Page 56 of Knife in the Back (New Orleans #4)

Jimmy glared at his pregnant wife. “You fucking whore. You want to send me to prison? I’ll make sure you’re destitute. You won’t see a penny of my money.” His hands had balled into fists and Burke had a bad feeling that Jimmy would be hitting McKenzie right now if he and Val weren’t in the room.

“I’m not a cop,” Burke reminded Jimmy, hoping to calm him down. “I’m just a PI looking to close a case.”

Jimmy turned his fury on Burke. “For the woman you’re fucking.”

“Whoa.” Burke held up his hands. “I assume you saw the photo online.”

“He has a Google Alert set up for her name,” McKenzie supplied bitterly. “Any news on Naomi comes to him right away.”

Jimmy closed his eyes. “Shut. Up.”

“I kissed her,” Burke said. “I’m not ashamed of it. But anything else isn’t your business, Mr.Haywood. You lost that right when you cheated on her. When you lied about her under oath. So put your fists away. They might work on your wives, but they won’t work on me.”

Jimmy’s eyes opened and in them Burke saw defeat. Jimmy was a bully and once confronted by someone bigger, he backed down.

“You’re not a cop anymore, but you were one. You’ll go straight to them and tell them everything,” Jimmy accused.

“They won’t hear any of this from me. It’s possible that they’ll follow the money and end up on your doorstep, but it won’t be because of my visit today.”

Jimmy didn’t look convinced. “Then why are you here?”

“Because Naomi was devastated when she learned that your new wife and Winnifred Timms were good friends. She thought that the two of you had been involved in setting her up to go to prison. At least I can tell her that yours was a crime of opportunity, not planning.”

Jimmy swallowed. “Okay.”

“And—” Burke started, but Jimmy interrupted with a snarl.

“Of course there’s an ‘and.’ You’re going to shake me down.”

“No. But I do want you to give Naomi full custody. That’s the price for my silence.”

Jimmy glared at him. “No.”

“Do it,” McKenzie ordered. “He’s sixteen, for God’s sake. He’ll only be home for another two years anyway.”

Jimmy slowly turned to stare at her. “What? No. At least another six. He’s got four years of college.”

“Somewhere else,” McKenzie snapped. “You’ve got a new family now. Our family. We’re running out of room for our real kids. Everett’s just taking up space and eating us out of house and home.”

Jimmy’s eyes widened, like he was seeing her for the first time. “Ev said you’d be happy that he was gone.”

“Well, Ev is right. I’m not going to lose everything because you won’t give him to your bitch ex-wife.” She gave Burke a defiant look. “Tell Naomi that Jimmy agrees to give her full custody. It won’t matter. Everett hates her.”

Thanks to you two. “Okay. Our agreement is set. I’d like to know a few more things. Mrs.Haywood, did you ever meet Winnifred’s boss? The one who wanted Naomi disgraced?”

Was it Gaffney or Cresswell?

“No. She lived with him. That’s all I knew.”

“Where?”

“She had a condo on Poydras.”

The condo where Naomi had seen Winnifred with the older man. Amanda Cresswell had seen her husband there with Winnifred as well. “Do you remember which unit?”

“It was on the third floor. I don’t remember the number.”

“Okay. Any other residences that she mentioned?”

Like the place they were keeping teenagers?

“No. Just the condo.”

“Did you ever go there?” Burke asked.

“Once. She wouldn’t let me visit. Said the guy she lived with wouldn’t like it. We stopped there once because she’d ruined her clothes and needed to change. But all the other times, she came here.”

“Did you meet anyone else at the condo?” Burke pressed. “And let me remind you that Winnifred Timms is involved in trafficking teenagers for sex. And that, had his abductors been successful, Everett might have ended up in their clutches.”

Jimmy blanched. “Oh my God.”

McKenzie blinked, seeming to have forgotten that detail.

“Oh, right. No, I didn’t meet—” She cut herself off.

“I met her boyfriend’s assistant. Just for a second.

He was furious that I was there, so I backed out of the room fast and waited by the front door.

He yelled at Winnie about bringing a friend over, that she knew that wasn’t allowed. ”

“Did you notice anything about him?”

“Not his face. He was so angry that I kept my head down. But I saw his clothes. He had good taste. Nice suit. Really nice shoes. He’d taken them off next to the front door.

” She made a face. “The condo had white carpet, so everyone took off their shoes. Winnie and I hadn’t and he yelled at her about that, too. ”

Shoes, once again. Susan Snyder had mentioned that the big boss’s assistant had really nice shoes. “Can you describe the shoes?”

“Italian leather. Brown. Looked hand stitched. Expensive. But I didn’t know the brand. Sorry.”

