Frankenstein

a kick-ass cop in the Big Easy.
    She had often been called a mother before she was one, mostly by thugs and druggies and corrupt cops who didn’t relate well to the straight arrows on the force, but they hadn’t been praising her commitment to child-rearing.
    In those days, she would never have imagined that she would want a child, let alone that she would get married and produce one. She’d had too much to prove, no time for romance, a husband, a family. She had been intent on discovering who killed her mom and dad execution-style, with bullets to the back of their heads.
    The word
mother
, coupled with six other letters and issued with a vicious snarl and a spray of spittle, never offended her because the creeps who called her that were really using it as a synonym for
incorruptible, dedicated
, and
relentless
.
    In pursuit of the elusive shadow that was Chang, as her slamming heart synchronized with the pounding of her feet on blacktop, she began to wonder if she was as dedicated and relentless now as she had been back in the day. Maybe her little Scout gave her pause, a reason to hesitate. Maybe Chang was putting ground between them not because he was younger and faster than Carson but because subconsciously she didn’t want to risk getting too close to him and leaving Scout motherless.
    Although she yearned to deny it, the possibility existed that she didn’t have the right stuff to be both a mother and a private detective. Perhaps, having given birth to the prettiest baby on the planet, she was henceforth better suited to diapering a butt than to kicking one.
    Still to her right, Michael moved out ahead of her, keeping pacewith Chang. When they were partners in the NOPD homicide division, she’d always been faster than Michael, driving or running, confident that she could chase down any perp ever born.
    Now she was a plodder, her heart racing faster than her feet, her legs heavy. A leaden weight in her abdomen and a constricting upward pressure on her lungs might have been not real symptoms but instead a memory of advanced pregnancy and a reminder of her maternal obligations.
    She had become a baby-besotted wifey, a domestic by default, thinking less with her brain than with her heart, cautious whereas she’d once been fearless. She was made submissive by the realization that fate held her daughter hostage and always would, demanding a ransom of worry and prudence, payable in installments by the day, by the hour, forever. On the Highway of the Fainthearted, the ultimate destination might be cowardice.
    “Screw that,” she said, and by the time Chang disappeared around the nearer warehouse, Carson sprinted ahead of Michael, to the building.
    With her back against the corrugated-metal wall, pistol in both hands, muzzle skyward, Carson hesitated, not because of her baby girl but because—mother or not—she was averse to taking a bullet in the face at point-blank range. She could hear Michael approaching behind her, but she couldn’t hear Chang’s receding footsteps.
    Carson no longer enjoyed the advantage of cloaking darkness. The security lamps spread bright fans across the blacktop immediately around the structure.
    She lowered the muzzle from the overcast sky, arms out straight, wrists locked. Crouched low, she took the corner fast. In harmony, her eyes and the gun surveyed the scene, right to left, from open ground to warehouse wall.
    About sixty feet ahead, Chang ran along a surfline of gray shadows, where the waves of light dissolved against the shore of night.
    Carson couldn’t shoot him in the back. She had to catch him, club him—or chase him until he turned and fired and gave her a legal target.
    Michael reached her, but she was no longer in a mood to serve only as his backup.
    Although encumbered by the shopping bag—which was most likely full of money—and the attaché case containing the trade secrets that Beckmann had been selling, Chang was getting away. Carson couldn’t allow that. He had shot at them.
Shot
at them. Twice. He had tried to make an orphan of Scout. The sonofabitch.
    With the confidence of a panther in the wake of a fatigued gazelle, Carson pursued him.

    
chapter
6

    Rafael Jesus Jarmillo, the elected and popular police chief of Rainbow Falls, had not been assigned to the graveyard shift since he was a rookie on the force more than twenty years earlier. He came to work that October morning prior to dawn, with much to accomplish before noon.
    Although no