court, and his cases were often more about people trying to get money for injuries that really didn’t change their lives much than addressing real and tragic harm done to his clients.

  But in the big scheme of things in a city full of corruption, Jonas Flynn had helped some people along the way and made a few bucks for himself and her, his only assistant. He never got rich, and even though he had an office in a building with other lawyers, they never associated with him socially. He simply wasn’t big enough or important enough.

  Until now. Something had changed to make Jonas Flynn and his client, Samuel Darnell, very important to someone. Important enough to kill them.

  Kate took a deep breath of fetid motel room air into her lungs and let it out slowly as a single thought filled her brain. She had to figure out who had killed Jonas and his client and why. But to do that, she needed first to find a safe place to hide that didn’t make her skin crawl.

  She’d paid for the night under a name that was a combination of her first name and her mother’s maiden name. Not that Landrieu as a last name would help her stay under the radar, but she hoped it at least made it slightly harder for someone to find her than her own name.

  Fuck. She wasn’t good at this cloak and dagger stuff. She kept on the right side of the law at all times. She paid her taxes like she should, and whenever she got behind the wheel of her friend’s cars, she made sure to wear a seatbelt and not drive over the speed limit. Damnit, she’d done everything right and look where it had gotten her.

  Hiding out in a shithole motel room that smelled like a mixture of blood and vomit.

  “I can’t meet my end here,” she mumbled as she rolled off the bed and set her feet on the floor. “I won’t. If they’re going to kill me, I’m going to at least die in a decent place.”

  As Kate walked across the room to the nastiest bathroom ever, she thought about that little bout of bravado she’d just showed. Pretty ballsy for someone who had no way to escape the city, little money to pay for anything, and no one to help her.

  She flipped the switch on the wall that made the fluorescent light flicker on above the medicine cabinet that doubled as a mirror and stared at her reflection in front of her. A crack in the mirror ran diagonally through her face, giving her a nice funhouse look with the top half of her head shifted left and the bottom half shifted right.

  “You’ve had bad mornings before, Kate, but this takes the prize. No hangover beats this look you’ve got going on now,” she said to herself, punctuating her comment with a sardonic chuckle.

  For all the partying she’d done in her late teens and early twenties, none of those mornings after had ever looked this bad. Her mascara sat underneath her blue eyes, accentuating the dark circles there from a poor night’s sleep. Yesterday’s youthful and attractive look had given way to today’s mess, and since she didn’t have any makeup with her in her purse, she’d have to go through the day looking like this.

  Even worse, her dark hair looked like those bedspread triangles had come to life during the night and gone to war with one side of her head. Tangled and frizzy, that half looked only marginally worse than the other half that sat pressed to her scalp.

  “You’re the personification of this motel room,” she groaned to her reflection.

  Behind her, the old shower curtain hung in a clump at the end of the rod to show off the black and mildewed grout lines between grimy green tiles. As she tried not to focus on the millions of microbes that must be living on that shower wall, she wondered if the tiles were supposed to match the carpet.

  “No shower for me today, it seems,” she said as she forced herself not to look at the disgusting shower.

  She didn’t even want to imagine how bad the tub looked. One glance at that and she might really throw up. Keeping her eyes on the mirror in front of her, she turned the hot water faucet handle with her left hand and heard the pipes make a terrifying groan, as if she’d awoken some horrible creature that lived inside them. Quickly, her gaze dropped to the sink to see what would come out, but after a few more angry groans, nothing happened. She turned the hot water handle completely off and prayed for better luck with the cold water.

  Hopefully, the monster that controlled that temperature would be friendlier.

  Cautiously, she turned the handle with a C on it and watched in surprise as water actually flowed into the sink. A smell like low tide hit her nostrils, turning her stomach for a moment, but she’d take the slightly murky cold water over nothing at all.

  Wetting her hands, she scrubbed her face and wiped the area underneath her eyes until she no longer resembled some goth or punk rocker chick. Once more under the water to get her hands wet again and then she dragged her fingers through her hair to fluff the one side and untangle and calm the other.

  When she finished, Kate looked into the mirror again and saw not much improvement. She looked about as good as she felt, which considering what she’d been through in the past twelve hours and where she’d spent the night was pretty damn bad.

  If only her biggest problem was how she looked.

  Clean and as ready for the day as she possibly could be, Kate next had to tackle finding out what information the police had released on the murders. Someone had stolen all the knobs from the old TV that sat on top of the dresser, so finding out that way wouldn’t be happening. She’d seen a newspaper machine on the sidewalk about half a block away from the motel when she arrived the night before, so hopefully the paper had something to help her.

  Opening the motel room door, she poked her head out and looked around at the world outside. She saw no one in the parking lot, and looking down the sidewalk toward where guests checked in, she saw no one working the desk. Clearly, the Bayou Motel didn’t expect many cheating spouses or high school partiers at five-thirty in the morning.

  She felt her back pocket for the key she’d gotten when she paid for her room and found it still there, so she stepped outside onto the sidewalk in front of the motel. A handful of cars sat parked in front of other rooms. Looking out toward the road and the sidewalk that ran next to it, she saw the newspaper machine chained to a telephone pole.

  Kate ran as fast as she could to it before realizing she might not have enough change to get a paper. Stopping in front of the navy blue newspaper vending machine covered with stickers from local bands and people’s pet causes, she rummaged through her pockets but only found a quarter, two dimes, and a penny.

  “Who the hell carries change anymore?” she asked before cursing out the newspaper business. “No wonder these damn things are going the way of the landline.”

  As she considered trying to break into the machine by kicking her foot through the glass front, she saw the entire front page of that day’s newspaper edition displayed for her. Crouching down, she read the headline at the top and the sentence beneath it that stunned her.

  LOCAL LAWYER FOUND DEAD

  Police looking into possible love triangle

  Kate sat back on her heels in amazement. Possible love triangle? That was the line they were spinning? A love triangle between a forty-five year old lawyer who was married to his work and hadn’t dated in ages, a man in his fifties, and who?

  A horrible thought rushed into her mind. Did they think she was the third in that love triangle and she’d killed both men? Was she a suspect in the two murders?

  The very thought made her blood run cold.

  Suddenly, she felt utterly vulnerable out there in the open, so she rushed back to the room and slammed the door shut. She pressed her back against the door and tried to catch her breath as her heart raced.