Killer Chef Read online

  Could he have spoken to the killer tonight and not known it?

  Outside, the evening wind is picking up a bit. The windows rattle, as if something from the world beyond is knocking, summoning Caleb, trying to let itself in.

  Chapter 8

  The morning birds are just starting to chirp when Caleb slips out from under Patsy’s lavender sheets and tiptoes into the kitchen.

  There he discovers, happily, that her fridge is fairly well stocked. He wants to start their day off on the right foot by whipping up a small feast.

  Knowing Patsy to be an eggs Benedict aficionado, Caleb begins by preparing his famous mornay sauce, heating the milk and flour into a silky froth before removing the mixture from the heat and whisking in the cheese.

  Patsy doesn’t have any buttermilk for the traditional southern biscuits he’d hoped to bake, so Killer Chef does some killer improvising. Caleb chops a few jalapeños from his personal stash and tosses them into the dough along with a fistful of raisins, to give each bite of the biscuits the perfect balance of spicy and sweet.

  Patsy pads into the kitchen just as Caleb is arranging some seared andouille slices atop the steaming biscuit halves. “Smells like heaven,” she says.

  But Caleb doesn’t respond; he keeps his laserlike focus on his food. He slides a cooked egg on each biscuit, painstakingly drizzles his mornay sauce over everything, then dusts it all with a Cajun spice blend, garnishing with diced parsley.

  Patsy waits until the plating is complete before wrapping her arms around Caleb’s waist from behind.

  “I think you do love me,” she says, referring to their conversation last night—one he’d thought she wouldn’t remember, given her state of inebriation.

  “Sit, eat,” Caleb says. “Before it gets cold.”

  Patsy obeys. With just one bite of his Cajun-inspired breakfast, her eyes roll to the back of her head in ecstasy. “Mmm! Your mornay is still the best I ever had.”

  Caleb smiles. He loves making people happy with his food—women in particular. Especially one as lovely as Patsy, who’s wearing just a T-shirt and panties.

  He considers, briefly, taking the day off and spending it with her. They could make spicy sweet potato hummus, mix a pitcher of ice-cold juleps, and watch old movies together in bed, just like they used to.

  It’s an incredibly tempting notion. But Caleb pushes it out of his head.

  He’s a dedicated homicide detective with a fresh case. And he’s wasted enough time already.

  After a lingering kiss on the corner of Patsy’s lips, Caleb is out the door before the Times-Picayune lands on her welcome mat. Still, he almost immediately finds himself stuck in morning rush-hour traffic. At least that’s what he thinks it is. He considers flipping on his police siren, but it looks like a parade of some sort beginning to form on the outskirts of the French Quarter.

  Just another day in New Orleans.

  “Screw it,” Caleb mumbles, and pulls a squealing U-turn.

  Instead of inching his way to his office at police headquarters on South Broad Street, he decides to head for the New Orleans coroner’s office less than half a mile away.

  Rex, the longtime parking attendant, waves hello as Caleb pulls his black Charger past the security gate and into a spot reserved for visiting law enforcement.

  “I’m guessing you’re not here just to say hello, Detective,” Rex says.

  “I wish,” Caleb says.

  Before he gets out, Caleb snatches the crumpled paper bag sitting on the front seat to bring inside with him, filled with jalapeño-raisin biscuits still warm from the oven. He knows Quincy will appreciate them.

  He also knows how desperately he’s going to need his friend’s help.

  Chapter 9

  “Well, we were right,” the potbellied medical examiner declares as he leads Caleb down the sterile hallway toward his laboratory, his snakeskin boots clicking along the floor. “Official cause of death: poisoning. I’m sure of it. Just as I’m sure these heavenly little biscuits of yours are going to do quite a number on my intestinal tract.”

  Quincy savors the final flaky bite, then dusts off his fingers and types a code on a keypad affixed above the handle of a large metal door.

  “Detective Rooney,” Quincy says, as he and Caleb enter the musty lab, “meet Martin Feldman and Elizabeth Keating. You’ll forgive them if they’re a little quiet this morning.”

