No Hero Read online

  Dev rubbed his eyes.

  “You need to go to bed,” she continued, “and in your bedroom, not down in the office. I changed your sheets today, though I don’t know why I bother. You never sleep in there.”

  “I don’t think I can sleep. I’ll go down and do some paperwork,” he said, standing.

  Penn threw up her hands in mock surrender. “Fine. But eat something. There’s sandwich stuff in the refrigerator if the kids haven’t already inhaled it. And drink milk, not coffee. I’m going to get in another hour of study before Katie wakes up.”

  Dev leaned down and kissed her on the cheek. “Night, Penn.”

  “Morning, Dev,” she said, then called out, “Milk.”

  He smiled as he headed down the hall to his bedroom. The king-sized bed was made and the room smelled like fresh linen. With a longing glance toward the bed and its promise of cool, clean sheets, he grabbed a pair of sweatpants and headed down the hall to the bathroom for a quick, hot shower. Under the refreshing spray, he found himself thinking about Reghan Connor. That red hair and the determined lift to her chin were as intriguing and sexy as her slender yet curvy body. He was surprised at how easily and quickly his own body reacted to his thoughts. But then, his body was fickle. It didn’t care that she’d ripped into the web of lies that Thibaud had spun to protect Dev from having to face his past. His flesh still wanted her with a burning desire that only grew hotter the more he tried to tamp it down. He turned off the hot water and endured the cold spray for a few seconds before finishing up his shower and drying off.

  He pulled the sweatpants over his damp legs and walked downstairs. After scowling at the mess of papers piled on the desk, he lay down on the couch. When his head hit the cushion, he winced at the tension in his neck and the renewed throbbing in his temple.

  He closed his eyes, hoping he could relax and maybe nap for a while. But no such luck. As soon as his eyelids closed, Brian’s and Darnell’s broken, limp bodies rose in his inner vision. He’d started the center to give these teens what he’d never had until he’d found himself in New Orleans.

  Today, he was thankfully a thousand miles and twenty years away from the frightened, desperate twelve-year-old who’d run as far as he could to escape the awful reality of what he’d done. Still, the memories bombarded his exhausted brain and his ears rang again—they always would, he suspected—with the horrible crunching sound of wood against bone. His fingers would always tingle from the force of the deadly blow he had dealt. Thibaud had been right all those years ago. It don’t help to run when you’re hauling around what you’re running from.

  Dev scrubbed his hand over his face and, like so many times before, deliberately wiped his brain of the pointless memories. The boy he’d once been was as dead as the man whose skull he had cracked. John Devrow, the child, had died that night. He’d left behind everything he’d ever known and become…nobody. Just another nameless vagrant on the streets, doing what he had to do for a drink of cool, clean water or a warm place to sleep. He’d survived months of begging and stealing a few dollars where he could, dozens of nights of hiding, huddling in corners striving to be invisible, wondering if surviving was worth the price.

  Then, just over two years after he’d run away, that nameless boy had dared to trust, to accept something more than a handout from a beat cop who had chosen to go around the law rather than put another kid in prison. That boy had accepted a promise, and he’d given one.

  That’s when Devereux Gautier had been born.

  Thibaud had taken him in. He’d protected him and taught him everything he knew about life, including how to protect himself. He could still hear the gnarled cop’s Cajun drawl. What I got to spend my money on, fils? Always wanted a son, me. Always thought it’d be nice to see my boy become a cop. Mais non, not like me. No walking a beat, not for my kid. He be a detective, him, I guarantee. Yeah. A big-time detective.

  Thibaud had pointed to him and grinned. You hear me out, Devereux. Me, I got no truck wit’ what you can and can’t do. You get on up and get to school. Can’t be a detective with no degree. John Devrow maybe didn’ finish high school, but Devereux Gautier will. My long-lost “nephew” sure will, I guarantee.

  Dev’s face creased in a smile. Old Thibaud. The best man Dev had ever known. And for Thibaud, Dev had finally passed the high school equivalency exam. Had gone on to become a detective, just as the old man wanted. And one day maybe, he’d finally live up to Thibaud’s faith in him.

