The Whispering Room Read online

  A movement in the corner of the room gave Evangeline a start, and it took all her willpower not to retreat from that filthy, ramshackle house as fast as she could. For all she knew, the serpents that had attacked the victim were still slithering around somewhere in the piles of rubble.

  Great. Just great.

  Coming face-to-face with a pit viper was all she needed to make her day complete.

  All right, get a grip. It’s not a snake. Probably just a rat. Or a big old cockroach.

  But Evangeline had a sudden mental image of the victim, hands and feet bound, a gag in his mouth to stifle his screams as sinewy bodies crawled all over him, up his pant legs and down the collar of his shirt.

  She imagined his agony as the razor-sharp fangs sank into his soft flesh and the poison spread through his bloodstream, making him weak and sick and maybe even blinding and paralyzing him.

  She stood so abruptly, a wave of dizziness washed over her and she put out a hand to steady herself.

  Mitchell rose and looked at her in surprise. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, I just don’t like snakes.”

  “Who the hell does?”

  “No, I mean…I’ve got a real phobia about them,” she admitted reluctantly.

  A slow grin spread across Mitchell’s face. “Well, I’ll be damned. Detective Theroux has a weakness after all. Who would’ve thunk it?”

  Evangeline’s answering smile was forced. “Okay, so now you know my secret. Snakes are my kryptonite. No need to let that get around, is there?”

  Mitchell kept right on smiling. He was definitely enjoying himself. “Oh, hell no. We wouldn’t want anyone thinking you’re human, now would we?”

  “I’m serious, Mitchell. It’s like you said earlier. It’s different for a man. Different set of rules. But for someone like me…you know I’d never hear the end of it.”

  Plus, it wouldn’t be above some of the guys to plant rubber snakes in her desk. Or even real ones, for that matter. She could just imagine the kick they’d get out of her reaction. Some of the more juvenile cops lived for that kind of crap.

  “Now don’t you worry, Evie girl. I’ve got your back on this one,” Mitchell said, but he was still grinning from ear to ear and she had a bad feeling it was only a matter of time before word got out.

  “So why don’t I trust you?”

  “Beats me.” His amusement faded and his expression turned serious. “Hey, no joke, you don’t look so hot.”

  She swatted a mosquito from her face. “I just need a little air. What do you say we get out of here and go knock on some doors?”

  Three

  As they stepped out on the porch, the humidity almost took Evangeline’s breath away. There wasn’t a lick of breeze, and the palm fronds and banana trees in the side yard stood motionless in the heat.

  Her striped cotton blouse clung to her back as she stood in the warm shade of the porch, and her clammy black pants felt as if they weighed a ton. She thought of the shower she’d have when she got home. Cold at first, then hot enough to scrub away the dark, smelly nightmare inside that house.

  Her gaze lit on an unmarked gray sedan parked across the street. Two men in dark suits and dark glasses leaned against the front fender as they watched the house.

  Evangeline poked Mitchell’s arm, her nod toward the newcomers almost imperceptible.

  He followed her gaze and she felt him tense. “Feds.” His voice dripped scorn, the same oozing tone he might have used to designate a boil or a blister.

  Evangeline swore under her breath. “What are they doing here? This is a homicide investigation.”

  NOPD rarely crossed paths with federal law enforcement because typically the big boys went after a different kind of prey. Plus, even though they tried to deny it, certain agents from a certain bureau had a nasty habit of looking down their noses at the locals, and their altruistic superiority bred a fair amount of antagonism among the rank and file.

  “Not too hard to figure why they’re gracing us with their presence,” Mitchell said. “The victim is Sonny Betts’s attorney. Looks to me like the Fibbies are still trying to nail his rusty hide.”

  Evangeline made a face. “I don’t give a damn what they’re trying to do. Our jurisdiction, our case. They try to muscle their way in, I say we go wompwomp on their smug asses.”

  “Mighty big words for such a little girl,” Mitchell teased.

  But Evangeline barely heard him. Her gaze was still on the men across the street. They were both tall with broad shoulders, polished loafers and closely clipped dark hair. She might have found their similar appearance comical if she hadn’t been so annoyed by their presence.

  One of them suddenly took off his sunglasses and his gaze locked with hers. He said something to the man at his side, but his gaze never left Evangeline and she decided real fast that she would sooner pass out dead from heat stroke than break eye contact. No way would she let that arrogant so-and-so think he’d intimidated her.

  His suit coat was unbuttoned and the whiteness of his shirt was almost blinding in the bright sunlight. Evangeline guessed him at six-one or-two, maybe one hundred seventy pounds. A little taller than Johnny and probably at least ten years older.

  As he continued to stare at her, she was tempted to walk across the street and suggest a little come-to-Jesus meeting with him.

  Instead, she folded her arms and stared back at him.

  If he took her openly hostile demeanor as a challenge, so be it.

  Special Agent Declan Nash had recognized her straightaway when she came out of the house.

  Detective Evangeline Theroux looked much the way she did in the candid shot he had in his office. The blond hair and the pretty face—those things he’d expected, along with the wide blue eyes, which, even from across the street, he could tell were intense.

