Loe raamatut: «Shadow Of The Wolf»

CHAPTER ONE

Mardi Gras

March

Amy Fortenoy manipulated the controls of the tape editor until the smooth, too-handsome-to-be-true features of Deputy Police Chief Marshall Devereaux came into center frame. She muttered, freezing the tape, “There you are, you smug, self-righteous son of a—”

“Oh, real helpful, Fortenoy.” Her producer, Janice Waters, paused to look over her shoulder. “Let’s start a war with the police department. Guaranteed to get you lots of publicity. Of course, you won’t be getting any interviews…”

“Watch this.” Amy let the tape play through.

“Before we go any further,” the deputy chief said with hands upraised in the manner of a born politician, “I’d first like to express my sincere disappointment with certain members of the media who, although repeatedly cautioned to use discretion regarding certain sensitive aspects of this case, have nonetheless chosen to turn this series of tragic and senseless killings into a virtual circus—”

“Me!” exclaimed Amy indignantly. “He’s talking about me!”

“Who else?” said Paul Shelton, her cameraman. “You’re the one, after all, who made the Werewolf Killer what he is today. With a little help from your friends, of course,” he added smugly and perched on the edge of the desk to admire the results of his work as it flickered across the screen.

Amy frowned. She didn’t like the way that sounded, any more than she had liked it when Marshall Devereaux had said virtually the same thing earlier that day. Of course, from Devereaux she had cause to take offense, while with Paul…well, he was one of her own. He knew, as well as she did, that it was all part of the business.

“To remind you, once again,” Devereaux was saying on tape, “that disturbed individuals such as this very often thrive on the publicity engendered by their crimes.”

And that was where Amy came in. She leaned forward to mark the tape. “Excuse me, Deputy Devereaux,” she called out clearly from the back of the room. “Surely you don’t mean to suggest that we should cease our coverage of the activities of this ‘disturbed individual,’ as you call him?”

Paul swung the camera to Devereaux. She marked a cut. Close-up on Devereaux’s angry face. “What I mean to suggest, young lady—”

“Young lady!” Her voice was practically a squeal. “He called me young lady!”

Paul grinned. Janice frowned. The tape rolled on.

“—is that without the insistence of certain members of the press upon turning an otherwise unremarkable series of killings…”

Chaos erupted from the pressroom, but it was, once again, Amy’s voice that rose above the fray. It was sweet and polite, laced with Southern sugar—a tone those who knew her well did their best to avoid. “Could you describe to us, sir, what you would consider a remarkable series of killings?”

Janice exclaimed in amazement, “What an absolute jerk!”

Paul’s grin broadened as he watched the action unfold on the screen. “Nail him, babe!”

“Now, this is a perfect example of how my words are twisted every time I come before you people,” returned Devereaux angrily.

“You people!” Janice was practically chortling with delight. “That man is going to hang himself by his own—”

Amy held up a hand for attention as Devereaux went on, “What we have is a sick, deranged individual preying on the weak and helpless among us, who, for some reason that’s totally inexplicable to me, has been glorified by the media into what very nearly approximates a cult hero.”

“Well, I resent that,” muttered Paul.

“Cut it,” Janice told Amy, but Amy had already marked it for editing.

“The press has all but convinced the public there is a real werewolf out there, a man who changes into a beast during the full moon and tears people’s throats out. But worse, there is a strong possibility you’ve actually convinced the killer of it, as well. And that’s all we need, isn’t it? A deranged killer who’s convinced of his own invincibility?”

“Well, I never,” murmured Paul, feigning insult.

Amy ignored him.

Devereaux continued, “You might recall that it wasn’t until the media started bandying about the term werewolf killer that this maniac actually began leaving evidence suggestive of a wolf at the scene—”

“Now that’s a downright lie!” exclaimed Janice indignantly. “There was animal hair on the first body!”

Amy simply frowned at the screen.

