She gave him a hug and said to Tremanty, “See? I told you. He must have visited Virginia thirty-one years ago.”
Tremanty said, “I’ll check with Mom.” To Lucas: “Listen. I’m glad to have you. I’ve heard about you from a couple people in Washington. You’re welcome to everything we’ve got, but you ought to start by following Bob and Rae around the scene in the back.”
“I’ll do that,” Lucas said. “And thanks. I’ll try to help without getting in your way.”
They nodded at each other, and Rae said, “This way . . . Hey! Like your shoes.”
* * *
—
RAE CALLED the back lot a jungle, and it was, but now roped with crime scene tape and new-cut trails. The undergrowth was so heavy that Lucas worried about getting bit above the knee by a snake wrapped around a vine. He’d seen pictures like that—Garden of Eden pictures, with a snake encircling the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
He said that, and Rae said, “Garden of Evil. No good in here.”
Fifty yards back into the jungle, all of them yet un-snakebitten, they found a tall, skinny, weathered man wearing mud-caked white Tyvek coveralls, a baseball hat, and gum boots identical to Lucas’s. He wore a belt over the coveralls, with three holsters, one carrying a .40 caliber Glock, the second a plastic canteen, and the third a Marshalltown trowel.
Bob asked him, “What about six?”
“Doc’s down there taking DNA samples. It’s old, it’s all falling apart, we’re gonna box the skull, we can see some dental work. He says it’s male, for sure. We got one hand, but the flesh is gone, so there won’t be any prints. Barb thinks she’s got seven, by the back lot line, and Dave thinks he has eight. The dogs aren’t indicating, so they may be really old, and there’s so much organic matter on top that they get confused. Whatever, we’ll have to dig them out.”
Rae said to Lucas, “This is Cory Laird, FBI, he does old bodies. Cory, this is the marshal I was telling you about, Lucas Davenport.” They shook, Laird smiling and saying, “Clean hands. We all work with gloves, in case you’re worried. You need the tour?”
“Like to take a look,” Lucas said. “You got IDs on any of the bodies?”
“On two of them. We’re shipping the DNA scans everywhere, seeing if we can pick up the others. We think that most of them come from New Orleans, or the parishes right around New Orleans. We’re looking for relatives of missing people that we think might have been Deese’s targets, so we can cross-check the DNA with them. Deese worked for several different mob guys over the years, some of them are dead, so figuring that out has been complicated. My best bet is, we’ll get all but one. It seems like in these situations, there’s always one you can’t identify.”
Laird led them along the narrow but now well-worn path, and, behind Lucas, Bob said, “Newest body is only about seven or eight months old, a woman named Bailee Wheelwright, nicknamed Bill, who kept company with Rog Smith, who I told you about.”
“The lawyer, bail bondsman, loan shark.”
“Right. She was his best girl for two years, and Tremanty said they were having problems and she supposedly moved to Chicago and disappeared. He’d been looking for her, hoping she’d talk about Smith, but never made contact. Tremanty thinks that when they had their falling-out—she might have known too much about his operation—so . . . Deese. The body’s missing a strip of muscle from the back.”
They’d been stringing along the narrow track behind Laird, walking through shallow mud puddles along the way, around the larger trees, past deep excavated pits. Somebody had used a chain saw to open up pieces of the swamp, with the cut limbs stacked back in the heavier brush.
They took a new-cut side track to an isolated pit, where two people were working side by side in the hole, both dressed in Tyvek. A lunch-box-like container sat outside the hole, filled with cylindrical bottles with screw-on tops. The excavations had been cut wide enough to allow the men to stand on clean earth separate from the grave’s hole.
“All the digging is done with trowels, an inch at a time,” Laird said. “It takes a while.”
Peering into the hole, Lucas could make out a dirt-colored skeleton with some rags of clothing and skin and hair. The visible bones had collapsed on top of one another, the vertebrae, arm bones, and ribs crushed down over the folded leg bones, the skull on top. The only odor was that of swamp mud. The men looked up, and one of them said, “Where’s Larry? We need the box.”
“He’s coming,” Laird said. “You see anything?”
“Shot in the back of the head, bullet passing through the brain and out through the left eye socket. Looks like the subject was kneeling, to get that angle. Or, the shooter could have been standing on a chair, but . . .”
Laird said, “Yeah?”
The other man in the hole said, “This goddamn mud gets on everything. Drives me crazy. You scrape it off and one minute later it’s back on.”
Lucas took the rest of the tour: two unexcavated suspicious depressions were pointed out, with Laird saying one was a sure thing, in his opinion, the other was fifty-fifty. “We’re more than halfway through and there are spots in the other half that we think would have been obvious choices for burials. So . . . it’s a big deal and getting bigger.”
