I closed my eyes, trying to find something, anything that would tell me who they were and where she was. There was nothing here. I had no leads. No ideas. Nothing except the stink of the vamps I’d scented the first time I came to the room. I stopped and sniffed again. No. Not Adrianna. Not one of the Arceneau Clan that she had been left in charge of. It had been stupid to think that in the first place. My cases were not interconnected.
I knew only this: Molly was in trouble. Someone didn’t want her found. She was blood-drunk and didn’t know she was in trouble. She had left me a note—or someone else had.
I had no conclusions other than to keep looking for Molly. Except that I’d used up all my own sources.
And that meant that I was going to have to ask Leo for help and soon. “Crap, crap, crap,” I muttered. I hated to involve Molly with the MOC. Hated it. But unless I found something new in the woo-woo room, I might have no choice.
• • •
The woo-woo room was in the basement of NOPD Central. The first time I’d come here, it was dank and mostly unused. Then I’d discovered that witches had gone missing in New Orleans for decades, maybe centuries, and neither human nor vamp law had done a dang thing to stop it. The files of missing witch children had gone back for as long as the local cops still had records, all of them cold cases—unworked cold cases. Until Jodi’s aunt—a witchin-hiding and also a cop—came along and began to work the cases in her off time, human law enforcement hadn’t cared that witches had vanished, in much the way that white cops had once ignored the violent deaths, lynching, and missing citizens of African lineage, perpetrated by the KKK.
I’d made a stink about it all. Things had started to change. Jodi got a promotion of sorts, which was really intended to be a career killer, by NOPD powers that be. She became the head of the woo-woo squad. Not the squad’s real name, but one of the many names that I called them. Under her leadership, the woo-woo room had expanded into space for three offices and a conference room, carved out of the bowels of the cop dungeon. Unlike the upper reaches of the building, it was quiet and conducive to the kind of cold cases Jodi excelled in. Unfortunately it had no cell signal at all.
I skipped down the stairs, my visitor’s badge bumping my collarbone, a box under my arm and a bag in the other hand, sloshing with my steps. I wandered the short hallway until I found Jodi, standing in the conference room, her jacket off, staring at a whiteboard. There were five whiteboards in the room, each and every one covered with photos of witch children. Some of the photos went back a long time, discolored with age, curling in, folded or creased. Knowing that there was nothing I could do for any of the victims, and feeling a sense of helplessness that curdled my stomach, I always tried to not look at the photos. Yeah. I was a coward.
The photo Jodi stared at, seeming mesmerized, was centered on the center board, with two other photos, file names, and numbers.
“Jane,” she said, without turning her head to me. “Haven’t seen you here in a while.”
“Yeah. My bad.” And here I was, not visiting, but bringing problems and asking for help. I needed to take this slow. “I brought peace offerings.”
Jodi looked at me, her eyes tracking to the stuff I carried. A slow smile spread on her face. “Café DuMonde. You are evil. What if I’m on a diet?”
I didn’t have the time, but I offered, “We can go for a run together this evening.”
She huffed a breath. “I’m on a case. But thanks.” Her eyes found mine. “Why do you have to be such a pain in the ass? Being friends with you is hard work.”
“I know. So. Beignets and coffee? They’re still sorta hot.”
Jodi pushed papers aside from the long length of tables and I set the box and bag in the clear space. “Gimme,” Jodi said of the coffee. I poured a cup from the travel box the café had put together and she took it, inhaling the aroma before she inhaled the coffee itself. “God, this is so much better than the swill we scorch here. I needed this.” A moment later she took a beignet and bit in. Through the powdered sugar and fried pastry she said, “So. What do you want?”
I followed her lead, took a beignet, and bit in. The taste was incredible. Sweet, hot, and perfect. Through the pastry I said, “I need info. And I have something to trade.” Jodi made a little “go ahead” gesture with her pastry and I said, “I need to know about any dark-haired male vamps or blood-servants who currently have short beards.” I demonstrated with a finger to show her the shape. “And who may wear earrings. Hoops.”
“Yeah?” Jodi watched me speculatively, and from the look in her eyes, she had something for me. “What do you have to trade?”
“Info on a vamp gather.”
“Old or recent?”
I popped the last of my beignet into my mouth and pushed it in with one finger. Chewed. Swallowed. Grinned. Letting her wait. “Planned.”
Jodi’s eyes widened and her jaw dropped. “No shit? Uh, sorry. No kidding?”
“None at all. And if you help, I’ll ask Leo if you can attend. He’ll probably say no, but it’s worth a shot.”
“I’d give my ex-husband’s left testicle to attend a gather. Actually, I’d give both. Wrapped up in a box with a bow.”
I chuckled. I’d only recently discovered that Jodi had been married once. It hadn’t lasted long and it had ended badly when the ex had tried to sleep with Jodi’s cop partner. Who was male. And not gay. “Like I said. I can’t promise anything. But I can tell you as much as Leo lets me about the gather, like date and time, info I’ll get tonight. I do know that it’ll be soon. Deal?”
“One of my sources spotted a new vamp in town. He goes by the name Jack Shoffru, and we have records on him back to the mid seventeen hundreds. Scuttlebutt from way back when, like ancient history gossip, says that he ran with Jean Lafitte.”
“The pirate?” I asked, startled, talking around the pastry and thinking about the gold earring. I had been thinking gay vamp, but the earring could certainly have been piratical. I kept my smile in and swallowed my bite of beignet.
“Yeah. Him. Lafitte made Louisiana his stomping grounds, until he disappeared in 1823.”
I stopped cold, another beignet halfway to my mouth. Disappeared was a vamp term, used when a vamp had lived too long unchanged and unaged in the human world. It also was a term they used when they were first turned and went into forced containment in their master’s scion lair for the necessary ten years or so of curing, the time and the condition of insanity referred to as the devoveo. “Sooo, are you saying that Shoffru actually is Lafitte?”
“No. They hung together. A lot. Records suggest that he was a ship’s captain in Lafitte’s fleet and a partner in Lafitte’s warehouse in the city in 1805. Anyway, Shoffru has been gone for nearly two centuries, and is now a big-time MOC in Mexico, which was also a stomping ground for Lafitte. Now he’s back. I’ll e-mail you his file as soon as I nail down some particulars.”
“That would be great,” I said. “A pirate on Leo’s territory. Yeah. I need to talk to the MOC.” I stopped. “When did he get here? To New Orleans? And . . . do vamps have passports? How did he get here from Mexico?”
“My sources are still tracking that down and trust me, it should not be taking so long. No one is saying, but I have a feeling that either he compelled humans to let him in without papers or he snuck in over the border.”
I sat back on the tabletop, letting the formerly unmatched puzzle pieces find a few new empty slots. “So, does Galveston have a port where he could have come over?”