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“That’s my guess, anyway. Trouble is, it might not even be the killer. It could be whoever covered it up back then. Your father saw the body, but when he came back, it was gone. The residents weren’t allowed back for days afterward, but somebody came to retrieve that body.”
“And Dad was actively discouraged from investigating.” He bit his lip, worry in his eyes. “Call Burke. Please?”
“Okay.” Cautiously, she looked up and down the street again, on alert for anyone or anything that looked remotely out of place. She dialed Joy’s extension and put it on speaker. “Hi, Joy, it’s Molly. Is Burke available?”
“He is,” Joy said, a thread of tension in her voice that Molly did not like at all. “I’ll patch you through.”
“Joy, how’s the coffee this morning?” Molly asked before Joy could transfer her call.
“Shitty,” Joy said, and Molly breathed a sigh of relief.
“It’s a code,” Molly said to Gabe, because his brow was furrowed in confusion. “She’s okay. If she’d said the coffee was delicious, I’d have known something was wrong.”
“It’s just been a morning,” Joy said. “None of us trust that woman who met with Burke today and Antoine’s doing a sweep of the office to make sure she didn’t bug us. Phin’s been sweeping for any kind of bombs. But that’s just Phin.”
“Yeah, bombs would be his go-to,” Molly agreed. “You’ll allow him to escort you home tonight?”
“I will,” Joy grumbled. “I’ve been schooled by everyone here who worries about me. Like I’m not a woman grown and an ex-cop. Let me patch you through.”
Gabe’s brows raised. “Ex-cop?”
“She took a bullet to the spine when she responded to a robbery,” Molly explained. “Joy was and continues to be a badass.”
“Molly.” Burke had come on the line. “I was getting ready to call. We’ve been sweeping for bugs.”
“That’s what Joy said. I told Gabe about the call on the voice mail this morning. If you’ve learned anything, it’d be nice to know before I bother the woman who’s glaring daggers at me while she weeds her garden.”
“What are you talking about? What woman?”
“She’s the first name on my list of pre-Katrina homeowners on Xavier’s old street. She does not appear happy to see us.”
“Oh, okay.” Burke exhaled wearily. “The woman who called claimed to be Alicia Rollins. She was really young. Early twenties, I’d guess. She said her sister was JoAnn Rollins, who’d disappeared during Katrina. Alicia searched for her for years but found nothing.”
Molly did the math. “If Alicia’s in her early twenties, she’d have been between five and seven years old during Katrina. Not sure how she could have searched for her sister.”
“I know,” Burke said. “It was one of many things wrong with her story. I asked her why she’d come to me and why now. She said that someone tried to kill her yesterday.”
“Oh.” Molly hadn’t expected that. “How and where?”
“She said they fired shots through the window of her bedroom last night.”
Molly opened the note-taking app on her phone. “Her address?”
“I’ll text it to you. It’s in Rock Hill, a town in—”
“South Carolina,” Molly said. “Only about thirty minutes from where I lived when I was working in Charlotte.”
“I know,” was all Burke said.
“More coincidence?” Molly asked.
“Hard to believe so. She said she left immediately and drove straight to New Orleans.”
“She didn’t call the police?” Gabe asked.
“Nope. Said that she didn’t know who she could trust, and that Rocky had told her to come to me.”
Gabe’s eyes closed, grief flitting across his face. But when his eyes opened, they were cold with anger. “She has nerve, using my father’s name.”
