“No gratitude necessary.” She smiled. “After all, we’re family.”

Beth’s smile became steadier. “That’s right, I keep forgetting. That means you’re stuck with me.” She reached over and turned out the light on the nightstand. “Now get out of here and let me see if I can get to sleep in this bed. If I can’t, you may find me downstairs sleeping on that couch in the living room.”

“It looked pretty comfortable.” She paused. “Aren’t you the least bit curious about Gelber’s disc Billy is trying to make sense of?”

“Yes.” Eve couldn’t see her expression in the darkness, but her voice was only a wisp of sound. “But I’m more scared than curious. If what you say is true about Gelber’s manipulating my memories and giving me posthypnotic suggestions, maybe that’s natural. Perhaps I was supposed to be too afraid to delve into what Gelber did. Do you suppose that’s possible?”

Eve felt a surge of anger. “Yes, that’s entirely possible.” She turned. “So we’ll just break through that wall he built around you, ignore what he did, and get what we need. There’s nothing to be scared about.”

“What if I did something … bad.”

“Bullshit. You were a kid. What could you have done?” She started to pull the door shut. “Try to sleep.” She paused a moment outside the door before she moved next door to her room. She had thought that Pierce was the principal villain of the piece, but the more she thought about Gelber, the more she was beginning to give him equal billing. Pierce had been her jailer, but Gelber had robbed her in a hideous way.

Murder was a terrible crime, but so was the crime that Gelber had committed against Beth. There was no way on earth Eve could regret Gelber’s death.

*   *   *

EVE WAS STILL AWAKE when Joe came to bed over an hour later. “So much for catching one newscast.” She yawned and cuddled closer to him. “Well? Anything about Drogan?”

“No.” His hand absently stroked her hair. “Nothing about Drogan. He’s not a suspect.”

“What?” she asked, startled.

“You heard me. A note was found on the coffee table in the living room written by a Paul Helmer, a director. He confessed to killing Gelber because he allegedly ruined his life by hypnotizing him, then threatening to tell his wife of his infidelities, which he’d confessed while under hypnosis. He stated Gelber was blackmailing him.”

“It wasn’t Drogan?”

“I didn’t say that. I just told you about the note. The police think that since Paul Helmer was a patient, Gelber could have let him into the house. It’s a pat explanation since the house was not broken into, and the alarm was so difficult to disarm. They checked out Helmer with Gelber’s secretary and he’d definitely been undergoing therapy for the past two years.”

“Have they picked up Helmer and gotten a statement yet?”

“Not yet. He wasn’t at his apartment.” He paused. “And they may not get a statement … in time. The note he left was a suicide note as well as a confession.”

Eve was silent, trying to take it in. “All the ends neatly tied up. I suppose it could have been Helmer.”

“If they find Helmer’s body, then the police will close the case without any further investigation.”

“Was the note handwritten?”

“No, computer, but it was signed by hand.” He added dryly, “Much simpler to forge … or easier to persuade someone to scrawl.”

“You’re not buying it.”

“I’m still betting on Drogan. Pierce knew we were getting too close to finding out what happened to Beth. It would be smart to get rid of one of the prime witnesses.”

“You think he planned all this with Helmer?”

“It was clever, and I don’t believe Drogan is that clever. According to his dossier, he’s principally an assassin and good at what he does. But this is an elaborate cover-up, and he’d need someone to do that for him.”

“But is Pierce that clever?”

“He’s capable … and desperate. By using Helmer, no one would be looking at any connection to him. The killing is all spelled out for anyone to see. All he had to do was wait a few days until the police finished getting the info on Helmer out of his files, then send someone to get Beth’s records.” He shook his head. “I don’t know … it’s complicated.”

“So what next?”

“We go through the disc we pulled tonight and see if we find evidence that will skewer that son of a bitch, Pierce.”

“Can’t we go to the police now?”

“We could, but not if you want to protect Beth. You prove that Helmer didn’t kill Gelber and Beth was thirty minutes away, and you set her up. She’s a mental patient who has a grudge against Gelber and wants revenge for an imagined crime against her.”

“Dammit.”

“Exactly. That mental-patient stigma is going to haunt her for the foreseeable future.”

“I hate it.”

“So do I,” he said quietly. “She doesn’t deserve it. But we have to accept the facts and deal with them.”

“The fact is that Pierce put a major stumbling block in our way when he got rid of Gelber.”

“He got rid of Gelber, but we still have the disc. That could clear the path.”

“Then what are we doing lying here when we could be working on that disc?” She sat up in bed and said fiercely, “Beth may be frightened of knowing what’s in it, but I can’t wait.”

Joe chuckled and pulled her back down. “You’ll have to wait. Newell has the disc, and you need to sleep.” He kissed her. “Give it a few hours, Eve.”

He was right. But she was still feeling a sense of sudden urgency. She put her cheek on his shoulder. “I just have a feeling that everything is moving too fast, and we need to keep up. We needed Gelber as a witness against Pierce, but now he’s dead. Pierce is scared, and he’s started eliminating everyone who knew what he did to Beth.”

“If we can catch Drogan, he won’t have a weapon to use,” Joe said. “All we need to do is keep an eye out for him and pounce. There’s no doubt that he’ll stay close to us as he can get. Beth is the target, and I’m the lagniappe.”

“‘Lagniappe,’” she repeated. “That’s the French word for a little something extra.”

“And Drogan was born and raised in Cajun country, so he knows Cajun French. He’s into voodoo. I’ve been thinking of that and wondering how we can use it…”

Eve shook her head and settled closer to him. Joe was thinking, planning, reaching out. She brushed her lips against the warm flesh of his shoulder. “You’d better not be the lagniappe. I won’t have it.”

He didn’t answer and she felt a ripple of disquiet.

Voodoo.

A snake skeleton wound around the throat of a woman buried alive.

Her arms tightened protectively around him.

6:05 A.M.

Twin Branch Arms Motel

“I DON’T LIKE THIS PLACE.” Stella wrinkled her nose as Pierce unlocked the door of Room 7. “It’s cheap and looks like one of the places I took my johns when I was doing tricks.”

“You’re still doing tricks,” Pierce said. “Only you’re doing them when I tell you to do them.” He threw open the door. “Now go change into that gold robe. Gelber should be here in about forty-five minutes.”

“I’m not sure that I want to screw him if he’s going to make me come to places like this.” She opened her overnight bag and pulled out the gold robe. “I’ll have to teach him to treat me as I deserve to be treated.”

“I assure you that you wouldn’t like that at all.” He moved toward the TV across the room. “Be happy that I’m not going to—”

“Don’t turn on the TV.” She had stopped and was stripping and slipping on the gold robe. “I want music. Turn on Queen on the iPod.”

“That’s what you said in the car coming here.” He turned to look at her. “Don’t turn on the radio. Play the iPod. And what’s this obsession with Queen?”

“I like that song, ‘We Will Rock You.’” She fluffed her hair and took her discarded clothes back to the overnight bag on the bed. “I think it suits me. I can see myself rocking the whole damn world.”