Chapter One
Everything had been planned—from every lock that had to
be picked, to every step through every corridor. The Louis Royale Hotel’s
popular restaurants had cleared out by midnight and most of the diners had moved
on to more exciting places or gone home. The hotel’s bar was popular for lunch
and predinner cocktails, but most serious partiers ended up on Bourbon Street by
late evening.
It had been simple to slip in with the last of the late diners.
Simple to take the elevators up to the tenth floor. And it was a snap to pick
the lock on the fire stairs door to the penthouse suite that took up the entire
eleventh floor. The hotel still used the original ornate metal keys, although
the guest rooms also had computerized security card locks.
The hotel was the perfect place to kill the senator. And
tonight was the perfect night. His offices and the senate floor in Baton Rouge
were too public and too secure. The locked gates of his home just outside of
that city put the Louisiana State Legislature’s security measures to shame. It
was laughable that the man who’d erected a fortress worthy of a paranoid
potentate was so lax about his safety in a hotel. But then, a lot of people
assumed a hotel’s penthouse suite was innately secure. Tonight, for Senator
Darby Sills, that assumption would prove to be a fatal mistake.
Crouching in the fire stairs to wait for the perfect moment was
also a snap. Boring, cramped, but simple. The layout of the penthouse suite was
perfect. The elevator doors opened into the sitting room. On the left wall were
the double doors to the master suite and on the right was the door to a second,
smaller bedroom.
It was after midnight, one twenty-seven, to be specific. The
senator and his staff were due to have breakfast with the local longshoremen’s
union at eight o’clock in the morning. He’d probably sent his staff off to their
rooms by eleven, eleven-thirty at the latest. Sills insisted that his employees
maintain a routine. He liked to say that any man or woman worth their salt
should be in bed by eleven and up by seven. Not that Senator Sills abided by
that rule. No one in public life could maintain a healthy, structured sleep
schedule.
Although few people were aware of it, Sills was an insomniac.
He rarely got four hours’ sleep a night. At home, he’d sit in a rocking chair in
his study, smoke his pipe, sip Dewar’s scotch and read. It was widely rumored
that his staff had the unenviable task of keeping the senator and his scotch
separated when he was on the road.
The plan to kill Senator Sills allowed seven minutes for the
job, start to finish. Best scenario, Sills would be in the sitting room,
reading. A quick entrance through the service door, a muffled shot, right in the
middle of Sills’s chest, a rapid escape and down the fire stairs. If Sills had
already retired to the bedroom, seven minutes would be stretching it, but it
could still be done.
Next, change to the clothes hidden in the fire stairs while
descending to the first floor, then walk through the bar and out the door as if
nothing was more important than heading left toward Bourbon Street. Seven
minutes, one bullet, and the greedy bastard would be dead.
* * *
L
ANEY
M
ONTGOMERY
CLOSED
the connecting door between the penthouse suite
sitting room and the adjoining bedroom with an exhausted sigh. She’d thought the
senator would never stop editing his speech. He was pickier than usual
tonight.
She kicked off her heels and collapsed on the king-size bed,
too tired to lift her arm to check her watch. The last time she’d checked, it
had been after two, and she had to get up at six to make any final changes to
Louisiana State Senator Darby Sills’s speech before his eight o’clock breakfast
meeting with the local officers of the Longshoremen’s Association.
But as much as she wanted to just turn over, grab a corner of
the bedspread for warmth and drift off to sleep, she couldn’t. She had to brush
her teeth, take off her makeup and set her phone’s alarm first. She felt around
for her phone, then remembered that she’d left it on the printer cart in the
sitting room.
With a weary sigh, she sat up. For a brief moment she
fantasized about leaving the phone where it was and calling for a wakeup call,
but she couldn’t spend three hours—not even three hours while she was
asleep—without her phone. As Senator Darby Sills’s personal assistant, she’d be
the one called if anything happened. Whether it was a change in the number of
people attending the longshoremen’s breakfast or a frantic text from the
governor about some issue facing the legislature, it came to her phone.
