Violets Are Blue

so invitingly on the porch.
    It was then that the girl finally spoke again. “Why do you hold back?” she called, and laughed pitilessly.
    William smiled, and then he turned around.
    He walked back toward the girl.
    “You’re very lucky,” he said. “You’ve been chosen.”

Chapter 70

    SOMETHING HAD to break for us. At seven in the morning, I sat alone at a table outside the Café Du Monde across from Jackson Square. I ate sugar-dusted beignets and sipped chickory-laced coffee. I stared off in the direction of the spires of St. Louis Cathedral and listened to the bleating horns of riverboats coming down the Mississippi.
    It should have been a nice time in the morning, except that I was frustrated and angry and filled with energy that I didn’t know what to do with.
    I had seen a lot of bad cases, but this was possibly the most difficult to comprehend. The gruesome murders had been going on for more than eleven years, but the pattern was still unclear and so was the motivation of the killers.
    As soon as I reached the FBI offices, I got the disturbing news that a fifteen-year-old girl was missing and that she lived less than six blocks from the magicians. It was possible that she was a runaway, but it didn’t seem likely to me. Still, she had been gone less than twenty-four hours.
    There was a briefing scheduled, and I went upstairs to find out more, and also why I hadn’t been alerted earlier. When I entered the session that morning, I sensed the frustration everywhere I looked. It was hard to imagine a worse result: We suspected that we had tracked down the murderers, but there was nothing we could do about it. And now, possibly, they had murdered another victim right under our noses.
    I sat down beside Jamilla. Both of us had containers of hot coffee plus the morning edition of the
Times-Picayune
. There was nothing about the missing girl. Apparently the New Orleans police had sat on the disappearance until early that morning.
    Kyle was as angry as I’d ever seen him. He just wasn’t himself. He was storming about the front of the room, his right hand nervously combing back through his dark hair. I didn’t blame him—everything about the investigation depended on cooperation between the local police and the FBI. The NOPD had broken that trust, broken it badly.
    “For once, I sympathize with Mr. Craig,” Jamilla said. “The locals were way out of line.”
    “We could have been working on the girl’s disappearance for hours,” I agreed. “What a mess, and it’s getting worse.”
    “Maybe that’s our opportunity. I wonder if we could get inside the house during the party tonight. What do you think? I’d love to give it a try,” she whispered. “Everybody who comes to the so-called fetish ball will be in costume, right? Presumably? Somebody needs to get inside that house. We need to do something.”
    Kyle stared directly at Jamilla and me. He raised his voice. “Can we have one meeting?”
    “He means can he have
his
meeting,” she whispered. I wondered why she had taken such a dislike to Kyle. He was acting strange, though; the pressure of the case was getting to him. Something had him on edge.
    “Tell him what you think,” I said. “He’ll listen. Especially now that the girl is missing.”
    “I doubt it. But what can he do — fire me?”
    She swiveled around to face Kyle. “I think we could probably get inside the house tonight during the party. And if we don’t, what do we lose? The missing girl might be in there.”
    Kyle hesitated, but then he said, “Do it. Let’s see what’s in the house.”

Chapter 71

    IT COULD only happen like this in New Orleans. I spent part of the afternoon securing a couple of printed invitations, and then Jamilla and I prepared our costumes for that night. The ball began at midnight, but we’d heard that most of the crowd wouldn’t start to arrive until closer to two.
    It had already been a long night for us by the time the festivities started. We waited until just past two to approach the house. Some of the party goers were college age, a few were even younger, but at least half of the crowd looked to be thirty or older. A few arrived in limousines and other expensive cars. The dress for the night was definitely eye-catching: antique morning coats and top hats, velvet Victorian gowns, corsets, walking sticks, tiaras.
    The Goth crowd sheathed their androgynous bodies mostly in black leather and velvet, with frilly white and black lace on