“No, that’s very helpful.”

McKenzie exhaled quietly. “We didn’t know about the sex trafficking. We never would have gotten involved in that. Please believe us.”

Burke just gave her a nod. He wasn’t sure whether he believed her or not.

“If you want to catch Winnie, I can call her,” McKenzie offered. “I can arrange a meeting. That way, if the police do follow the paper trail to us, you can tell them that we were helpful.”

“That’s very generous,” Burke said, then came to his feet. “But not necessary.”

Jimmy slowly rose, his chin lifting angrily. “All of this was a lie?”

“No, sir,” Burke said quietly. “I told you that I’d witnessed one of Gaffney’s people being killed. That was Winnifred.”

McKenzie gasped. “Winnie’s dead?”

“She is, ma’am. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you.” Except Burke wasn’t sorry at all, even when McKenzie began to wail her grief. “We’ll see ourselves out.”

—

The Quarter, New Orleans, Louisiana

Wednesday, February 26, 6:20 p.m.

“Thanks, Mom.” Naomi looked up from the printouts she’d been reviewing to take the ibuprofen her mother offered. “I’m fine,” she said to the concerned faces watching her from where they sat in Burke’s study. “I hit my head on that pickup truck and I have a headache. Tell them, Mom.”

Molly, Antoine, and Lucien turned to Ruthanne.

“She just has a bump,” Ruthanne confirmed. “But I suspect trying to read that small print isn’t helping.”

It was true. There were pages of the evidence Naomi had processed while working for the NOPD. Antoine had narrowed it down to the year before her arrest and to evidence relating to Gaffney and/or Cresswell, but there were still hundreds of items.

She glanced up at the new whiteboard, purchased by Molly, of course. The woman did like her whiteboards.

On it was the other reason for Naomi’s headache. In the middle of the new board, written in giant all-caps with a red marker, was WHY NAOMI?

Molly was an incredibly focused woman. Naomi couldn’t fault her, of course. It was an important question.

Wearily, she flipped to the next page in the stack. “There has to be a better way than this.”

She sounded irritable and fractious, she knew. But this was an overwhelming task and she was worried about Burke. He’d headed off for his errands and they hadn’t heard from him in over an hour. He was with Val, so Naomi knew he was as safe as he could be, but she still worried.

“Maybe we should take a break.”

The words came from the back corner of Burke’s study, where Phin’s wife Cora sat in a chair with her feet propped on an ottoman and one of Antoine’s laptops perched on her pregnant stomach. Phin had slid pillows behind her back and under her legs, but she still looked incredibly uncomfortable.

Cora struggled out of the chair and pressed her fists into her lower back. “I texted Phin for snacks. That might help with your headache, Naomi.”

Grimacing, Cora leaned against the sofa where Naomi sat with her mother. “I’m fine, Antoine,” she insisted before the man could ask. “The kid’s kicking, that’s all.”

Naomi remembered those days. She also remembered that Jimmy had been so attentive during her pregnancy. The memory of his tender care had been tarnished by the knowledge that he’d manipulated the first pregnancy and tried to manipulate her into another.

She loved Everett. She loved being his mother. She might have even wanted another child at some point, but not because Jimmy had tricked her into it. That was the part that hurt.

She thought about his new wife, already on baby number three. Which made her wonder about McKenzie’s relationship with Winnifred Timms.

Nobody in this small group was talking about her, and they had deftly changed the subject when Naomi had asked.

Which made her wonder if talking to McKenzie had been one of Burke’s errands.

Phin arrived then, his dog at his side. Phin carried a tray filled with all kinds of snacks, offering it first to Cora, who just shook her head and pointed to Naomi. “She needs it more than the rest of us.”

Which made Naomi roll her eyes, although the food did help. Her headache lessened, but the pages of evidence still overwhelmed.

“We do need to find another way. I’m going to miss the one tree we’re looking for in the forest of all this.” Naomi pointed to the stack. “Maybe we can work on some of the other questions.”

“No,” Molly said apologetically. “This is one of the two things we keep dancing around. Why you?”

“What’s the second thing?” Naomi asked, grasping at straws.

“Gaffney.” Molly’s expression was grim. “We never approached him with questions and now he’s gone.”

“What do you mean, he’s gone?” Naomi asked, the headache regaining ground.

“André said they’ve checked his house,” Molly said, “and all the places he might go after you talked to Susan in the hospital. He’s disappeared.”

Naomi took a brownie from the tray because chocolate really did help stress. She’d missed chocolate during her years in prison.

“What about anyone from PIB who Gaffney might have been paying?” she asked.