She closed her eyes. Maybe nobody would call tonight. And
surely she’d hear her phone through the door. Just as she began to sink into the
soft bed, she heard a loud yet muffled pop through the connecting door, then a
thud. Was that pop a bottle being uncorked? Had the senator smuggled in a bottle
of scotch?
Ready with her “remember what the doctor said about your liver”
speech, she vaulted up and knocked briskly. “Senator? I forgot my phone,” she
called, then opened the door and stepped through.
The desk chair where Senator Sills had been sitting just two
minutes before was empty. Laney glanced toward the wet bar. The senator liked
his Dewar’s on the rocks. “Senator,” she called. “Where did you get—?”
Then she saw the scarecrow-thin shadow looming in front of
her.
Laney’s hands shot up in an instinctive protective gesture.
“What? Senator—?”
The shadow took on a vaguely human outline—a silhouette
completely cloaked in black. It came toward her and she recoiled. “Who are you?”
she cried. “Where’s the senator?”
The person in black lifted its right arm and pointed at
her.
Laney blinked and tried to clear her vision. Surely there was
something wrong with her eyes. “Senator—” she started, but stopped when
something in the person’s hand caught the lamplight, gleaming like silver.
“No!” she cried, her subconscious mind recognizing the object
before her brain had time to attach a name to it. She dived, face-planting on
the hardwood floor in front of her bedroom door. A muffled pop echoed through
the room and her skull burned in white-hot pain. Her head was knocked back into
the baseboard behind her. Her cry choked and died as her throat seized in
fear.
What happened? What hurt so bad? Again, her brain was slow to
catch up to her intuitive subconscious. Finally she understood.
I’ve been shot.
Whimpering involuntarily, she drew her
shoulders up and pressed her forehead into the floorboards as hard as she could.
She wrapped her arms around her head, grimacing in awful anticipation as she
waited for the next bullet to slam into her.
And waited. There were no more pops. Instead, she heard
footsteps coming toward her. They echoed hollowly on the hardwood floor.
One step. Two.
She thought about
moving. Pictured herself propelling backward through the door to her room and
slamming it. But it didn’t matter how brave she was inside her head. In reality,
she couldn’t make her frozen limbs move. All she could do was cower.
Three steps.
He was coming to check
and be sure she was dead. He was going to shoot her again, at point-blank range.
She didn’t want to die. “No—” she croaked. “Please—”
The elevator bell dinged.
The footsteps stopped. The man whispered a curse. Laney held
her breath. Who was on the elevator? Who would have access to the penthouse? Had
someone heard the shots?
The footsteps sounded again, but this time they were quicker
and fading, as if the man were retreating. Laney opened her eyes to slits,
bracing for the sharp, nauseating pain. She had to know where the man was—what
he was doing.
When she raised her head, a moan escaped her lips. The shooter
whirled and something silvery and bright caught the light again. He was holding
the gun at shoulder height, pointed right at her. She gasped and tried to shrink
into the floor. At that instant the distinctive sound of elevator doors opening
filled the air.
The man turned as if to glance over his shoulder, then
disappeared through the service door to the left of the elevators. His footsteps
echoed, warring with the electronic sound of the doors.
With a massive effort, Laney lifted her head. Coming out of the
elevator was a bellman carrying a bottle of Dewar’s scotch. She pointed with a
trembling finger toward the service door and cried out, “Help. He’s getting
away!” Only it wasn’t a cry. It was nothing more than a choked whisper.
The bellman saw her then. He dropped the bottle, which thudded
to the floor without breaking. “Oh, God!” he cried, running over to kneel beside
her. “Oh, God. Are you all right? What happened? Where are you hurt?”
“Senator—” Laney forced herself to say. She pointed toward the
desk. “The senator—”
The young man twisted to look in the direction she was
pointing. “Oh, God,” he said again.
“Help him,” she whispered.
“I can’t—” the bellman started. “The blood—”
Laney pushed herself to her knees. “Senator!” she cried out as
she crawled toward the empty desk chair, hoping against hope that the gunman
hadn’t killed him. That somehow the shot had missed him and he had taken shelter
under the desk, wounded maybe, but alive. As she crawled closer, she saw his
back. He was lying next to the chair, crumpled into a fetal position. Blood made
a glistening, widening stain on the Persian rug.