Rae asked Laird, “You remember that case up in Minnesota a few years ago? The Black Hole?”
“Sure. Seventeen murders and a few old skulls stolen from cemeteries, if I remember correctly. Crazy guy living with a dead man. It’s a classic.”
“Lucas is the guy who broke that down,” she said.
“No kiddin’.” He looked at Lucas with raised eyebrows. “Glad to have you, then. I hope to hell we don’t have seventeen, though. That’s not a record I’d want to mess with.”
Of the six recoveries, including the one in the grave still being excavated, the means of death had been determined in five—all gunshot wounds to the head. “It looks to us, from what Tremanty’s uncovered, that Deese used a club to punish and guns to kill. Never straight-up fights. He favored ambushes.”
In the last one, the one that had got him arrested, the victim, Howell Paine, said he had answered the door and had been hit in the face and was on the floor before he even understood what was happening.
By then, he’d been unable to resist. He never would have known who his attacker was—the man had been wearing a ski mask—if his next-door neighbor hadn’t taken a picture of the attacker’s car, including the license plate. He’d also taken a bite out of the man’s leg, and the meat he’d spit out had matched the DNA of the meat still intact on Deese’s body. Tremanty had had a watch on anything Deese-related. Howell had been put under guard, in the hospital, and when he got out he was hustled into the Marshals Service Witness Protection Program.
“Never would have found this place if he’d gone to trial,” Bob said, tipping his head back to look up through the jungle to the skies. “If he’d been convicted, he might’ve gotten ten years, or fifteen, with the wrong judge. With Roger Smith’s influence, he might have gotten two, maybe none. But he would’ve gotten out. Now, since he ran . . . and we found this place . . . he’s looking at life, at a minimum. And the needle is a real possibility.”
Lucas looked around. “I’ve seen what I need. I want to look at Tremanty’s paper and maybe get a beer with him, if he’s the beer-drinking type.”
“He can be,” Rae said. “You’ve got to be careful, though. He’s pretty straight. He won’t want to hear about . . . unorthodox investigative techniques.”
On the way out, Bob suddenly blurted, “Snake!” and pointed at Lucas’s foot. Lucas levitated, and Rae and Bob fell out laughing.
Lucas said, “I won’t kick your asses right now. Revenge is best when it’s cold, and I’ve had time to think about it. Can you say ‘economy class’? Can you say ‘seventeen-inch seats’? ‘Motel 6’?”
“You wouldn’t f
uckin’ do that,” Bob said. He looked at Rae. “Would he?”
Rae: “Who are you again?” And to Lucas: “Do I know him?”
“Best for you if you don’t,” Lucas said. He looked around his foot and back into the weeds and muttered, “Snakes . . .”
CHAPTER
THREE
Back in the house, Tremanty asked Lucas if he’d had a chance to look through the printouts that Bob had given him. “I can’t read in cars,” Lucas said. “I need to do that now.”
“There’s a spot upstairs,” Tremanty said. “Deese’s office. It’s cool, and there’s a decent chair in there.”
“Any guesses on how many bodies you’ll find?”
“I’m thinking ten, twelve. That’s only a guess,” Tremanty said. “What worries me is all the publicity we’ve been getting. By now, Deese knows for sure that we’ve found the bodies, so he’s gotta be digging himself in deep. He hasn’t had a lot of time to do that yet, but the longer it goes . . .”
“Does he have the resources to do that?” Lucas asked.
“I dunno. When we busted him, we went after his bank accounts and got eight thousand dollars. This is a guy who was probably spending that much every month on hookers and blow. So, he wasn’t keeping his income in his aboveground bank account.”
“If it was hookers and cocaine, over any long period of time . . . those guys tend to spend everything they have. They’re both addictions.”
“Yeah. Even if he had a stash, it might not have been too much. His housekeeper never saw any money around the house and she was all over it. It’s possible that he’s broke.”
“Okay. Let me read,” Lucas said. “Preferably in a place that’s snake-free.”
“Hey. Snakes are more afraid of you than you are of them. Not many rattlers survive an encounter with a human being, but it’s a rare thing when a rattlesnake kills a human,” Tremanty said.
“Right. I needed a pro-snake lecture. I’m gonna go read,” Lucas said.
* * *
—
HE SPENT the rest of the afternoon working through the paper with a highlighter pen, taking breaks for Diet Cokes supplied by Rae, to walk in the jungle and look into the pits while avoiding snakes, and once, as the day faded into evening, to chat again with Tremanty.
“We need to go somewhere quiet and talk,” Lucas said. “Maybe when you quit for the day?”
