Alligator Moon Read online

  Praise for

  JOANNA WAYNE

  “Joanna Wayne masterfully weaves a story

  of dark secrets and unforgettable evil.”

  —USA TODAY bestselling author Karen Young

  on Alligator Moon

  “Lose yourself and your heart in the sultry

  Cajun setting Joanna Wayne brings to life

  in Alligator Moon.”

  —reader favorite Judy Christenberry

  “Wayne creates compelling relationships and

  intricately plotted suspense that will keep readers

  guessing in this page-turning, heart-pounding read.”

  —Romantic Times on Harlequin Intrigue novel

  Attempted Matrimony

  Dear Reader,

  Welcome to the sultry world of south Louisiana. As a lifelong Louisiana resident, I’ve always loved the romance and mystery associated with the bayou country and have been fascinated with the lore of the Cajun people. That’s why when I got the idea for Alligator Moon, I knew I had to write the book. It’s more than a story of suspense and romance—it’s a journey into a world where alligators slither through murky bayou waters and passion rules the hearts and minds of the citizens.

  This is John Robicheaux and Cassie Havelin’s story, but it’s much more than that. It’s also the story of how decent people can become so caught up in a diabolical lie that it destroys them. But mostly it’s a story of suspense that entangles the hero and heroine until they are forced to open old wounds and give themselves a chance to love again.

  I love to hear from readers. Please visit my Web site at www.joannawayne.com. Or drop me a line at [email protected]. Let me know if you’d like to receive my electronic newsletter.

  Happy reading,

  JOANNA WAYNE

  Alligator Moon

  JOANNA WAYNE

  is a multipublished, award-winning, bestselling author known for her cutting-edge romantic suspense. She lives with her husband just outside the steamy, sultry city of New Orleans, Louisiana, near the bayou country that was the inspiration and setting for Alligator Moon. A narrow bayou runs behind her house and most afternoons you can find her on the back patio, a glass of iced tea in hand, her fingers typing away on her laptop computer, enjoying the ducks, turtles, egrets and various other wildlife that share her domain. On rare occasions an alligator has even been spotted swimming by.

  Joanna has always been an avid reader and she claims that writing her novels of romantic suspense was a natural progression from reading them. Not only is the writing exciting and rewarding, but also she loves the research. In the process of gathering material for her novels, she has rounded up cattle by helicopter, gone on trips deep into humid swamps, walked deserted beaches in the moonlight, visited morgues, looked through gritty crime-scene photos and visited FBI headquarters. And those are just a few of her research adventures.

  Writing is more of a passion than a job for Joanna. She loves nothing more than taking a hero and heroine from breath-stealing danger to happily-ever-after. Who could complain about a day like that?

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  DENNIS ROBICHEAUX gave the propofol thirty seconds to work, then leaned over the patient. “Can you hear me, Mrs. Flanders?”

  “Is she fully under?” Angela Dubuisson asked, not looking up from the instruments she was readying for the surgeon.

  “Yeah. They can’t resist my French kiss.”

  “Are we still talking about patients?”

  “Now, boo, you know you can’t believe all that trash they talk by Suzette’s.”

  “That’s not a problem since I don’t hang out in smoky bars that smell like crawfish and grease.”

  “You don’t know what you’re missing.”

  “Sure I do. A bunch of drunks looking for an easy lay.”

  Dennis fit the endotracheal tube down the patient’s throat, slowly, easing it past the relaxed muscles, the task almost second nature to him now.

  Angela pulled the blanket over the patient. “How’s she doing?”

  “All that’s left is to hook her up to Big Blue,” he said, nodding toward the anesthetic machine. Dennis finished sealing the tube so that the patient wouldn’t choke on her own saliva. “Down for the count. Where’s our surgeon and his faithful nurse?”

  As if on cue, the door to the operating room swung open and Dr. Norman Guilliot strode in, his hands still dripping from the sanitizing scrub. Angela became far more animated now that the self-proclaimed king of scalpel makeovers had appeared. She handed him a towel, then helped him into his gown and gloves. Susan Dalton was a step behind the doctor, her blue eyes dancing above her surgery mask.

  “Got Ms. Ginny Lynn all ready for you, Doc,” Dennis announced.

  Dr. Guilliot leaned over the patient and pinched the excess skin beneath her chin, pulling it tight. “In for the works, isn’t she?”

  “Eyelid, face and forehead lift.”

  “Must have a sentimental attachment to the nose,” Dennis said.

  “She just wants to look her best for the glory of God,” Guilliot said, mimicking the patient as he ran a finger under the delicate eye area. Ginny Lynn was the wife of the Reverend Evan Flanders, a TV evangelist who’d become a household word in the New Orleans area.

  Dr. Guilliot lifted the fatty tissue above the lid, pinching and pulling it away from the eye before beginning the delicate task of marking his incision lines in blue.

  Dennis monitored his machine. “Want me to make the initial incision for you, Doc, since Fellowship Freddie’s off on his minivacation?”

  “No, just stick to giving your Versed cocktails to the patient. The surgery has to be a work of perfection. We can’t have any scars showing when she goes back under the bright glare of fame.”