“Those ridiculous paw prints, which our forensics people had no difficulty dismissing as a hoax, the widely publicized claw and teeth marks…”

“We didn’t widely publicize them,” complained Paul, disgruntled.

“Not to mention the fact that the number of killings has actually increased with each successive cycle, as though the killer is becoming emboldened by his own success. I attribute this directly to what I can only call the media’s exploitation of a tragic situation. Let me be clear on one thing, people—I will not have panic in the streets.”

“Might not the quickest way to avoid that,” Amy spoke up on tape again, “be to make an arrest in the case?”

Devereaux’s contempt for her, and the press, in general, was clear through the tape. “That, of course, is at the top of our list of things to do.”

“Oh, great,” groaned Janice. “The man is dog food.”

Someone else called out, “Do you have an update on the progress in the case?”

But Amy overrode him. “Is it true the FBI has been called in?”

Devereaux glared at her. “It is customary for the FBI to take on a consulting role in all cases of this sort. We’re working closely with federal investigators and expect a break in the case very soon.”

Amy had the last word. “Hopefully, before the next full moon.”

Devereaux looked at her long and hard, and then turned his gaze to the assemblage in general. “Are there other questions?”

Amy turned down the volume.

Janice gave a rueful shake of her head. “I assume he didn’t have anything else important to say?”

“You heard the best parts.”

“The man is such a jerk, it’s almost no fun to torment him. Okay, put the best parts together with a nice little narrative, and we’ll run it at six and eleven. What else have you got?”

“At the moment, nothing. But I’m going to try to get a quote from the mayor tonight. If I can snag it in time for the eleven o’clock show, I’ll let you know.”

Janice lifted an eyebrow. “The mayor, huh? How do you plan to arrange that?”

“Simple. He’s going to the Governor’s Ball tonight. So am I.”

Janice gave her a grinning thumbs-up and left the editing room.

Paul said, rising, “Governor’s Ball, huh? Boy, I wish my folks had money.”

“Money,” replied Amy, running the tape backward, “is nothing. Connections, on the other hand, are everything.”

“So, is your dad going to be there or what?”

Amy did not look up. “No.”

Amy’s father, Byron Fortenoy, the internationally renowned cardiac surgeon and researcher, inventor of the synthetic reflux valve that had saved countless thousands of lives, rarely found time in his busy schedule to visit among mere mortals anymore. His name, however, still carried more than enough influence among the New Orleans elite to guarantee his daughter anything from a bank loan to Saints tickets merely for the asking. Sometimes, such notoriety was a pain. More often than not, however, it was incredibly convenient.

Amy said absently, studying the frames as they moved through the editor, “Anyway, I’m only going for the quote. You know how I hate these Mardi Gras balls. And it’s not like there won’t be a half-dozen other reporters there.”

“Yeah, but none of them who are on first-name basis with the mayor. And none of them,” Paul added pointedly as he turned for the door, “who have the Werewolf Killer in their pockets.”

Amy shuddered. “Did anybody ever tell you you have a creepy way of putting things?”

He shrugged. “Hey, in this business, if you don’t learn to laugh, you spend your life crying.”

“Boy, that’s the truth,” Amy murmured, focusing on the tape.

Amy had been a crime reporter for WLAK’s Channel Six Action News for the past four of her twenty-nine years. In that time, she had covered gang slayings, child murders and child murderers, rapes, molestations, abuse, home invasions, drive-by shootings, arson, bombings. Whatever twisted evil lurked in the hearts of men and whatever violent or obscene way they chose to express it, Amy had seen it all. She had quickly learned that to allow herself to become emotionally affected by the stories she covered was a short road to self-destruction, and she was careful to maintain a professional detachment in every situation.

Until now.

“Paul?” She glanced up as he opened the door, trying to keep her voice casual. “You don’t think…I mean, Devereaux couldn’t be right, could he? About us—about me—encouraging this guy?”

