Chapter 1
ALMOST FAT TUESDAY
"Remember this. Every precious thing I lose, you will lose
two."
The man was a good target.
Tall, six-five. Wavy blond hair that shined almost red in
the filtered February sunlight. Ivory skin that refused to
tan. Green eyes that danced to the beat of every melody
that radiated from every tavern on every street corner in
the always-tawdry Quarter. Even during a crowded lunch
hour in the most congested part of New Orleans, you could
spot him a block away, his head bobbing above the masses.
On the eve of Fat Tuesday the Quarter was flush with
tourists, and each of them was flush with anticipation of
the debauched revelry that would only accelerate as the
Monday before stretched into the Tuesday of, as almost-
here became Mardi Gras.
The other man, the one with the gun, knew that in a crowd
like this one he would have made a rotten target. He was
five-eight with his sneakers on. What hair remained on his
head was on the dark side of brown. His creeping baldness
didn't matter much to him, though, because the Saints cap
he was wearing shielded his scalp from the sun as
effectively as the distinctive steel-rimmed Ray-Bans
shaded his eyes. The khakis and navy-striped sweater he
was wearing had been chosen because they comprised the de
facto uniform-of-the-day among the male revelers wandering
to join the crowds on Bourbon Street.
The late morning had turned mild, and the man's
windbreaker was draped over his right hand and arm,
totally disguising the barrel of his Ruger Mark II as well
as the additional length of the stubby suppressor. His
left hand was shoved deep in the pocket of his khakis. He
had been briefedon the tall man's destination in advance
and kept his distance as he followed him. At the
intersection where Bienville crossed Royal the man with
the silenced .22 would begin to close the gap on the man
without one. That would give the assassin a little over a
block to get close enough to do his job.
The tall, blond man had come from his office near City
Hall. His wife had wanted to meet him downtown and
accompany him to the restaurant. But he'd declined her
offer. He'd made prior arrangements to stop on his way to
their lunch date at an antique store on Royal to pick up a
nineteenth-century cameo he knew his wife had been
coveting. The cameo was a surprise for their anniversary.
The errand on Royal hadn't taken the man long, though, and
he was turning the corner from Bienville onto Bourbon ten
minutes before he was scheduled to rendezvous with his
wife. With an athlete's grace and a large man's strides,
he dodged slothful tourists with their to-go cup
hurricanes and quickly covered the territory to the
entrance of Galatoire's. Briefly he scanned the sidewalk
and the teeming street in front of the restaurant. His
wife wasn't there. He didn't even consider looking for her
inside: Kirsten had a thing about sitting alone in
restaurants. He hoped she wouldn't be too late; the line
for lunch at one of New Orleans legendary eateries was
already growing.
They had been in New Orleans for six years and this would
mark the sixth time that they had celebrated their
anniversary at Galatoire's. He was the one who insisted on
returning year after year. She would have preferred going
to a restaurant that actually took reservations. But he
prevailed. He was the keeper of the traditions in the
family. He was the romantic.
The man with the windbreaker on his arm window-shopped two
doors down from Galatoire's, using the storefront glass to
reflect the position of his prey. He didn't worry about
being spotted. There was no reason that anyone would focus
on him. He was a middle-aged guy loitering on Bourbon
Street just before lunch hour on the eve of Mardi Gras.
One, literally, of thousands. Finally, the beeper in his
pocket vibrated. With his fingertip he stilled it and
began to scan the street for Kirsten's arrival. His
partner up the street had paged him from a cell phone. The
page was his signal that she was approaching.
She, too, would have been a good target. Like her husband,
Kirsten was tall. And she flaunted it. Two-inch heels took
her above six feet, and the skirt of her suit was cut
narrowly to accentuate her height. The jacket was tailored
to pinch her waist and highlight her hips. Her hair was
every bit as blond as her husband's although the sunlight
reflected no red. Kirsten was golden, from head to toe.
She carried a small gift box, elaborately wrapped. In it
was a key to a suite at the nearby Windsor Court Hotel and
a scroll with a wonderfully detailed list that spelled out
all the erotic things she planned to do to her husband's
lean body between check-in that evening and dawn the next
day. She'd had the list drawn on parchment by a friend who
was a calligrapher.