  “I doubt Frankenstein’s scars would show beneath the makeup she wears,” Susan said.

  “Careful,” Dennis said. “You’re talking about the Lord’s anointed.”

  “What’s the deal with Fellowship Freddie?” Susan asked. “I never see him with a woman. Does he swing the other way?”

  “He’s got a girlfriend,” Dennis said. “A real looker, way too hot for him.”

  “I guess you checked her out,” Guilliot said.

  “Me? Mess around with a friend’s woman? You know me better than that.”

  Easy chatter, the kind you didn’t get in a big city hospital. That was one of the reasons Dennis had jumped at the offer to work with Dr. Guilliot at his private clinic. Not only that, but he and the surgeon got along great. If Guilliot treated him any better, Dennis would expect to be in the will.

  But the deal clincher for accepting the position had been location. The restored plantation house was practically in his backyard, and good Cajun boys like himself didn’t like straying too far from home.

  Angela moved in beside the doctor as he started the procedure. She’d been his tech nurse for twenty years, had come with him sixteen years ago when Dr. Guilliot had left his position as chief of reconstructive surgery at a New Orleans hospital and established the Magnolia Plantation Restorative and Therapeut
ic Center.

  Like any good tech nurse, Angela worked like a seamless extension of the surgeon’s arm. He reached, she was ready with forceps, scalpel, surgery scissors, lighted retractor or lap sponge.

  “How are her vitals?” Dr. Guilliot asked.

  “Blood pressure’s down. Ninety systolic. I’ll drop off on the gasses.” Dennis turned the knobs, making small, precise adjustments. “How’s the new Porsche?” he asked. “Had it full throttle yet?”

  “Close. She’s one sweet piece of dynamics.”

  “How ’bout I take her for the weekend and break her in the rest of the way for you?”

  “Touch that car, and you lose an arm.”

  The chatter continued, from cars to fishing and back again. They were thirty minutes into the operation when Dennis felt the first pangs of apprehension. “Pulse rate is dropping,” he said. “I’m going to inject a vial of ephedrine.”

  “What’s the reading?”

  “Fifty-five.”

  Dennis opened the vial, injected it through the IV line and watched the monitor, confident the ephedrine would kick in and do its job. The seconds ticked away.

  “How we coming?” Guilliot asked without looking up from his work.

  “Pulse and pressure not responding.” Dennis opened another vial of ephedrine and injected it through the IV. “This should take care of it.”

  It didn’t. The numbers continued to slide. Dennis’s hands shook as he tore open the next vial and injected the drug. Still no change. Damn. There was no explanation for this. The woman was healthy. He’d read her chart.

  Susan rounded the operating table, took one look at the monitor and gasped.

  “What the devil’s going on?” Guilliot demanded.

  “Not looking good.”

  “Then do something, Dennis. I’ve got her wide open here, and I’m not losing a patient on the table.”

  Dennis hadn’t prayed in quite a while. It came naturally now, under his breath, interspersed with curses as sweat pooled under his armpits and dripped from his brow.

  Guilliot kept working. “Give me a reading.”

  “She’s full code.”

  “Sonofabitch!”

  Susan moved to Dennis’s elbow. “Stay calm. You can do it. What else do you have?”

  “Calcium gluconate.” He injected the drug. Fragments of his own life flashed in front of him as if he were the one slipping away. The sound of his Puh-paw’s voice singing along to his fiddle music on Saturday nights. The smell of venison frying in the big black skillet. The way Kippie Beaudreaux’s tongue had felt the first time he’d kissed her.

  The past collided with the present, all bucking around inside Dennis while the monitor continued to glare at him, daring him to defy it.

  No easy chatter now. No reassurance. Just deadly silence. He turned to Guilliot. The usually imperturbable surgeon had backed away from the table, jaw clenched, looking totally stunned.

  None of the glory. All of the blame. The role of the anesthetist. Dennis grabbed a vial of bretyllium.

  Too little, too late.

  “Oh, shit!” Angela shoved the instrument cart out of the way, jumped on the black footstool and started pumping on the patient’s chest, hand over hand.

  Finally Guilliot snapped out of his paralysis and took over for Angela, pressing the patient’s heart between the sternum and the spine with quick, steady motions.

  Dennis was so scared, it was all he could do to hold the long needle as he filled it with epinephrine.

  Susan grabbed his arm. “Not intracardiac, Dennis. Not yet.”

  “Get the hell out of the way.” Holding the needle in one hand, he grabbed the edge of the sterile drape with his other and ripped the fabric from the runners.

  Guilliot stopped pumping as Dennis slid the point of the needle under the breast bone. The room felt small. Icy cold. Quiet, as if they’d quit breathing so that the patient could have their breaths.

  They all watched the abnormal rhythm play across the face of the monitor, but Angela said the words out loud. “The tack.”

  Dennis snatched the paddles from the crash cart and stuck them to the patient’s chest. The shock lifted her off the table, but still the monitor screen went blank.

  Asystole.

  Dennis administered the shock again. And again.

