Head down, Jack lunged for Danjermond, planting a shoulder hard in the man's chest. The two of them landed on the polished wood floor, inches from the head of the stairs, and began wrestling for control of the gun. Jack grabbed hold of Danjermond's arm and slammed it hard against the floor, but before he could shake the pistol loose, a white-hot pain sliced into his right side, momentarily shorting out all thought and all strength.
Howling in pain and rage, he twisted around to find the source. A jagged shard of white porcelain protruded from his side with Danjermond's hand closed around it, as if around the hilt of a knife, blood oozing from between his fingers. As Jack reached to dislodge the impromptu knife, Danjermond swung the gun up and slammed it into his temple.
In the blink of an eye, the balance of power shifted. Jack struggled to stay on top as his consciousness dimmed, but the world dipped and tilted beneath him. Then suddenly they were rolling, through the water, over the broken vase, pain biting, muscles burning, heart pumping.
He managed to get a hand on Danjermond's throat and started to squeeze, but the district attorney was on top of him and pulling back, pulling away. Bringing the gun up. Laurel might have screamed, but all Jack was certain of was the sharp thunk! of a bullet splintering the floor millimeters from his head as he let go of Danjermond's windpipe and knocked his gun hand to the side.
Jack surged up, twisting to reverse their positions. Pain sliced through his side, pounded in his head. He blocked it out and fought on adrenaline, groping, pushing, turning. Danjermond's back slammed into the delicately turned white balusters that guarded the second-story landing, cracking one and shaking the whole balustrade, and the gun came out of his hand and skidded across the floor, toward the stairs.
Laurel jumped back as they wrestled, wanting to do something, but the gun was on the other side of the hall and the flashlight was somewhere on the floor beneath the tangle of grunting, straining male bodies. She glanced around for something, anything, she might use as a weapon, finding nothing, but she wasn't about to settle for prayer.
Do something, do something, she chanted mentally, turning and running back into Danjermond's bedroom. She had to find a weapon, something she could hit him with, stab him with, anything.
Jack slammed a left into Danjermond's face, then lunged up and forward, scrambling for the gun that was just out of his reach. His fingertips hit the silencer, and it spun away, sliding through the pool of water and broken glass. Focused, intent, he grabbed for it again and closed his fingers around the rubber grip on the handle.
At the same time, Danjermond found the flashlight. As Jack came up and started to swing around with the gun, Danjermond came to his knees and swung the flashlight like a club. It caught Jack a vicious blow on the side of his head, snapping his head around and clouding his vision to a gray blur. Brain synapses shorted out. The gun fell from his hand and tumbled down the steps, firing a useless shot into the wall.
He tried to stand, tried to block the second strike, but the messages never connected with the appropriate muscles. The blow landed, and everything faded to black.
Laurel burst out of the bedroom with a heavy ginger jar lamp in her hands, brandishing it like a club to swing at Danjermond's head. But he grabbed her arm as she stepped into the hall and her gaze went to Jack, and the lamp crashed to the floor.
"Jack!" Laurel screamed as he lay limp at the top of the stairs, the side of his face running with blood. Thoughts flashed fast-forward through her mind in that one elongated moment she stood there staring at his still body in the dark hall-he was dead, she'd lost him, she was alone with a killer.
She started to move forward, but Danjermond held her.
"Careful, Laurel," he said quietly, his breath whistling in and out of his lungs. She could smell his sweat and his expensive cologne. She could smell blood and could only hope it was his. "You don't want to step on glass," he murmured.
"You're insane," she charged, her voice a sharp, trembling whisper. She twisted around to glare up at him, her breath catching at the sinister cast his features took on in the orange-shadowed glow of the flashlight.
"No," he said in return, smiling ever so faintly, his cool green eyes on hers, unblinking. "I'm not."
Chapter Thirty
"I dislike compromise as a rule," Danjermond said as he worked at binding Jack's hands and feet. "But one has to be flexible in times of emergency."
Laurel sat on an elegant Hepplewhite shield-back chair in the front hall, her wrists bound to the arms with straps of white silk, her ankles bound to the front legs. She wanted to scream, but silk clogged her mouth, leeching away the moisture and literally making her gag.
She watched Danjermond with a sick sense of dread pushing at the base of her throat and a strange, lethargic numbness dragging down on her. Dreamlike. No, nightmarish. If she could believe this was a nightmare, then it wouldn't be real. A trick of the mind. She couldn't decide what would be better-to be alert and terrified with the reality of the situation, or to be stunned senseless and believe it was all a bad dream.
Danjermond looked up at her, as if he had expected some response to his statement. He had taken the time to change out of his tuxedo and neatly bandage the hand he had cut during the fight. He was now in black jeans, boots, and a loose-fitting black shirt, an outfit that made him look like a modern-day warlock.
He had spread a blanket out on the floor so as not to get Jack's blood on the Oriental hall runner, and he checked and double-checked the bindings on his unconscious prisoner to make certain they were tight enough to hold but not so tight as to make impressions beneath the padding he had used first. The Bayou Strangler's victims were the ones who were to have bruises on their wrists, not the Strangler himself.
Laurel's gaze kept slipping down to Jack. She wasn't certain he was breathing. He had been unconscious nearly half an hour. Utterly motionless. Blood, sticky and brilliant red, matted his hair and glazed his temple and cheek like candy on an apple, but she couldn't tell whether or not he was still bleeding. Dead men don't bleed. She stared at his chest, willed it to move.
"I would rather have brought him to trial," Danjermond went on. He rose gracefully and picked up a glass of burgundy from the hall table, sipping at it thoughtfully, savoring the wine. "That was my intent all along. A murderer on a spree in Acadiana, running unchecked, no one able to stop him-until he reached Partout Parish. That was why I left the bodies where they could be found. There are, of course, many ways of disposing of bodies so as not to leave a trace. A man can get away with murder again and again if he is intelligent, careful, coolheaded."
He finished his drink. The grandfather clock chimed the hour. Eleven. Jack still didn't move.
With a sigh, Danjermond hauled him up off the blanket and maneuvered him into a fireman's lift. Without a word to Laurel, he went down the hall, toward the kitchen. She heard the back door open and close, then silence.
Oh, God, Jack, please be alive, please come around. I don't want to die alone.
Alone. As Savannah had been, as Annie had been, as all those other women had been. God knew how many. He had left six bodies to be found because that suited his plans. There could have been dozens more, all of them gone without a trace, swallowed up by the Atchafalaya, never to be seen again, the victims' cries for pity heard only by the swamp.
The numbness began to fade, and fear took its place. Tears rose to burn the backs of her eyes.
A vision of Savannah's face floated through her mind. The scents of formaldehyde and ammonia with death lingering, cloyingly sweet, beneath it all. The stainless steel table. The draped figure. Prejean murmuring something apologetic. Savannah's face-not as it had been in life, but as death and its aftermath had distorted it.