  Laid out side by side on two metal cadaver tables are the male and female victims from Patsy’s restaurant. Both are completely naked. Both have long, jagged incisions running from their sternums to their pubic bones.

  “Marty and Elizabeth,” Caleb repeats solemnly. The two victims, in his mind, have just been transformed from anonymous corpses into real human beings. His desire to find their killer and avenge their deaths is suddenly intense.

  “Unfortunately,” Quincy continues, “their names are about the only thing I can tell you for certain. I’m still waiting for the lab results on the tissue samples I sent over. That should give us some idea of what kind of poison was used. I hope.”

  Caleb is no forensic pathologist but wagers a guess. “Could it be hemlock?”

  “That’s what I thought, too,” Quincy replies, flipping through a messy stack of his handwritten autopsy notes. “Until I sliced open their lungs. Mr. Feldman’s had quite a bit of tar buildup. Probably a pack-a-day smoker for years. But there wasn’t any of the textbook respiratory system paralysis you’d expect to see.”

  “What about nightshade?” Caleb asks. “Not common, I know. But it’s turned up in a couple homicide cases of mine in the past.”

  “If they ingested atropa belladonna,” Quincy answers, “they would probably have lived long enough for the paramedics to arrive. Might even still be with us.”

  Caleb thinks. “What about, I don’t know…something like strychnine?”

  “It has similar symptoms, I’ll give you that,” Quincy replies. “But it still doesn’t quite fit the bill.”

  “So maybe we’re looking at some kind of man-made poison. Something new.”

  “It’s possible,” Quincy concedes. “Past couple of years, we’ve been seeing novel strings of synthetic alkaloids and toxins coming out of Chinese labs—stuff that would give whoever was behind Yasser Arafat’s death a real run for their money.”

  He removes his tortoise-shell glasses and shakes his head in pity.

  “Whatever it was…these two both died awful deaths. The constriction of their airways. The wild spasms of every muscle fiber. The burst blood vessels in their necks and eyes. Whoever slipped ’em their fatal elixir didn’t just want ’em to die. They wanted ’em to suffer. Like hell. And they sure as shit did.”

  Caleb absorbs that for a moment, affected by the pure callousness of the double murder, the killer’s cruelty.

  But that might also prove to be a critical clue. It could speak to the killer’s relationship to the victims—personal—and his motive—revenge.

  Caleb’s mind kicks into gear. He tries to retrace his steps last night at Patsy’s restaurant, tries to think back to all the people he observed and spoke with.

  “Must have been an inside job,” he mumbles. It’s the only theory that makes sense. But it troubles him, too. It might mean somebody on Patsy’s staff committed the murders, and Caleb knows his old flame has a knack for hiring only the very best.

  But that could mean…Patsy might have done it herself.

  No. That’s impossible.

  Before Caleb can fret any further, he notices Quincy eyeing the grease-stained brown bag he’s holding containing those homemade jalapeño-raisin biscuits.

  “How about one more for the road, Killer Chef?” Quincy asks with a smile.

  Caleb might be feeling frustrated, but he’s also feeling generous. He hands his friend the entire sack.

  He’s got himself a real killer to find.

  Chapter 10

  Patsy’s doesn’t officially open for another ninety minutes, so Caleb wager
s that its namesake probably won’t show up for at least thirty. Which means he’ll have a bit of time to do some investigating on his own before Patsy gets in his hair.

  As he parks his Charger in front of the restaurant, Caleb remembers that Mary Ellen Cantrell—a sassy, seventy-something hostess who’s worked the busy lunch shift at Patsy’s for years—keeps the main entrance dead-bolted until 11:30 a.m. on the dot. She’s the type who wouldn’t even let her own mother step inside early.

  Caleb could flash his badge and make her open up, of course, but he doesn’t want to disrupt or irritate any of the staff more than he has to. So instead he heads around to the back alley and slips in through the kitchen’s rear door, finding it propped ajar with an empty wine crate.

  “You’re back pretty early, Detective.”

  Helen Broussard, a spunky young prep cook with skin the color of a New Orleans–style iced coffee with chicory and cream, is mashing and seasoning a small mountain of blanched redskin potatoes.