Paul scowled sharply in a mixture of annoyance and amusement. “Come on, babe, you know he’s just trying to torment you. If you ask me, he’s just jealous.”

Amy tried to relax. “Of my good looks, no doubt.”

“You better believe it. Hey, if I weren’t married…”

“In your dreams, sweet thing.” Grinning, Amy turned back to the editor. But her amusement faded as she watched the frames scroll by and she said again, “Hey, Paul.”

He looked back. “I’m on my dinner break,” he reminded her impatiently.

Amy said thoughtfully, “What was all that garbage about the forensic evidence, anyway? I never heard anyone declare those paw prints a hoax before. And he out-and-out lied about animal hair on the bodies. Until today, no one said anything about teeth and claw marks on the bodies. It was as though he was trying so hard to tell a lie, he tripped all over the truth.”

“And this is unusual? Devereaux wouldn’t know the truth if it jumped up and bit him on the ankle.”

“But would we?” she wondered, only half to herself.

“Huh?”

“Did you ever hear the phrase, ‘Methinks he doth protest too much’?”

“Come on, Amy, I’m going into serious sugar deficit here.”

“It’s just that…maybe I’ve been going about this whole thing the wrong way. Maybe the truth has been staring us in the face the whole time.”

“What? That the killer really is a werewolf?”

Amy didn’t smile. “That the police really don’t know what he is.”

Paul looked confused.

“Think about it, Paul.” Amy’s expression was serious. “A serial killer in one of the most populous cities in the country evades detection for ten months. Fifteen people dead, and not a single witness. The FBI, local police, all the crime detection capabilities of the modern age are involved, and there’s still not so much as a computer sketch or a psychological profile of this guy. Devereaux aside, you don’t really believe for one minute the police are that incompetent, do you?”

Paul frowned. “So what are you saying? That they’re covering up something? Hardly a new theory, Ace.”

“Exactly.” Amy chewed a thumbnail thoughtfully. “Police and corruption. We’ve all been pursuing that angle. It’s politically motivated because all the victims are homeless and the police are heartless. The evidence is being tainted because the police are careless. Competition between law enforcement agencies is hampering the investigation. But, Paul—” she lifted eyes to him that were dark with worry “—what if the simple truth is that the police are doing their best, and they still can’t find him?”

Paul regarded her gravely. “Now, that,” he told her, “is damn scary.”

“Yeah.” She released a breath. “No kidding.”

They looked at each other for another long moment. Finally, Paul said, “I, uh, wouldn’t mention this theory of yours to anybody just yet.”

“Right.”

He turned toward the door again, then looked back. “I’d rather it be a real werewolf,” he said.

Amy smiled, though the expression was faint and empty of humor. “Yeah. I know what you mean.”

“On the other hand, it’s not as though something like this has never happened before.”

Amy, who had started to turn back to the editor, glanced at him in confusion. “What?”

“That a serial killer eludes detection for months on end in one of the most populated cities in the country,” he explained. “No witnesses, no clean suspects, nothing.”

Amy was interested. “Oh, yeah? When was this?”

“London, 1888,” he told her. “They called him Jack the Ripper.”

“Great,” she muttered, pushing back her smooth blond hair with her hand. “I think I’ll put that in my story tonight. Citizens of New Orleans, there’s hope—London survived Jack the Ripper, we can survive the Werewolf Killer.”

He shrugged. “As long as we aren’t prostitutes or street people, that is. Say, do you have a date for that wingding tonight?”

“Don’t need one. This is business, not pleasure.”

“My tennis partner is getting a divorce, you know, and I’ll bet he’s available on short notice.”

Amy should have seen that one coming. Paul was always trying to fix her up, and his wife was no better. What was it about happily married people that made them incapable of letting their friends be happily single?

She said, “When he actually gets a divorce, let me know. Meanwhile, the party’s black-tie.”

“Oh.”