  Dev dozed for a while, but the questions he couldn’t answer kept whirling in his brain. Finally he rolled off the couch and sat down at his desk, turning on the low desk lamp. He picked up a pencil and pulled a torn envelope out of the trash can. He printed Brian’s and Darnell’s names at the top and began to list the similarities between them.

  Both had run away from abusive homes. Both were eighteen. Darnell’s birthday had been a week before. Both were residents of the Johnson Center. Both had recently been awarded Safefutures Scholarships.

  He read over the list, tapping the pencil thoughtfully. What else? Both were medium height and build. One black, one white. Both knew Dev, of course. Both had crushes on Tracy.

  Hah. Crushes on Tracy. His mouth turned up, and he underlined her name with short, sketching strokes. That fact wasn’t a similarity, it was a given. And it wasn’t just Brian and Darnell. According to Penn, Jimmy and Nicky, his other two scholarship nominees, and every other male at the center had been smitten with Tracy from the moment she’d shown up six weeks earlier. And with good reason. She was a talented cook, she obviously loved Penn’s daughter, Katie, and she was kind to the lovesick young men, treating them with a detached gentleness.

  Dev never pried into the kids’ lives, leaving them to come to him to talk if they wanted to, so he didn’t know much more about Darnell and Brian than he’d jotted on the envelope. But he knew even less about Tracy. Penn was the one all the girls confided in. She’d have more information.

  Thinking about Givens’ theory, as Dev went over the names of the current residents of the center, he tried to place each one of them in the role of killer. It was impossible. He couldn’t imagine any of them committing homicide for a chance at a scholarship.

  He had chosen the first four candidates carefully. The only one he’d worried about was Nicky Renato. Nicky was brilliant, but he was also a recovering crack addict. From what Dev had seen, all the other kids at the center were rooting for him. If Nicky could earn a scholarship, it would give hope to dozens of other teens who wanted to go to college.

  Dev rubbed his tired eyes, then checked his watch. Seven o’clock. If he got to work early, he could catch up on some paperwork before meeting Liz for the autopsy results. He wanted to know what the medical examiner’s official cause of death was, and whether she’d turned up any trace evidence, such as DNA. He knew it was a long shot, since the boys had been dumped into the river. But God, he hoped she was able to find something to give them a clue. Even though he wasn’t officially on the investigation, he wasn’t about to sit by while his kids were dying. No way in hell.

  Chapter Three

  In the autopsy room of the morgue, Liz gestured for Dev to join her. She guided him to a gurney and folded back the sheet that covered Darnell’s body. “Detective Givens was in earlier.”

  Dev glanced up.

  She smiled. “Givens is so by the book I end up boring myself. Okay. Take a look right here.” She indicated the wound on Darnell’s neck. “The cut is just over six centimeters long, almost exactly the same as the other vic,” she said. “I still need to take more precise measurements, but it appears to have been made by the same weapon.”

  As his gaze took in the relatively small cut, Dev felt grief and fury like acid etching another groove on his heart. “Did you find any trace evidence on him?” he asked, hopefully. “Any DNA?”

  She shook her head. “He was only in the water about thirty hours, but that was plenty of time to wash away any fibers or hairs. I didn’t even g
et any fingernail scrapings. Nothing.”

  “Ideas about the weapon?”

  “I’m ninety percent sure it’s a scalpel. Maybe ninety-five.”

  “A scalpel, really?” He leaned closer to look at the gash. “How can you be sure?”

  “Because of the clean cut. The blade had to have been extremely sharp. Plus, listen to this. The cut is textbook. The killer didn’t stretch the neck. He, or she, knew that it’s easier to slit the carotid with the head angled downward and the neck muscles relaxed.”

  Dev touched his own neck and frowned. “Explain.”