  “I could say the same about you,” Caleb replies. Helen was one of the many kitchen employees he spoke with late last night—and here she is the next morning, hard at work.

  “The only people in this town with worse hours than cops are chefs,” she quips.

  “Great,” Caleb says. “I’m both. How’s the staff holding up?”

  “Hangin’ in, I suppose,” Helen answers. “Most of us are just trying to keep our heads down and make the very best food we can. You know what I’m saying?”

  Caleb certainly does.

  As he moves through the kitchen, where the mood is palpably tense, Caleb nods hello to some of the other prep cooks and dishwashers he remembers speaking to last night. It’s a conscious effort to gain trust and put a friendly face on the not-always-so-friendly New Orleans Police Department.

  But he’s also looking for anything out of the ordinary. The fact is, any one of these folks could be the killer he’s after.

  Caleb passes briefly through the restaurant’s mostly empty main dining room before heading down a hall toward Patsy’s office. Since she has a tendency to misplace her keys, Patsy installed a keypad in place of a traditional lock. And Caleb—who used to sometimes sneak into her office to surprise her for a midday romp—still remembers the code. He enters it and steps inside.

  He takes a seat at Patsy’s messy desk behind her dusty computer monitor. He clicks open EverWatch, the program she uses to record and manage her restaurant’s multiple security cameras. Caleb is well aware that an NOPD forensic tech has already copied all the relevant footage onto an external hard drive for detailed examination back at headquarters. But Caleb wants to see it now for himself.

  Pulling up numerous split-screen angles at once of both the dining room and kitchen, he decides to start with the moment of Marty and Elizabeth’s deaths.

  Just as witnesses said, the two victims appeared to begin choking and gasping more or less simultaneously. They clutched their throats in terror. They jerked and shuddered uncontrollably. Even if Quincy hadn’t told him that the victims died in excruciating pain, the video makes it obvious. A few diners and waitstaff can be seen hurrying over to the couple’s table and trying desperately to help—but they’re too late. Turning blue in the face, Marty and Elizabeth suddenly become stiff, then collapse to the ground.

  Caleb takes the briefest moment to compose himself after witnessing the disturbing scene, then starts to rewind the footage, working backward.

  He watches the couple chatting, intimate and relaxed, while sipping Chardonnay and slurping oysters Rockefeller. The courses before were colorful jambalaya and juicy, perfectly pink Chateaubriand steak, two of Patsy’s specialties.

  Caleb realizes his mouth is starting to water at the sight of such a feast—despite the knowledge that one of those dishes was probably laced with a synthetic poison.

  Referring back to his interview notes, he tries to pay particular attention to the staff members who handled and prepared the couple’s food. Unfortunately, that seems to be just about everybody on the payroll.

  Laurel Peck, a bubbly twenty-something waitress with a long mane of golden curls, was Marty and Elizabeth’s primary server. She took their orders, brought their waters and a few dishes, and checked on them throughout the evening.

  Jimmy LeBeauf, another young server with the grit and good looks of the struggling young actor Caleb knows him to be, also waited on the victims, dropping off their first-course plates and refilling their wine glasses.

  The bottle of wine itself was delivered and uncorked by Shelby Jemison, Patsy’s snooty sommelier, wearing a crisp three-piece suit. And the couple’s plates were bussed by longtime busboy Michael Lopez.

  In other words, Caleb can’t narrow down the suspects one bit.

  Inside the kitchen, it all gets even messier. Caleb counts nine different sous-chefs and prep cooks, including Patsy herself, who helped prepare or plate one or more elements of Marty and Elizabeth’s lavish dinner.

  Despite his careful scrutiny, Caleb doesn’t spot anything obviously fishy. No one palming a tiny vial or sprinkling a plate with a funny-looking “spice.” The detective’s only hope is that the digital forensic team, who will be combing through the footage in closer detail, might catch something he missed.

  Until then, Caleb decides to speak with the two main servers again. It’s as good a place to start as any.

  Chapter 11

  Caleb reenters the main dining room, which has a few more staff members buzzing around inside now, preparing for the lunchtime rush. He spots Mary Ellen wiping down a stack of menus at the hostess station.