Paul sounded disappointed, and Amy guessed his friend did not have his own tux.

Then he cheered. “Anyway, Cindy says for you to come to dinner next week.”

“Is the tennis partner going to be there?”

“I guess not, if you’re going to take that attitude.”

“I’ll call Cindy.”

Still Paul hesitated. “You don’t, uh, need a camera for that interview tonight, do you?”

Amy looked up at him and grinned. “You big baby. No. I’m not going to drag you across town to the Governor’s Ball and no, I’m not going to make you put on a tux. Go home to your wife. You’re off duty.”

Paul returned her grin and kissed his fingers to her. “You’re a prince, Fortenoy, an absolute prince. I’ll name an offspring for you.”

“You’d better go before someone sees you hanging around and puts your name on the assignment board.”

“I’m out of here. And be careful crossing Canal to-night—you’ll be hitting the worst of the parade traffic.”

Amy waved him away, smiling, but she was deeply immersed in the editor now and did not look up.

Amy Fortenoy had spent her life laboring under two handicaps: her looks and her family name. Amy was blond, petite and cute in a business that valued tall, svelte and striking. Her shoulder-length hair was the sundrenched color of a three-year-old’s and the texture of satin, her nose a perfect button, her face round and ingenuous. Her eyes were large and fringed with thick dark lashes, and the only thing that kept them from being breathtaking was the fact that they were more hazel than green. She had flawless Fortenoy porcelain skin, and a perfect size-six figure, which was due as much to her own efforts and the demands of the camera as it was to the Fortenoy genes.

In a business that values physical attractiveness at least as much as it did ability, if not more—there were, after all, very few ugly news anchors—being a cute blonde might not be considered a disadvantage. But cute was the operative word, and Amy was a reporter. She was tough, ambitious, alert and perceptive. All she wanted was a chance to prove what she could do, yet she had spent her career fending off advances, fighting the stereotype and being offered jobs as the weather girl by station directors who took one look at her and wondered if she could read…or if it mattered.

But the prejudices she fought in the work force were nothing to the disapproval—indeed, the disappointment—with which she had to contend in her own family. The Fortenoys were a grand old Southern family who bred tradition, snobbery and intellectuals. Amy had two brothers and three sisters, all of whom had earned at least one Ph.D. in suitably exalted subjects like philosophy or mathematics. Two were university professors, one was a doctor like their father, one was a museum curator, one was the director of a major European symphony orchestra. Among her cousins, aunts and uncles were bank presidents, Supreme Court justices, research scientists and poet laureates. Not one of them worked in television. Most of them, in fact, did not even own television sets, and those who did, only brought them out on the occasion of a presidential election or a particularly compelling PBS special.

Amy’s Grandmama Fortenoy still lived in one of those wonderful old antebellum houses on St. Charles Avenue, shaded by creeping ivy and oaks dripping with Spanish moss. On Sunday afternoons she served tea from bone china that had been in the family for three hundred years, and friends and relatives and the social elite would gather in her high-ceilinged parlor with its small brocaded chairs, and speak, in their soft sugared accents, of things lofty and genteel and utterly civilized. The Werewolf Killer would never be among their topics of conversation. And if, by chance, some well-meaning soul asked about “poor little Amy,” throats would be cleared, eyes would be averted and the subject delicately changed.

Amy was a source of bafflement and embarrassment to her family, but no more so than they were to her. Sometimes she felt like a changeling, and she could no more understand how that most carefully regulated Fortenoy family tree had come to produce her than they could.

Amy had wasted far too much time and energy early in her career fighting the tide of other people’s prejudices against her, but when she had finally realized she could do nothing about either her looks or her family, the solution to her difficulties was clear: She simply started using both to her advantage, instead of allowing them to work against her. No one expected a petite, blond, wide-eyed young woman with a sparkling smile and bubbly personality to be a crime reporter. And nobody expected her to be any good at it. Thus she was not only allowed into places a more experienced-looking reporter could never go, she actually, more often than not, had the door held for her as she went in. No one expected Byron Fortenoy’s daughter—Joseph Fortenoy’s granddaughter—to sully her hands with anything as distasteful as the news. She was therefore privy to certain information relevant to scandal, corruption and white-collar crime that would be guarded furiously from an “outsider.”

