Stop Me (Last Stand #2)(86)
Author: Brenda Novak

“But…”

“I’m a cop.”

So his conscience had finally prompted him to face what he’d been trying so hard to avoid. “You were a cop when I called you about Jasmine’s.”

Huff blew out an audible sigh. “The note I got said something no one but the killer would know.”

Romain shot a glance at Jasmine, who was watching him carefully. “What’s that?”

“He told me where the fiber evidence came from.”

“The fibers found in Adele’s hair?”

“Yes. We couldn’t find a blanket near the dump site, remember?”

“And there wasn’t one remotely similar inside the Moreau residence. You assumed Moreau had gotten rid of it somewhere else.”

“A plausible assumption.” Huff was still on the defensive. “But this note said it was a baby blanket. He didn’t wrap her in it, Romain. He gave it to her to sleep with.”

The image that rose in Romain’s mind made him cling that much tighter to Jasmine. He trusted her to stop the pain, and her desire to do so seemed to help.

“That’s what the note said?”

“The note told me where I could find a fuzzy red baby blanket.”

Romain clenched his jaw. “And?”

“It’s the one. It was buried in a plastic bag not far from the Old Gentilly Landfill.”

“Francis’s attorney went after the lack of fibers as a possible defense,” he said.

He’d gone after everything imaginable, eventually landing on the method through which the evidence had been collected. And he’d won. Until Romain had taken the law into his own hands….

Unable to keep driving, he pulled over to the side of the road. “I shot an innocent man.” As if the notes weren’t enough, the fibers confirmed it. “I killed a man because you said you found my daughter’s blood on his clothes. Because you said you saw him doing unspeakable things to my child on tape!”

“I never said it was Moreau on that tape!” Huff insisted. “I said it was a man who fit his description, who wore similar clothes. It never showed his face, and I didn’t lie about that.”

“Did you lie about any of the rest of it?”

“No! I found his pants in the cellar, like I said. And he had priors. You know his history.”

“Murder wasn’t included in those priors!”

“I believed he got carried away, finally went too far. Whoever was on that tape definitely went too far.”

The tape. Romain couldn’t even let himself imagine it. Don’t think about it.

Don’t picture it. Instead, he focused on one key word. “Believed,” he repeated.

“Moreau was a pedophile,” Huff said. “He wasn’t an innocent—”

Romain cut him off. “Just answer one question.”

“What?”

“Did you purposely overlook certain details in order to get a conviction?”

“No! What kind of man do you think I am?”

Romain didn’t know how to respond. He didn’t even know what kind of man he was. “If Moreau didn’t do it, that evidence must’ve been planted,” he said. “Who did it?”

“That’s what I’m here to find out. Do you think I’d leave my family at Christmas if this wasn’t important to me? If I didn’t feel terrible about it?”

“Tell him we have a picture of the guy,” Jasmine said. “Maybe he can help us identify him.”

Apparently, Huff overheard her. “Who’s that?”

“Jasmine Stratford. She has a picture of the man who killed her sister and Adele.”

“Then we should meet—go over what she’s got, what I’ve got, what you’ve got. Put all the pieces on the table and see if we can’t come up with some leads. Can you drop by my hotel?”

Just the sound of Huff’s voice, the intensity of his personality, carried Romain back—back where he didn’t want to go. But he had no choice. “When?”

“As soon as possible.”

“Where is it?”

Huff gave him the name and address.

“We can be there in an hour.”

“I’ll be waiting in the lobby,” he said and hung up, but Jasmine had another suggestion.

“Let’s make a copy of this. Then you can meet Huff while I go to the Moreaus’ old neighborhood and start asking questions,” she told him. “We need to put a name to this face.”

Chapter 21

Gruber thought it’d be easy to follow Romain and Jasmine anywhere they went. He watched it happen over and over in the movies. He’d gotten behind the wheel of his car and angled it so he could see when they passed him on the road, and he’d pulled out just at the right moment. Not fast enough to draw attention, not slow enough to make the effort pointless. But pointless it turned out to be. He lost Romain’s pickup long before he ever reached New Orleans. Probably because Peccavi kept calling him, distracting him as the traffic on the road increased.

Frustrated that the old woman had interrupted him this morning and Romain had somehow outdistanced him on the road, Gruber finally answered. “What is it?”

Silence. Suddenly aware of the impatient tone he’d used, he tried to back off.

“I had her,” he said. “She and Romain Fornier were right in front of me.”

“Leave Fornier out of it,” Peccavi said.

“Why?”

“The more people you involve, the bigger the backlash.”

That wasn’t what Gruber wanted to hear. He was tired of Peccavi’s dire warnings, his pearls of wisdom. Peccavi thought Fornier might be too much for Gruber. But Gruber didn’t care if Fornier used to be Reconnaissance Marine or a janitor. A bullet did the same damage to one as the other. And Gruber had a bullet with Fornier’s name on it. The gun he’d stolen from one of his mother’s lovers years ago waited in his trunk. “We can’t,” he told Peccavi. “Anything happens to her, he’ll be all over it. They both have to go.”

Peccavi paused, then sighed. “It’s not that easy to dispose of the…trash.”

Gruber nearly rolled his eyes. For all of Peccavi’s business acumen, he had no idea who he was dealing with, no idea that Gruber had ever done more than snatch a few kids for the sake of a living. “It won’t be hard for me.” No one had discovered the three bodies he’d dumped in the bayou over the past two decades. There was no reason to believe he’d be discovered now. But he couldn’t say that. Peccavi believed Francis was responsible for Adele, like almost everyone else did.