Luc smiled. Maybe Sylvie wasn’t as dumb as he’d thought.
On second thought, Luc concluded a half hour later, Sylvie Fontaine was the dumbest broad this side of the Mississippi.
Her home was a god-awful mess. Drawers pulled out and emptied, their contents tossed here and there. Paintings ripped off the walls. Oriental carpets flipped up. Chair and sofa cushions lifted off and slitted, their stuffing pulled out.
Dumb, dumb, dumb! How could she have left her front door unlocked? Well, maybe it had been unlocked by the vandals once they’d entered. But that didn’t excuse her other dumb mistakes. How could a single woman live in a town house with first-floor French doors? All that glass was an open invitation to a burglar, as evidenced by the broken panes he’d seen first thing on entering her home. Hadn’t she ever heard of an alarm system? Or a guard dog?
Good thing she wasn’t home, or the person who’d broken into her home might have done more than ransack the place. Obviously the burglars were out for something other than loot, or they would have taken the television, or VCR. Hell, there were enough silver doodads and fine antiques scattered about the place to fill a small museum. That upended porcelain umbrella stand in the hallway, for instance. It looked like one of those Chinese thingamajigs, So-sue-me or some such name, that they sold in the French Quarter antique shops for a gazillion dollars.
What could the perps have been searching for?
Sylvie’s love potion? he speculated to himself with a groan of incredulity.
It seemed too ludicrous to be true, but hadn’t Henderson hinted that even his conservative business enterprise was entertaining the possibility of marketing the love potion? Well, not so ludicrous when you considered the huge profits Pfizer had made with Viagra.
But who would be anxious enough to break into a lab and a woman’s apartment for the formula? Industrial espionage agents? Reporters out for a scoop? Family members seeking to prevent a scandal? The FDA?
Something caught his attention then. A slight motion near the still-open front door. When he got there, though, all he saw rushing down the street was the back of a woman, clothed all in black, from turbanned head to ankle-length gown. Looking down, he saw something usually witnessed these days only in the deepest bayous… a gris-gris, of all things. The small gris-gris or conjo bag was attached to a voodoo curse doll, which wore a white lab coat and looked like a dark-haired Martha Stewart.
It was one thing for Lucien LeDeux to be after Sylvie Fontaine’s butt. The press, her family, business spies, and every government agency in the Washington Beltway might pose a threat. But voodoo hoodoos were a whole other territory.
Yep, Sylvie Fontaine was in big, big trouble.
The first thing Sylvie noticed when she arrived home Monday afternoon was the open doorway to her town house.
The second thing she noticed was the mess. Someone had broken into her home and savaged it. She leaned down and picked up a closed umbrella on the hall floor.
Stepping quietly into the living room, she set her Happy Meal container on the floor, then noticed a third thing… Lucien LeDeux.
She’d been gone since yesterday evening after giving up on responding to the numerous phone calls that kept coming in on her answering machine. Blanche had offered her the use of her parents’ summer home near Avery Island. After four straight hours of sightseeing at the famous bird sanctuary, hearing every birdsong imaginable, Sylvie had decided it was time to hightail it home and face her own music.
Little did she know she’d be confronted by her own personal vulture first thing. Luc stood on the other side of the room with his back to her, casually listening to the messages on her answering machine. The nerve of the dolt!
“Ms. Fontaine, this is Fred Daltry at the Food and Drug Administration. Please give me a call immediately. We need to talk about this… ahem, uh, love potion you’ve invented. Are you aware of FDA regulations regarding substances which are sold as medicinal products? Now, if this is just a vitamin supplement, or herb… well, really, I can’t explain over the phone. We need to talk. My number is…”