  What he found surprising was her size.

  From his vantage, she looked tiny. So slight, in fact, he wondered if a strong puff of wind might give her a problem. He knew from her file that she was five feet four inches tall and weighed one hundred and twenty pounds, though he thought the latter was an exaggeration because she looked much smaller to him.

  But in spite of her petite frame, there was an air of toughness about her—in the way she carried herself and in the way she interacted with her fellow cops.

  And in the way she challenged him, Nash admitted. She exuded confidence and he admired that about her.

  In fact, as he’d studied her file, he’d come to the conclusion that, under other circumstances, Detective Theroux was someone he would very much like to know.

  Nash respected people who did their jobs well, and Theroux had one of the highest arrest records in the department. Her evaluations were stellar, her commendations glowing. From all accounts, she was a strong asset to the New Orleans Police Department.

  But of her personal life, Nash knew very little, only that she was Johnny Theroux’s widow.

  And that was all he needed to know.

  That was why he was here, after all.

  Beside him his partner, Tom Draiden, made a wisecrack, but Nash ignored him. He didn’t want to lose concentration or break eye contact because he suspected if he looked away first, Detective Theroux would view it as some sort of triumph on her end and a sign of weakness on his.

  Considering her hostile stance, she seemed to labor under the misconception that she was in a position of power, and Nash didn’t think fostering that impression would be advantageous to either of them.

  “That her?” Tom asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Damn, that is one fine-ass Sarah Jane.”

  “Very professional observation,” Nash said dryly.

  “Well, yeah, but you might have at least warned me about the eye candy.”

  “I guess I didn’t notice.”

  “What the hell? Check her out, man.”

  “Seems to me you’re doing enough checking for the both of us,” Nash said.

  Tom smirked. “
No harm in that, is there?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you should ask Laura.”

  “You’re a real buzz kill, Nash. You know that?”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “So what’s our strategy?” Tom drawled.

  He’d been born and raised in Macon, Georgia, and despite a stint in the navy and bureau assignments in Denver and Salt Lake City, he’d never lost his drawl. He had a knack for dealing with people, and he wasn’t above pouring on the Southern charm when it suited his purposes. His laid-back charisma often came in handy when dealing with the local good ol’ boys.

  Tom’s approach to their assignments was instinctive and organic while Nash tended to be more textbook and detail-oriented. He knew he could sometimes come off as arrogant and impatient, but he was neither.

  What he was, was focused.

  “Who owes us a favor at NOPD?”

  Tom grinned. “You want me to make you a list?”

  “A name or two will do.”

  “I take it you’re down for a little arm-twisting,” Tom said. “You want we should do it the nice way?”

  Nash slipped on his sunglasses, turned and opened the car door. “I don’t care. So long as it gets done.”

  He glanced over his shoulder one last time at Evangeline Theroux. He almost hated to do this to her. The murder of a prominent attorney would get a lot of media attention and a high-profile investigation could be a real feather in a young detective’s cap.

  But he had a job to do and the last thing Nash needed was Johnny Theroux’s widow anywhere near Sonny Betts.

  Four

  With its lush gardens and gleaming white columns, Pinehurst Manor might have been a slightly careworn cousin of the grand old dames situated along River Road, that fabled seventy-mile corridor of Southern plantation homes stretching on either side of the Mississippi between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

  But to the discerning eye, it soon became apparent that the house was merely a poor replica of its far grander predecessors. Built in 1945 as a personal residence for Dr. Bernard DeWitt, a noted psychiatrist and philanthropist from Baton Rouge, the original home was later expanded and converted into a private sanatorium.

  Under Dr. DeWitt’s stewardship, Pinehurst Manor became one of the most highly regarded psychiatric institutions in Louisiana. For over thirty years, the hospital treated patients from all over the state, suffering from all manner of mental disorders, but by the late eighties, the once pillared splendor of Pinehurst was but a distant memory.

  Rocked by the twin scandals of misappropriation of funds and inappropriate behavior by some of the male orderlies, the hospital fell on hard times. By the end of the decade, only a handful of forgotten patients remained in treatment and those unfortunate few were eventually turned out when Pinehurst was forced to shut its doors for good.

  The building remained boarded up for over a decade until the state bought the property and reopened it as a medium-security psychiatric facility, admitting only those patients who were not considered a serious threat to society.

  But all that changed with Katrina.

  Hospitals affected by the storm had to be evacuated quickly and even though every effort was made to relocate the more violent patients—those designated criminally insane—to maximum-security facilities in other parts of the state, the sheer number of beds lost to flooding forced low-to-medium-security hospitals like Pinehurst to take in the overflow.

  One of the patients evacuated to Pinehurst was Mary Alice Lemay.

  For over thirty years, Mary Alice had been incarcerated at a branch of the South Louisiana State Hospital in Plaquemines Parish, a dingy, gloomy facility with cinder-block walls, chipped tile flooring and hallways that reeked of urine.

  In that building, the worst of the worst were housed and treated—the serial killers, rapists and child molesters who had been remanded to a state psychiatric hospital rather than being sent to prison.