The man with the windbreaker spotted Kirsten down the
block. As he had been told to expect, she was approaching
down Bourbon from Canal. A moment later her husband
spotted her, too, but he was reluctant to leave his place
in line at Galatoire's. He waved. She waved back. Her
smile was electric.
The man with the windbreaker on his arm moved closer to
the tall blond man, simultaneously lifting his left hand
from his pocket and placing it below the jacket. His right
hand was now free. He stuffed it into the pocket of his
trousers at the same moment he spotted his partner moving
into position behind the woman.
Timing was everything. That's what he'd been told. This
wasn't just about the hit; it was also about the timing.
Timing was everything.
Kirsten Lord was fifty feet away when the man with the
windbreaker stepped into position no more than two yards
to the left of her husband, Robert. The position the man
took was slightly back from Robert's left shoulder.
Kirsten dodged tourists and closed the distance between
herself and her husband to twenty feet. Impossibly, her
smile seemed to grow brighter.
The man raised his left arm, the one shielded by the
windbreaker, so that it extended across his chest. Below
the jacket, the barrel of the sound suppressor was now
pointing up at a forty-five-degree angle toward his right
shoulder.
Kirsten's eyes left her husband's for only an instant,
just barely long enough for her to notice the small man
with his oddly held windbreaker. She met the man's eyes as
they danced from her to Robert and back. She noticed the
awkward way he was holding his arm, perceived the evil in
his grin, and in a flash, she processed the peril that the
man presented. The bright smile she was wearing for her
husband left her face as though she'd been slapped. The
gaily-decorated box flew from her hand. Instinctively, her
tongue found the roof of her mouth and the beginnings of a
horrified "No" left her lips just as the man in the Saints
cap pivoted his hand and wrist at the elbow so that his
silenced weapon emerged from below his jacket.
Out toward Robert Lord's head.
With the voices from the throngs on the street mixing with
the music coming from the myriad clubs mixing with the
rest of Kirsten Lord's plaintive "NOOOOO," the hushed
shots from the silenced pistol were barely discernible,
even to Kirsten. She thought they sounded more like arrows
than bullets. Another witness later described them as two
drumbeats.
Both shots found their marks. The first slug entered
Robert's head just below his ear, the second higher, in
his cranium. The load in the Ruger was .22 caliber. The
slugs possessed neither the mass nor the velocity to find
their way back out of Robert Lord's head after they
pierced his skull. No grisly hunks of cranial bone
cascaded against the plate glass of Galatoire's front
window. No bloody gray matter fouled the clothes of the
locals and tourists standing in line for lunch. Instead,
the two slugs banged around inside Robert Lord's head,
mixing the contents of his skull the way a ball bearing
blends the contents of a can of spray paint.
The hit was supposed to be clean. And it was.
The timing was supposed to be perfect. And it was.
Kirsten fell to her knees at Robert's side just as his
legs were collapsing below him. One of the two shell
casings was still dancing on the concrete, finally coming
to rest near the crook of Robert's neck. Kirsten seemed
oblivious to any danger she might be in. No one around her
seemed to be aware that her husband had just been shot.
She no longer recalls what she said to the strangers who
stared down at her with shock and pity on their faces.
When she looked up to identify the shooter, to confront
the shooter, to accept the next bullet, he was gone. There
was no way she would have known it, but by then his Saints
cap was off his head, his pager was down a sewer, his
sunglasses were off his eyes and he was around the corner,
walking placidly down Bienville toward Dauphine. That's
where the third member of the team was waiting with a car.
The band in the bar on the corner was playing some better-
than-average Zydeco, and he decided that the longer he was
in New Orleans the more he liked it.
His instructions had been to make sure that the lady saw
the hit. He knew he'd done well.
She'd seen the hit. No doubt about it.
Chapter 2
"Remember this," he'd said, pointing at me over the
defense table. "Every precious thing I lose, you will lose
two."
