The North Face of the Heart - Dolores Redondo Page 0,38
worry your head ’bout that. She appears only to men.” She shrugged. “Maybe still looking for her fiancé.”
She opened the door and stood back to let Amaia pass. Everything in the room—furniture, bed, walls, ceiling, carpet—was of a satiny cream color, the epitome of French style. The bathroom with a claw-foot tub was to one side, and the exterior wall was dominated by huge southern-style guillotine windows hung with venetian blinds. The woman tugged the cord to raise the blinds so they could see the building across the street.
“I’m sorry we can’t give you a better room, but it was last minute, and the hotel was mostly booked.”
“I noticed. I thought that with the evacuation . . .”
“Lots of folks decided not to leave. Want to stay to protect their property from looting after the storm, so they took rooms with us ’cause they know the French Quarter never gets flooded. Never has, since New Orleans was founded, and little ol’ Katrina won’t be any different.” She opened the window. Music came into the room; a brass band was passing. Amaia poked her head out, and despite the angle, she caught a glimpse of a large group of musicians marching smartly in formation.
“Musicians!” she commented, coming back inside. “I thought they’d all have left.”
“Two kinds of folks never leave New Orleans: musicians and ghosts.”
The hotel owner paused to switch on the television and turn to a news channel. The inescapable image of the hurricane out over the Gulf appeared on the screen. She nodded in satisfaction and went to the door. When it opened, she found herself face to face with Agent Johnson.
He nodded, let her pass, and stepped inside. Tucked under his arm were the half dozen folders of case material they’d printed out at the station. Amaia pointed without a word to the large desk by the window. She took one of the folders and settled on the corner of the bed, leaving the desk to Johnson. He raised the blinds all the way to let in light from outside and then settled down to work.
It took her twenty minutes to rule out the first two of the three cases she’d picked up. In the first one, men with gas company credentials got into a family dwelling where service had been interrupted by an earthquake. They tied up the father and mother, then tortured the elderly grandmother until she gave them the code for a safe. The second case was a late-night assault by a group of hooded thugs who tied up a whole family. The intruders took valuables, but they also forced the husband to watch them rape the women. The children were kept in another room.
The third case was a murder-suicide. Eight months earlier in Galveston, Texas, in December of the previous year, Joseph Andrews, forty-eight, shot his wife and his two children, a girl of sixteen and a boy of twelve, before taking his own life. He’d been transferred from Sacramento for work only a month earlier. His wife was a well-known decorator with a popular blog, as well as a dedicated theatre enthusiast. The image of their teenage daughter had been lifted from a group photo taken at her new school in Galveston. The case file noted that Andrews hadn’t shown up at work on the day of the murders. A neighbor went by to check on them and found the bodies. The father’s gun lay at his side.
Amaia spread the half dozen crime scene photos across the bed for closer examination. The bodies were stretched out on the floor with the heads aligned in the same direction. There was no way of knowing which direction that was, and the ink-rich photo print made it impossible for her to discern any signs that they had been tied up. Most telling for Amaia was the general scene. The case report didn’t comment on it, but disorder prevailed. All the furniture in the living room had been overturned. Flowerpots were tipped over. Pictures hung askew. It wasn’t as evocative as the aftermath of a tornado, but . . .
She decided on an order for the six photographs, laid them out that way, and added the four individual portrait photos of the family members.
“Johnson, take a look at this.”
Johnson put a file back onto the pile and crossed the room.
“The assumption is that the father stayed home that day because he was planning to murder his family. He shot each one in the head, then put a