People expected Amy to be dumb, so she played dumb. They expected her to be helpless, so she acted helpless. They wanted her to be a socialite, a dilettante, a hothouse flower, and she was more than happy to play the part—when it suited her purpose. Only one thing mattered to Amy Fortenoy: success. And she knew that with the werewolf killings, she was as close to that elusive goal as she had ever been, maybe as close as she would ever get.

So, if she was a little obsessed with the case, there was more than one reason. If, like Devereaux had suggested, she had been a little overzealous in reporting the story, she had good cause. After all, the story of a lifetime only came along once, and this was hers.

Amy was on the air at six, giving her report and showing the tape. There was, of course, nothing new at all to report—the full moon was still almost two weeks away—but it was important to keep the story in the public eye. To her credit, she did not make Devereaux look like too much of a jackass on the final edit, and she left in the part about the sick, deranged individual being glorified by the media. She was trained to be fair, after all.

She left the studio at six forty-five, which left just under an hour to get across town, put on her party dress and get back downtown in time to get a quote from the mayor for the eleven o’clock news. She would also love to get a reaction to Devereaux’s remarks this afternoon from the chief coroner, and it was possible she would be able to catch him at home if she didn’t spend too much time at the party. He had been ducking her calls all day.

During Mardi Gras, Amy gave up trying to drive to work. It was impossible to keep up with which streets would be closed for what parade or for how long. It was easier and faster to simply take public transportation. She took the St. Charles trolley as far as Jackson Square and then had to walk a block and a half to catch the streetcar to Midcity. Ordinarily, this was no problem; the streets were well traveled and well lighted, and Amy enjoyed the brief walk. It gave her the chance to unwind from a busy day or, as tonight, to organize an even busier evening. But for some reason, she had forgotten about the parade.

Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Music, laughter, crowds and lights, extravagant costumes, gala parades. To the several hundred thousand visitors who packed the city streets every year, Mardi Gras was magic, pure and simple. To New Orleans residents like Amy, however, Mardi Gras was traffic jams, missed appointments and dancing in the streets until 4:00 a.m. when she had to get up at six. To her, there was nothing romantic about the shoulder-to-shoulder bodies that screeched and waved and cheered and blocked the sidewalk as she tried to elbow her way past, nothing thrilling about the towering floats and harlequins on stilts and fire-eating jugglers that inched down the street, blocking off both foot and vehicular traffic for six blocks in each direction.

The noise was deafening. A Dixieland band blared its trumpets in her ears as it passed less than five feet in front of her; the stereo speakers on a float a dozen yards behind roared out a marching tune. Grinning masks bobbed and leered, street lamps glinted eerily off of glass eyes. The air was alive with writhing strips of pink and purple confetti, dragons and mermaids danced in the street. Behind her, the door to a pub opened and a new mass of screeching, jostling, beer-cup-waving bodies spilled out. Amy felt as though she had stumbled into a madman’s nightmare and she thought, I don’t need this!

Gauging a break in the procession between a float featuring a giant Poseidon and a gaggle of acrobats in silver suits, Amy prepared to dash across the street. Her foot had barely left the curb when something grabbed her hard from behind.

“Hey!” she cried. Amy tried to spin around, but someone held her firm. She tried to jerk away, but an iron arm clamped around her ribs, dragging her back and jerking her off her feet.

She cried out, struggling. No one in the jostling, excited crowd seemed to notice. She wrenched around, flinging out a hand to strike, but stopped, gasping and disoriented, as she found herself staring into the grinning face of a wolf.