Fuck. Whereas Mr. Granade was the fabled hardass, Mr. Palmer was a stone-cold operator. Nothing got by him. He was in his fifties, single, rich from his own hard work, and conscientious to a fault. I was still surprised he'd hired me to work for him, though I suspected Terrell had something to do with it.
The Lynches and the Palmers were once slave families to one of the most powerful families in New Orleans. It was some sort of poetic justice that the slaves' descendants were at the top of the food chain whereas the former masters' families were scattered and no more high class than I was.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Palmer." Yvonne jumped ahead of me in the brown-noser line.
"I don't want apologies, Ms. Evans, just better behavior."
His gaze rested on the documents in my arms. "Long night, Ms. Montreat? I heard Wash chose you to work on the Ellis case."
"Yes. Just got the evidence from the State." I wanted to apologize, but it didn't seem to have worked out too well for Yvonne, so I held off.
Mr. Palmer dismissed me by turning his gaze to Terrell. "Care to go for an early dinner? Your father's meeting me at the club."
I grinned at Terrell over Mr. Palmer's shoulder. Terrell hated the "stuffy rich folks torture chamber," as he called it. But he wasn't getting out of it this time, not when Mr. Palmer was asking point blank.
"Sure, sounds great." He forced a smile as I tiptoed backward like a cartoon character.
It was gratifying that Yvonne was left standing to the side, not invited and with nothing to do other than give me a scathing look as I turned and walked down the hall to my office.
My smile faded as I realized the long night of work I had ahead of me. I kicked my shoes into my office and went to the copy room to scan everything into the firm's document-management software. It was relatively painless, taking only a few minutes before I could sit down at my desk and begin sifting. I called in an order to the Indian place a few blocks over and settled in for the evening.
The police reports seemed like the best place to start. Seven bodies over three years. I began working up an outline, filling in details of the murders. The similar injuries, the checkered pasts of the victims, the even more checkered past of Rowan Ellis. I saved the pictures for last. I figured if I could get through everything else, I would have steeled myself for the gore.
It was almost midnight by the time I'd read through the last document and gotten to the photo evidence. The office was eerily quiet. The hum of the air-conditioning and the whir of my computer's fan were the only things to break the silence.
I skimmed down to the JPEG files and clicked on the first one. I flinched, expecting some horribly gory scene. Instead, it was just a peaceful waterway, cypress trees and vines in the background. It wasn't so bad. You can do this.
I clicked to the next one. More water, more trees. No big deal. The next was a closer shot of a white tree trunk rising out of the water a bit. I clicked through a few more, each one focusing more on the tree trunk. Then I put my hand to my mouth. It wasn't a tree trunk. It was a body. Its skin was ghastly white, as if it'd been bleached by the sun. She was nude, her flesh wrinkled and ruined from the water. Her mouth was open, as if frozen in a perpetual scream. I had thought it was a dark knot on the tree.
My gorge rose, and I stood, trying to escape the image that was already seared into the backs of my eyelids. I leaned against my desk, my back to the monitor as I tried to shake the horror away. I had to pull myself together. This was probably nothing compared to what the morgue would be like. But her face, the terror that was visible even through the decay . . . Breathe, I told myself, my hand at my throat. Just breathe.
"Ms. Montr-?"
I jumped and screamed.
"Whoa, whoa." Mr. Granade had been standing in my doorway and hurried over to me. "You okay?"
I nodded and examined the floor, still horrified yet simultaneously embarrassed that I'd screamed like a banshee. He stood in front of me and looked to my right, at the screen. I was shaking, and my knees felt like they might go if not for the desk behind me.
"Oh, hell. This is not something you should be looking at all alone up here this late at night." He sighed and put his hands on my upper arms. "Ms. Montreat, look at me. It's okay."
I lifted my eyes to his. He reached over and hit a key that made my screen go back to my desktop. A photo of Terrell and me at a particularly booze-filled pub crawl filled the screen, both of us smiling goofily and raising our glasses. Why did I think that was a good desktop background? I shook my head.