“I’m on my way. Text me the exact address. Ryder, you have to make me real on this case.”

“I’m on it with my bosses. But it can be tricky. They like it better when you’re hired by a victim’s family, you know.”

“We’ll find something... I... Damn, Ryder. I mean, I know it could be something else, but this...”

“I saw your crime-scene photos from Orlando, and I’m seeing this. Get over here. We’ll figure out the rest soon enough. Want you to see this before...before the bodies are moved,” Ryder said.

Dan left his office, striding out through the reception area that opened out onto the street.

Marleah Darwin, his erstwhile receptionist/secretary/assistant, called out to him. “Dan, Mrs. Lawrence left you a check. She’s overpaying you. I tried to tell her—”

“Later, Marleah,” he said, leaving her shaking her neatly coiffed, graying head and sighing with her usual patience.

His office was in the Central Business District or CBD. The Faubourg Marigny or Marigny neighborhood was the other side of the French Quarter. His car was parked in a garage two blocks away. An Uber or Lyft driver would probably be near, but then he saw a cab approaching. He stepped out in the street and flagged it down.

It would take a few minutes to get across town.

Time to remember the scene he’d been called to in his second year as a detective with the FDLE.

Ryder had referred to the crime-scene photos. Dan didn’t need them. The precursor to what would certainly prove to be a similar scene was indelibly imprinted in his mind. The apartment had been painted in blood. Mrs. Austin, her head caved in, her face unrecognizable, her lower arm severed from her body. Mr. Austin, his lower left calf severed—his head looking like a blood stew filled with raw meat. The niece, Miss Henrietta, so mangled it had taken days for her identity to be firmly established.

The cabbie had an accent. Dan wasn’t sure where he was from. People in New Orleans might be from just about anywhere. It was one of the many cool things about the city of New Orleans. And wherever he had come from, this man now knew this place. He moved out of the CBD and on to Decatur, telling Dan what streets had been closed off that day.

Dan was relieved he’d got a good cabbie.

In minutes, Dan was looking ahead at the street just beyond Rampart and a few blocks down from Esplanade.

Police vehicles and those labeled Crime Scene Investigation sat alongside another vehicle, the wagon from the morgue.

And they weren’t alone.

He saw vans from the major news stations already out, reporters pointing to the house and speculating.