“Senator!” she cried again, shoving the chair out of the way.
Twisting, she pinned the bellman with a glare that ratcheted up the throbbing
pain in her head. “Call the police,” she grated.
She put her hand on the senator’s shoulder and carefully turned
him onto his back—and saw his eyes, open and staring and beginning to film
over.
“Oh, no,” she whispered. “No, no, no.” She shook him by the
shoulder. His jacket fell open and she saw where the blood was coming from. A
small, seeping wound in his chest. She cast about for something to stanch the
bleeding, even though she knew it was too late. She looked back at his eyes and
her heart sank with a dread certainty. There was no need to stop the bleeding.
He was dead.
Behind her she heard the young man on the house telephone
beside the elevator. “Hurry!” he said shakily. “There’s blood everywhere.”
Laney knew she ought to be the one on the phone, calling the
police, taking care that no one but them knew what had happened. Senator Sills
was dead and it was her responsibility to him and to the legislature to keep
that information away from the press and the public. But her head hurt so badly
and her vision was obscured by a red haze. Defeated by pain and sadness, she
curled up on the floor next to the senator, one arm under her head.
Behind her, the bellman spoke into the phone. “No. I’m telling
you, it’s Senator Sills. I think he’s dead.”
* * *
N
EW
O
RLEANS
P
OLICE
Detective Ethan
Delancey stared down at the body of Senator Darby Sills, sprawled on the floor
of the penthouse suite in the Louis Royale Hotel in the French Quarter. Blood
stained the Persian rug beneath him. This was going to be ugly.
“This is going to be ugly,” Detective Dixon Lloyd’s voice came
from behind him.
“Morning, partner,” Ethan responded wryly. “Nice of you to show
up.” He’d gotten to the hotel fifteen minutes earlier. But then he didn’t have a
wife or a house in the lower Garden District like Dixon did. His apartment on
Prytania Street was less than ten minutes from the French Quarter in rush hour,
much less at four o’clock in the morning.
“Hey, give me a break,” Dixon said. “Did you see how many
reporters are already outside? Not to mention rubberneckers. I had to call the
commander to round up more officers for crowd control.”
“Everybody in New Orleans will know Senator Sills is dead
before the sun comes up,” Ethan said glumly.
“Probably already do. I hate politics.”
“You?”
Ethan countered. “Try being
Con Delancey’s grandson.” Like his older brother Lucas and his twin cousins,
Ryker and Reilly, Ethan had become a cop, hoping to separate himself from the
tarnished legacy of his infamous grandfather, Louisiana Senator Con Delancey.
But like them, he’d quickly found out that the name Delancey was an occupational
hazard in New Orleans, no matter what the job was. There was nowhere in the
state of Louisiana—or maybe the world—that his surname didn’t evoke a raised
eyebrow and a range of reactions from an appreciative smile to unbridled
hostility.
“I think I can relate,” Dixon said, “since I’m in the family
now.”
“You two finished catching up on family gossip?” Police Officer
Maria Farrantino interrupted. “I’m sure it’s been a couple of hours since you’ve
seen each other.” She stood on the other side of the body, the toes of her
polished boots avoiding the pool of blood by less than two inches.
Ethan sent her an irritated glare.
Unfazed, she continued. “I’ve got the second victim over here.
The first officer on the scene took her statement. The EMTs are working on her
now, and CSI hasn’t gotten to her yet.”
Ethan looked at the young woman who was sitting on a
straight-backed chair with her head bowed and one hand holding back her dark,
matted hair as an EMT applied a bandage to the side of her head. Draped over her
knee was a wet cloth that was stained a deep pink, the same color as the large
spot on her white shirt. According to the statement the first officer had given
him, she was Senator Sills’s personal assistant and had surprised the killer in
the act. She’d told the officer that she’d dived to the floor when the killer
had turned his gun on her, but hadn’t been quick enough to escape injury.