  Finally Susan took his arm. “She’s gone, Dennis.”

  “No one loses a cosmetic surgery patient on the table.” Guilliot’s voice boomed across the operating room, as if he were God issuing an eleventh commandment.

  It changed nothing. Ginny Lynn Flanders was dead.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Six months later

  CASSIE HAVELIN PIERSON stared at the sheet of paper. The divorce decree. All that was left of her marriage to Attorney Drake Pierson. She’d have expected the finality of it to be more traumatic, had thought she’d feel anger or pain or maybe even a surge of relief. Instead she felt a kind of numbness, as if the constant onslaught of emotional upheavals over the past year had anesthetized her system to the point that it was unable to respond.

  She tossed the decree into a wire basket on the corner of her desk and went back to pounding keys on her computer. Almost ironic that the next word she typed was the name of her ex-husband, but he was all the news these days—him and his client’s suit against Dr. Norman Guilliot.

  Leave it to Drake to snare the hottest case of the year. Acclaimed plastic surgeon to the wealthy pitted against the best-known TV evangelist in the south. The locals fed on the details like starving piranhas on fresh flesh, but then New Orleanians always loved a good scandal. So did her boss. It sold magazines, and circulation numbers sold advertising.

  The Flanders case had been the hottest news item going for the past six months, even beating out the young woman who’d accused one of the city’s famous athletes of rape. The reverend was on TV every week, proclaiming the gospel according to Flanders and shedding tears over the wife he claimed had been lost to a case of malpractice by the famed Cajun surgeon. And somehow Drake had expedited the trial beyond belief to take advantage of the hype.

  Cassie finished the article, hit the print key and picked up the phone on the corner of her desk to make another stab at reaching her dad in Houston. The president of the United States was probably easier to reach, but then the president didn’t draw nearly the salary Butch Havelin did as CEO of Conner-Marsh Drilling and Exploration.

  She dialed the number and waited.

  “Mr. Havelin’s office. May I help you?”

  “It’s Cassie, Dottie. Is Dad around?”

  “I’m sorry. You just missed him again. Did you try his cell phone?”

  “I did and left a message there, as well.”

  “I’m sure he’ll get back to you soon, but if this is an emergency I might be able to track him down.”

  “No need for that, but thanks for the offer.” She hung up the phone and slid her notes on the Flanders v. Guilliot case into a manila folder.

  “You’re looking glum for a Friday night,” Janie Winston said, stopping by her desk. “Bad day?”

  “No worse than usual.”

  “A few of us are going to Lucy’s for happy hour. Why don’t you join us? You can drink as much as you want and stagger home from there.”

  “Staggering through the warehouse district on a Friday night. Boy, does that sound exciting.”

  “Not only glum but sarcastic. Why do I smell a rat named Drake Pierson behind this mood? What’s he want you to give up now, the sheets off the bed he shared with you?”

  “Too late. I burned those after I found he’d brought the Tulane cheerleader to the townhouse to take her testimony. Besides, Drake is old news.” She reached over, retrieved the decree and handed it to her co-worker.

  “Over and done with. I’d think you’d be celebrating, not sulking. He really is lower than pond scum, you know?”

  “Evan Flanders doesn’t think so.”

  “Evan Flanders has visions of dollar si
gns dancing in his head. So, forget ’em all. Let’s go get a margarita.”

  Cassie was tempted. She almost said yes, then spied the postcard propped against her pencil cup. “Actually I’m going shopping tonight.”

  “Buying something suitable for a hot divorcée?”

  “Could be, or at least for a relaxing vacation far away from this humidity.”

  “Now that’s what I call a divorce party. When are you leaving?”

  “Immediately, I hope, if the airline will let me use my flight credits for the last trip I had to cancel.”

  “Does Ogre Olson know about these plans?”

  “Not yet.”

  “That explains the glum. No way the guy is going to let you leave with the Flanders case going to trial in just two weeks.”

  “Only because he thinks the Pierson name in the byline carries some clout.”

  “You’ll never hear him admit that. Clout might translate to an increase in salary.”

  “No, he’ll use the usual bull. The timing couldn’t be worse for Crescent Connection. I don’t have the time blocked off on the vacation chart. I’m putting the man in a major bind, and…”

  “And you’ll owe him big time,” Janie joined in as they quoted in unison the boss’s last word on everything.

  “So where are you going on this impromptu vacation?”

  “The Greek Islands.”

  “Wow! When you play, you play first-class.”

  “Come with me.”

  “I would in a New York minute if I had a little more money in my vacation fund.”

  “How much do you have?”

  “Somewhere under five dollars. Not even enough to buy a box of assorted condoms for the travel bag.”

  Cassie’s cell phone rang. “Buy something really hot,” Janie said, walking away as Cassie grabbed the phone. “I’ll spring for the condoms.”

  Cassie murmured a hurried hello.

  “Hi, sweetheart.”

  Her dad, finally. “You are one hard man to reach.”

  “Sorry about that. Damn merger’s going to drive me nuts before it’s over and done with.”

  “Don’t you have a merger committee and a VP working on that?”