  “Hi there, Mary Ellen. I don’t think I saw you last night, did I?”

  “No, sir,” she answers. “I’d been off for a few hours already. It was date night with my hunk of a husband.” She peers over her glasses at him and subtly pushes her ample cleavage together. “By the time all this hell broke loose, we were sitting in our Jacuzzi, sipping champagne—”

  “All right then,” Caleb says, cutting the older woman off before she shares any more unnecessary details about her sex life. “You seen Jimmy or Laurel around?”

  Mary Ellen nods to a booth on the other side of the dining room. Laurel and Jimmy are seated together, but they aren’t talking. She’s folding cloth napkins; he’s refilling salt shakers with a small green funnel.

  Both look haunted.

  “Morning, guys,” Caleb says soberly, sliding a chair up to the booth and sitting in it backward.

  The two young servers barely mumble a response. They’re clearly still shaken from yesterday’s events and their up-close and personal role in it all.

  “Listen,” Caleb continues. “I won’t pretend to know how y’all are feeling. But I won’t sugarcoat the facts, either. Like I said last night, one of you could have served Mr. Feldman and Ms. Keating the food or drink that killed them. If you can think of anything you didn’t already tell me, anything unusual you saw, anything out of the ordinary—”

  “How could this happen?” Laurel suddenly exclaims. “They were just two nice, ordinary people! Who could do a thing like that?” She stops folding the thick napkin in her hands and dabs her eyes with it.

  Jimmy the actor does a better job of hiding his emotions, but the shock is clearly still raw for him, too.

  “I left Los Angeles and came back here because that city was nuts,” he says. “Too unpredictable and dangerous. And now this happens. I still can’t believe it.”

  Caleb studies the handsome young man for a moment. Is he hiding something? Or is Caleb—not usually the jealous type—just the tiniest bit envious of Jimmy’s youth and good looks? Not that he’d ever show it, of course. But his own advancing age, the occasional gray hair, the inevitable march of time—Caleb thinks about these things more than he’d like to admit. He glances at the salt shakers lined up on the table, each with a few grains of rice at the bottom to help soak up moisture and keep the contents fresh. Caleb wishes such a thing existed for human beings.


  “What about the couple themselves, then?” he asks. “Did they say anything unusual? Did you recognize them?”

  “I’d waited on them before, yeah,” says Jimmy. “Only, like, once or twice. She knew her way around the menu and liked to order for them. He didn’t seem to mind. They seemed a little boring, to tell you the truth. But totally normal.”

  Sensing he won’t get much more out of this interview, Caleb stands.

  “Thanks for your time. I gave y’all my card last night. Call right away if you think of anything, no matter how small or insignificant it might seem. Okay?”

  The two servers nod. Caleb starts to head off—when Laurel gets an idea.

  “Detective, do you think it might be…I don’t know, a competitor?”

  “A competitor?”

  “Yeah. Maybe somebody’s out to get Patsy. Put us out of business. Maybe it had nothing to do with that couple at all. They were just…wrong place, wrong time. Plenty of people in the Quarter must be jealous of Patsy’s success, right?”

  “Big difference between jealousy and murder,” says JD, the restaurant’s head chef. He’s walking toward the booth carrying two cups of coffee and has overheard the tail end of the conversation. He hands Caleb one of the steaming mugs. “Ain’t that right, Detective?”

  “Of course,” Caleb says, taking the beverage gratefully and blowing on the surface of the thick, almost velvety-smooth cappuccino. “But right now, it’s no worse a theory than any other. Nothing’s off the table.”

  But JD isn’t satisfied. “‘Competitor,’” he says, shaking his head. “Hell, you’re one of our competitors, Killer Chef. Marlene, too. Ever think about that?”

  His ex-wife and business partner a murderer? No, that hasn’t exactly crossed Caleb’s mind. But he hears, loud and clear, the point JD is trying to make.

  “Does Patsy have any enemies?” he asks. “And I don’t mean angry food bloggers. Real ones, who might want to do this establishment—or her—actual harm.”