The Sinner (Notorious 1)

That guy doesn’t exist anymore.

The bayou outside the screened in porch seemed to pulse and breathe. It was warmer than St. Louis, denser, the air thick and somehow both sweet and spicy. Like flowers dipped in cayenne.

I liked it. It made me hungry for food and a woman at the same time.

And not just any woman. Savannah. The one woman I shouldn’t touch.

But, the devil in me wondered, how much easier would it be to find out about her mother and the gems if I seduced her into trusting me.

I wasn’t that kind of monster.

Was I?

I’d lost count of all the monsters I was now.

In the sleeping porch I pulled on clean boxers and laid down on the daybed. Sleep despite my exhaustion wasn’t going to come soon and if I was going to look around I needed to wait until the house was quiet.

I pulled my bag closer to the bed and reached in for the file from the investigator I’d hired track down everyone related to the jewel theft that my father had been involved in seven years ago.

Inside were surveillance pictures. Pictures I practically had memorized.

Vanessa was last seen two weeks ago in New Orleans. My investigator had taken her picture, followed her around to various poker games and bars, and heard her talking about Bonne Terre and the Manor. Then she’d vanished. Just vanished.

I’d connected the dots and decided to come here to find her. Or wait for her. Whatever it took to correct justice’s aim.

It’s not like I had anything else to do.

“Was it you?” I asked Vanessa’s picture. “Did you break into the house last night?”

Six months ago my life was torn apart, and now I was talking to photos as if they might reply and stalking the O’Neill women to seek retribution for a seven-year-old crime. I wasn’t proud of it. It just was.

“Justice,” I said to the photo, tasting the word, loving how it gave me a purpose. A fire.

The second photo in the stack was Savannah. Outside the library in Bonne Terre. Her hair was back in that severe bun and she wore her button up shirt but the truth of her was undeniable. The burn of her was undeniable.

“What am I supposed to do with you?” I asked the photo. I knew what I wanted to do and that scene in the hallway was only a taste.

Suddenly, I had a memory of sitting outside an Indian reservation casino. I must have been about Katie’s age and my father was going in for one quick game. One hand. Just one.

He told me that my job was to sit in the car and watch for three men. One man with a patch, another with a scar and the final man with a one of those Russian bearskin hats. When I saw those three men I needed to run inside the casino and find my dad, Joel.

Clever, I realized now, twenty-five years later. Because while men with scars and patches were a possibility in South Carolina, there would be no Russian bearskin hats.

A goose chase. A fool’s errand, my father was brilliant with them. A master. And I had taken the job so seriously I’d sat in that beat-up Chevy with a notebook and pen, drawing pictures and taking notes, a young Sherlock Holmes. Always keen. Always on the lookout for a bear-skin hat that would never come.

All of which was irrelevant. Every moment of the past, every bad decision and terrible accident that led me to this point, was moot.

The only thing that mattered now was making one thing right, in a life gone horribly wrong. I had to make one damn thing right.

Who betrayed Dad? Joel’s partner, Richard Bonavie, or the blonde at the drop-off—Vanessa O’Neill?

The legal system might have gotten it wrong with me, my hands were bloody right down to the bone, but it wasn’t too late to get justice for my father. That’s why I was here, and the women in this house with me were the key to it all.

I turned off the light and planned on waiting until the house was quiet before looking around, but the work of the day pulled me down and I slept hard for the first time in six months.

For two days I tried my damnedest to get any one of the O’Neill women to talk to me about Vanessa. Savannah wasn’t talking to me at all. After that little moment in the hallway she’d gone into full hiding. Which was probably smart. But that left me with Katie, who when I’d asked her about her grandmother, had given me a blank look and left.

All this led me to believe that Vanessa hadn’t come here yet. And if she did - she wouldn’t be very welcome.

My plans for looking around at night had been derailed too, by the work I was doing during the day and the good food the O’Neill women were making.