Less than a month after they slid my husband Robert's body
into the only empty slot left in his family's tomb in the
Garden District's Lafayette Cemetery in New Orleans, I
packed up my daughter and moved what remained of our life
north to a little town called Slaughter, which was
bisected by Highway 19 about halfway between Baton Rouge
and the Mississippi state line.
We made the move in the middle of the night. In homage to
my paranoia I'd driven all the way to Picayune,
Mississippi, before I backtracked into Louisiana and
charged north to Slaughter. My old boss in New Orleans,
the district attorney, had arranged for a Louisiana State
Trooper to tail my car all the way to Picayune and then
all the way back as far as Baton Rouge. I bought the
trooper a cup of coffee at a truck stop outside Baton
Rouge, and he finished two pieces of pie, one apple, one
lemon meringue, before I allowed myself to be convinced
that we had not been followed.
Somewhere between the outskirts of Baton Rouge and the
town limits of Slaughter, I stopped calling myself Kirsten
Lord and started calling myself Katherine Shaw. I chose
the name at my husband's funeral. The inspiration? The
name was written in pencil inside the prayer book that was
in front of me in the pew at the church. "Katherine Shaw"
it read. The name was written in a child's hand, neatly,
in pencil, and I prayed that the Katherine Shaw who'd sat
in that pew and sung the hymns in that church and who had
spoken the prayers wouldn't mind that we now shared her
name as we had shared that holy book.
Trying to make the urgent move to a new town a game to my
ever-cool daughter, I'd allowed her to choose her own new
name, too. Her class in school had been studying the
Olympic Games in Sydney, so my daughter was now Matilda. I
wasn't fond of the name but consoled myself with my glee
that her class hadn't been studying the Nagano Games or
Salt Lake City.
Together, Matilda and I danced off to
Slaughter. . . “You'll come a-waltzing Matilda with
me. . . ."
When I agreed to go into what I told myself was temporary
hiding under the protection of the State of Louisiana, one
of the reasons I'd chosen to move to Slaughter for our new
home was because it was the kind of town where strangers
were noticed. Where unfamiliar cars earned a second
glance. Despite my still raw grief over Robert's death I
did everything I could to befriend our neighbors and I
quickly became known as the mother who watched her
daughter enter school each morning and who was waiting
outside the door ten minutes before the end of classes
each afternoon. The routine I followed didn't vary despite
the fact that the upstairs window of the house that I was
renting had a pretty good view of the front door of the
school. For my state of mind those days, a pretty good
view wasn't good enough. A half-block away was a half-
block too far.
School ended for Matilda on a much-too-sultry-for-early-
June day. But the kids didn't notice the heat. They were
energized and intoxicated by the prospect of their
upcoming summer of freedom.
Matilda was planning to go home from school with a friend,
the first social invitation she'd received since becoming
the new kid in class so late in the school year. Upon
learning of her plans, I invited the new friend's mother
over for coffee and sprinkled the conversation with a
manufactured concern that my estranged husband might try
to abduct Matilda. A custody dispute, I implied. The new
friend's mother said not-to-worry, she'd keep a close eye
on the kids. She pressed for some dirt about my estranged
husband and as I struggled to invent details to satiate
her I wished I'd come up with a different story.
Eight, almost nine-year-old Matilda sensed my apprehension
about her visit to her new friend's house and informed me
that she could walk all the way there without a chaperone.
"Really," I said, feigning surprise, though I'd expected
to hear words a lot like those from my much-too-
independent daughter.
"You won't wait for me outside school?"
I raised a hand in honor and stated, "I promise."
"Mom, you promise?" There was a time in the not-too-
distant-past that she stomped a foot every time she used
that tone of voice.
I asked, "Will you call me when you two get to your
friend's house?"
"Do I have to?"
"Yes, you do."
"Then I will."
"Matilda, you promise?"
"Mom."
The phone rang at eighteen minutes past three on that last
day of school. "Hi, Mom," said Matilda. "We're having
lemonade and those little cookies just like the ones that
Grandma used to make. With the jam in the
middle?" "Grandma" was my mother. She'd died the previous
April. My unfinished grief over her death had already been
trampled over by the brutal pain I felt trying to absorb
the responsibility and loss I felt over Robert's murder.
Copyright 2002 by Stephen White