  She gestured toward herself. “If the neck muscles are relaxed, the blade doesn’t have to cut through the muscle to get to the artery. But if the neck is stretched and the muscles are tensed,” she craned her neck, tensing the muscles and tendons, “like this, they hide the artery, giving it protection. He or she would have to be very precise or cut through muscle to hit the artery.”

  “He or she? You think a woman could have done it?”

  “Sure. As long as she wasn’t too much shorter than the victim. It doesn’t take much body strength to inflict a lethal wound with a scalpel. Especially if the victim knew the killer.”

  Dev clamped his jaw. He’d already decided that the killer must have known the boys to be able to get so close to them, but it was one thing to think it, another to have it confirmed by the ME.

  “Let me show you.” Elizabeth put her hand on Dev’s arm and turned him around, his back to her. “You’re about six inches taller than me, so it would be hard for me to slit your throat from behind. Wait.” She grabbed a step stool. “Hand me that letter opener on the desk.”

  “The one here that looks like a scalpel?” Dev asked, handing it over with a trace of grim amusement.

  “With me on the step stool, we’re about the same height.” She put her hand on his shoulder. “Say we were standing like this, looking out at the river. I point at a boat, you crane your neck to look, and maybe I put my arm around you, like this.” She slid her arm around his neck and over his shoulder, as if in a caress.

  “Hey, Doc, I’ll give you thirty minutes to stop that.”

  She chuckled. “Yeah, and if I weren’t married, I might take longer than that. Anyway, you’re looking out over the water, and all I have to do is—” She pushed the dull blade of the letter opener into the soft part of his throat, where the carotid artery nestled, then drew it upward and to the right. “For someone who knows anatomy, not much more force than that and the kid bleeds out. Then, if they’re standing near the edge of the dock, a push, and—”

  Dev almost overbalanced when she nudged him in the middle of his back. Jesus. Her calm, dispassionate description of how Darnell and Brian might have died was playing hell with the careful detachment that usually enabled him to process the details of a homicide logically, rather than emotionally. But he’d taken in these kids, sat up nights talking to them, and wanted to do so much for them… The detachment wouldn’t come. The ME’s reenactment left him feeling raw, as though his very skin had been peeled away.

  Liz stepped off the stool with a hand on his arm. “It’s different when you know them, isn’t it?”

  He blinked and gave himself a mental shake. “Very different. But if I’m going to find the killer, I need to know everything. An embrace would work if the killer was a female, but what if it was another guy?”

  Liz crossed her arms and gazed at him pensively. “Probably a lot of ways the killer could get close enough. Ask for a light. Walk up behind and be ready to strike when he turned around. Put a hand on his shoulder to point at something. If he’s fast and accurate enough, maybe just reach around and strike.”

  “Son-of-a-bitch,” Dev muttered grimly.

  “Let me show you the differences between the wounds,” Liz said. She pulled an eight-by-ten color photo out of a file on her desk and held it next to Darnell’s neck.

  Dev looked back and forth between the two wounds. “Darnell’s cut is clean and precise,” Dev said. “Brian’s is ragged.”

  “Exactly. He might have been the killer’s first victim, or the victim struggled, although I would expect defensive wounds if that were the case. The first wound might have even been made by a different person.”

  “And if you had to choose?”

  She tucked the photo back in the file. “I think either the killer learned really fast, or Brian was killed by someone else.”

  Dev thought about that. “But everything else is the same.”

  “That’s right,” Liz said. “If there are two partners, maybe the submissive one did the first killing, the dominant the second.”

  “Two killers? I don’t know,” Dev admitted doubtfully. “Anything else?”

  “And this is why I’d rather talk to you than Givens,” Liz said, smiling. “He was done asking questions three minutes in. I’ve got a lot more. Let’s look at the murder weapon. Why a scalpel? Granted it’s much sharper than a knife, but it takes a certain amount of expertise to handle one as well as this.”

  “A doctor?”

  “Or an EMT, a military medic, or someone who went to medical school. What I find unusual is that the murderer was able to slit their throats and push them into the river without any sign of resistance.”