  Mary Alice had spent the first few years of her custody under a suicide watch and in virtual solitary confinement. During that time, she received not a single outside visitor. Friends and relatives were so shocked by what she’d done, they couldn’t bring themselves to meet her gaze in the courtroom, let alone visit her face-to-face in a mental institution—especially considering most thought she deserved the electric chair.

  The weeks, months, years of her internment were passed alone and in complete silence until a new doctor assigned to her case decided one day that integration into the general population of the institution would be beneficial to her treatment.

  So the door to her room came open, and Mary Alice Lemay stepped through into a world unlike any she could have previously imagined.

  A nightmare world of confusion, misery and perpetual terror.

  She was encouraged to mingle with the other patients, but she didn’t like eating her meals in the cafeteria or socializing in the solarium or taking group walks around the grounds. Her ward was filled with all sorts of people suffering from all kinds of distress—addicts, schizophrenics, those with depression and bipolar disorder—and Mary Alice was afraid of them.

  She’d been born and raised in a small town in Southern Louisiana. For the most part, she’d lived a very sheltered life, and what she saw inside the walls of that hospital shocked her.

  Some of the patients were so violent, they were never allowed to leave their cells. Others were let out, but were kept restrained, and it was those patients that seemed to watch Mary Alice with more than a passing interest.

  They were the ones with the dark stares and the knowing smiles, the ones who gave her a nod as she passed by in the hallway, as if to acknowledge a kindred spirit.

  And then there were the sad cases, the distraught patients who tugged at Mary Alice’s heart. The elderly woman who stood in a corner all day long pulling imaginary spiders from her tangled, gray hair. The young man who drew nothing but eyes, then cut them out and taped them to the back of his head.

  Sometimes Mary Alice wondered what that young man had been like as a child. Had he been happy and carefree, or had the seeds of his sickness already been sewn?

  Sometimes Mary Alice thought of her own children, but she’d learned early on that it was unwise to look back. No good could come of living in the past, of trying to remember a time when she, too, had been happy and carefree.

  It had all been so long ago.

  Before evil had invaded her life.

  Before she had been forced to do the unthinkable. The unforgivable.

  Mary Alice didn’t want to look back, but the only thing she had to look forward to each day was art therapy where, instead of drawing eyes, she took up origami. Some of the doctors used the art of paper folding as a way to decrease anxiety and aggression in the patients, but for Mary Alice, it was an escape.

  Her fingers were very nimble, her patience boundless, and she could lose herself for hours in the intricate folds. Soon her room overflowed with the tiny paper cranes, each one beautiful and unique and—to Mary Alice—each represented a very special wish.

  She’d had to leave all her cranes behind when she was transferred to Pinehurst, but she didn’t really mind. The new facility was so much better. The building was old, but it had a lot of character and there where windows everywhere. The green-gold light that filtered down through the trees outside her room each morning reminded her of the bayou, and when she stared out that window, she could easily ignore the bars and imagine that she was back in her own bedroom.

  But she refused to dabble in the dangers of make-believe, nor would she allow herself the luxury of losing her mind. Every hour of every day, Mary Alice Lemay was cognizant of where she was and why she was here.

  She knew what people thought of her, what they called her here and in the outside world. But they hadn’t looked into the eyes of her children. They hadn’t seen what she’d seen. They didn’t know what she knew.

  So, no, Mary Alice did not—would not—look back with regret.

&nbs
p; Sorrow, yes, but not regret.

  Whatever anyone else thought of her, she knew that she was neither a monster nor a martyr, but a mother who had willingly sacrificed her own soul in order to secure her children’s eternal salvation.

  She had done what any loving mother would do.

  “Mama?”

  Mary Alice was sitting in a rocking chair, staring through the bars of the window. When she heard that voice—the sound like the sweet tinkle of a bell—she thought at first she must have imagined it. But when she looked up, she saw a woman in the doorway of her room.

  A woman with golden hair and beguiling blue eyes.

  A woman with the face of an angel.

  Her angel.

  Her beautiful girl.

  She put out a hand and the angel floated toward her, graceful and elegant. So loving and sweet.

  It was only then that Mary Alice realized her visitor wasn’t alone. A man had come into the room behind her. He was tall and dark and thin to the point of gauntness. His hair was swept back from his forehead and his dark eyes held a strange reddish hue. He had a terrible scar on the right side of his neck that looked as if he might have been burned years ago.

  When his gaze met Mary Alice’s, a shiver of dread crept up her spine.

  She’d seen those eyes somewhere before, or what was behind them.

  “Mama, this is Ellis Cooper. He’s a very good friend of mine.”

  The man leaned down and tried to take Mary Alice’s hand, but she pulled it away. For some reason, she didn’t want him to touch her.

  He picked up a paper crane from the floor and held it out in his palm.

  “This yours?” he asked with a smile that chilled Mary Alice to her very core. “I always loved origami. Some guy once told me about a Japanese legend. Seems if you fold a thousand of these things, your wish will come true.”

  Mary Alice said nothing.

  Ellis Cooper glanced around. “Looks like you’ve got a ways to go.”

  Mary Alice refused to look up. She would not meet the man’s gaze. She would not stare into that dark abyss.