Let the Devil Out (Maureen Coughlin #4)(16)

They believed what boyfriends and, unfortunately, some of their girlfriends told them—that they’d scared themselves into seeing threats where none existed, that they were paranoid, like anyone really knew what that word meant. Or brainwashed. That they should doubt their deepest, primal natural instincts for self-preservation so as not to be embarrassed.

It was part of the problem, Maureen knew, the hard part of trying to convince people to see threats, to be wary, to be hard targets. If you oversold the message, people saw danger so often that they stopped seeing it altogether. They stopped believing in it. Nobody wants to believe they should be afraid. And too many people, thought Maureen, thought that acting careful and living afraid were synonymous, that being wary of your surroundings constituted a character flaw.

*

Sitting in the booth, her eyes moving from guy to guy, Maureen recalled Preacher telling her that the description of the stalker was similar in all three incidents, but was so generic as to be useless: white, dark hair, medium height, medium build. Only the ring stood out. Only every other guy in this bar, Maureen thought, matched the physical description. None of the women could describe a face in detail. No one could offer a name. The women were convinced the stalker couldn’t be someone they knew. Why would someone they knew treat them like that? He hadn’t been someone they’d talked to that night. If someone they knew or had met was capable of acting like that, surely they would see it. They would feel it. Right? They would know better.

The night of her talk with Preacher, sitting at her kitchen table later, in a notebook Maureen had sketched out the details of the cases. She saw plenty to worry about.

She saw a predator practicing the hunt, learning his territory, honing his timing, and working up his nerve. Already a pattern was emerging. Somewhere in the near but indistinct future, somewhere in her neighborhood, a rape was going to happen. That it hadn’t happened already was a small miracle. Maureen had no intention of relying on the miracle to endure. She would indeed take matters into her own hands. She thought of one of the nuns’ favorite sayings from her Catholic school days. “The Lord helps those who help themselves.”

Right at that moment, somewhere around her in the Irish Garden, mixed in with the boring, harmless men she was looking at, hiding in plain sight, was a soon-to-be rapist. She knew it. She could feel it. She had experience with predators and she had an eye for victims. She’d known them. She’d been one. Like recognizes like.

What she needed to do tonight was spot the matching pair. That she could recognize both predator and prey, she thought, that vision, that slice of wisdom, more than anything she’d learned at the academy, would make her a cop to be reckoned with, to be feared. Being able to see both sides, to see the world as both the owl and the mouse, was a dark gift that the silver-haired man had given her. A gift she’d use against every man like him that she met.

She sipped her whiskey.

How long had she been sitting in this bar tonight? Long enough that the smoke from other people’s cigarettes burned her eyes.

She checked her phone. It was after one. She’d been in the bar since ten.

She’d find her target. She’d see him first and he would never see her. Not before, not after, she was sure of that. Plain and pale and thin, her unwashed, cornflake-colored hair pulled back in a ponytail, not made-up, in jeans and a T-shirt and an unzipped hoodie, she would never be noticed by the man she was looking for. Not by any man in that bar. Not until she wanted him to. At her time, on her terms, she would make her move. He would never see her face, but he would remember her for a long time. A very long time. She’d create a lasting, life-changing memory for one special man.

The ASP, sleek and black, rested beside her on the bench.

Killing a man with an ASP was tough, but not impossible. What it did best was wreak agonizing, emergency-room-level havoc on jaws and joints and teeth and the small bones of the extremities. The bigger bones broke, too, if you caught them right. The weapon was an academy graduation gift from her mother’s ex-NYPD boyfriend. In Nat Waters’s time, in Nat Waters’s hands, that ASP had broken more than a few bones on the streets of New York City, Maureen thought. It had changed the course of several lives before lying dormant for a decade, waiting to come to her.

Now Maureen had it, and she had put it back to work on the streets of New Orleans.





6

Shortly before two a.m., Maureen spotted a match. The target and the stalker revealed themselves to her one right after the other, exactly as she had expected it to happen.

The target was young, early twenties, blond, pale, and thin and chirpy as a baby bird, one of a small flock of potential victims Maureen had been watching. She wore billowy cotton pants in a fake African pattern, a charcoal top about a size too large that almost matched the pants, and wedge-heeled shoes. She had the look of someone who’d borrowed her curvier roommate’s clothes. Maureen had seen her come in around eleven, alone and already listing from drinking at home. She wore only a thin jacket against the cold night, which told Maureen she lived nearby. She’d spent most of the night squinting at her phone, texting. The girl was upset about something, Maureen figured, that had happened before she’d left home. Her outfit had a touch of “Fuck you, I’m going out.” She’d almost had the energy to get dressed up, but hadn’t quite made it. She’d done just enough preparation to convince herself she wasn’t going out purely to get shit-faced, which gave her permission to do exactly that.