  “They must have known their killer,” Dev said. Whoever was doing this had thought each attack through. Everything he’d done had been designed to leave no trace of himself behind.

  “I’m not sure I’d go that far. But yeah, one way or another the killer was able to get very close to them.”

  “Liz, thanks. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.”

  “I want to catch this killer as much as you do. I don’t like seeing young people on my table.”

  As Dev headed for the door, he thought of something. “Liz, one more thing. A lot of times when someone uses a sharp knife, they cut themselves. How likely is it that the killer cut himself with the scalpel?”

  “Good point. The killer’s finger could certainly have slipped or the victim might easily have jerked when he realized what was going on. Unless the killer wore gloves or otherwise protected his fingers, it’s quite likely the scalpel could have nicked him.”

  …

  Jimmy Treacher sat down on the end of the dock and pulled out his pipe. He packed it with a bud, then lit it with a disposable lighter, pulling the fragrant smoke deep into his lungs and holding it. He felt the effects almost immediately. Now, that was good dope.

  He’d promised to wait to light up. After all, it wasn’t often they got a chance to smoke some premium weed. But he needed it after the fucking day he’d had. He’d been at the library since early morning, studying. The scholarship exam was going to be damn hard. He hoped he could pass it.

  He felt a little guilty, smoking while he was prepping for the test. Dev would be sorely disappointed if he knew. But a little dope just to relax never hurt anybody. He took another toke and held it, feeling the dizzy, floating sensation that made everything okay. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back, breathing in the warm air that carried the briny scent of the Gulf mixed with the dark, muddy odor of the river. It was a great night.

  “Hey, Jimmy. You started without me.”

  He leaned his head back a little more and opened his eyes, looking up. “Not really. I’ve only had two—”

  He never finished the sentence. Before he’d even focused on the face above him, his carotid artery was slit in two. He tumbled into the water, still clutching his pipe full of premium weed.

  …

  By the time Reghan got home, it was almost eight o’clock. She felt grimy and tired after being up for sixteen hours. She’d easily given Officer Stevens the slip on the way to her car, then driven straight to the WACT studios, arriving half an hour later than she’d planned. She’d ditched Stevens partly because she was pissed at Dev for dismissing her, but also because it would have taken way too much time to drive back to her house to give the officer the DVD.

  Sh
e’d settled in at work, looking forward to the show, figuring after the crime scene, she’d already seen the worst the day had to offer. But ironically, it had turned out to be an awful day all around.

  Her interview with the city councilman had been harrowing. She couldn’t believe he hadn’t expected her to bring up the allegations of sexual harassment that had surfaced two days before. He should have been prepared. After all, he’d run for city council on the platform of morality, decency, and the importance of family. When she’d mentioned the allegations, he’d turned purple and yelled at her, issuing dire warnings about the bleeping paparazzi who dug around in people’s private lives getting what they deserved.

  Then to her surprise, he’d stalked off the stage. She’d expected a calm denial or possibly a couple of well-planned sound bites expressing outrage over the slanderous comments. But instead, he’d stomped his feet like a child throwing a tantrum and walked out.

  Ah well, yet another supposed good guy with feet of clay. Reghan had seen her share of powerful, heroic men who seemed to be made of steel but who had built their reputations on foundations so shaky, they would wash away with the first rain.

  Barely three minutes after closing her front door, she was in the shower. It felt wonderful to let the pounding spray massage her tense, aching muscles and clear her mind.

  The entire day had been a reinforcement of her belief that heroes were an extinct species. Where were the people who, when the going got tough, came through for you instead of running away? That was the eternal question.

  Where were the heroes?

  Reghan had a very firm grasp on the answer to that question. There weren’t any. Her father had always been her hero. He’d called her his princess and showered her with love and attention. But when she was eleven, he’d left, with nothing more than a quick kiss good-bye. All her mother ever told her was that he’d gotten tired of being married. But Reghan’s young heart had known the truth. Her daddy, her hero, had stopped loving her. It had taken her years to learn to trust again.