“There’s a bar a few miles out where people go when we finish,” Tremanty said. “It’s got booths that give you a little privacy.”
“Then let’s get Bob and Rae down there and talk.”
At six o’clock, everyone in the house gathered around Deese’s wide-screen television to watch the news. The talking head immediately passed the camera off to a dark-haired woman who began by saying, in her best hard-news voice, “We have learned exclusively that the bodies being dug up at the home of Clayton Deese are showing signs of cannibalism . . .”
Everyone in the room groaned, and a neatly dressed woman in a blue dress said to Tremanty, “There goes my night.”
Rae leaned toward Lucas and muttered, “FBI spokeswoman.”
“I’m two-thirds of the way through the paper,” Lucas said. “I’m going back upstairs.”
* * *
—
SUNSET WAS about eight o’clock, but the jungle started getting dim at seven, even dimmer in the muddy pits, and the recovery crews began pulling out. Six men and a woman who were doing the excavations took turns in Deese’s shower and were gone by eight. A dozen overnight guards began patrolling the site, under perimeter lights supplemented by laser trip wires.
Lucas, Bob, and Rae followed Tremanty out at eight o’clock, seven miles to a low, rambling concrete-block bar called Remy’s. The bar was decorated with beer signs, and, on the door, a black-and-white poster that showed a man’s fist holding a revolver, with the words “We Don’t Call 911.”
A twenty-foot-square dance floor sat at one end of the building, with an elevated platform against the wall that might have accommodated a five-piece band. Everything inside was old wood, fake wood, or concrete blocks, including a digital jukebox that was a bit of all three; a Brooks & Dunn song, “Neon Moon,” was burbling out into the dim interior.
The bar was populated by wary locals, most in working clothes—jeans and T-shirts—who were gathered at the dance floor end; by a few reporters, who were jammed into the middle; and by cops and technicians from the Deese crime scene, who dominated the other end. Everybody seemed to be eating deep-fried shrimp or deep-fried catfish or deep-fried potatoes, string beans, or cauliflower buds.
As they walked past the reporters, a photographer lifted a hand-sized camera and took a picture of Lucas. Annoying, but perfectly legal, and the photographer nodded at him. Tremanty led the way to the last booth, the only one that was empty. Lucas got the impression that it was reserved for him, and a waitress hustled over as soon as the four of them slid into it.
* * *
—
THEY ORDERED DRINKS, and when the waitress had gone Tremanty looked at Lucas and asked, “What do you think?”
“I won’t be any help for you at the crime scene. Neither will Bob or Rae, except maybe as tour guides. We need to go after Deese,” Lucas said. “Starting now.”
“How would you do that?” Tremanty asked.
“I’ve had some complicated dealings with the FBI,” Lucas said. “In my experience, the FBI doesn’t always want to know how the sausage gets made.”
“I don’t want to hear about anything overtly criminal, but if it’s arguable I do want to hear about it,” Tremanty said.
The waitress arrived with the drinks—beers for Bob and Rae, a lemonade for Tremanty, and a Diet Coke for Lucas—and they shut up for the minute she was there, and, when she was gone, Lucas said, “I want to interview Roger Smith. I want to ask him where he thinks Deese went.”
“Good luck with that,” Tremanty said. “There’s no way he’ll tell you a thing. If Deese flipped on him, he could be looking at the needle himself.”
“This would not be a formal recorded interview,” Lucas said. “I’ll ask him to take a walk. I might lie to him a little.”
Tremanty gazed at him for a moment, then said, “Huh.” And, a moment later, “Now that the cannibalism thing is out, the pressure is going to get intense.”
“That’s exactly what I’m thinking,” Lucas said.
Rae was sitting next to Tremanty and pushed an elbow into his arm. “We wouldn’t want to use the word ‘blackmail’ about a Smith interview. That would be wrong.”
“Why would the word even come up?” Tremanty asked.
“We’ve worked with Lucas before,” Rae said.
“Ah. If you did use the word, what would scare him enough that he might cooperate?” Tremanty asked. “He’s got a lot of reasons not to.”
“That might be something that you don’t want to discuss,” Lucas said.
“Let’s try not to wreck my career,” Tremanty said. “But if you were to do this, when would you do it?”
“Tomorrow morning, early. If you have an address for Smith? And a phone number?”
“Oh, yeah. We’ve got all of that. He’s out late every night and sleeps in. Usually starts stirring around about ten o’clock,” Tremanty said. “He has live-in help. A housekeeper, plus a driver who carries a legal gun.”
“You’ve done surveillance on him,” Lucas said.
“Sure. He’s got links to every organized crime outfit in the city. Actually, more disorganized crime than anything else, but you know what I mean. Ratshit gangs trying to peel money off anything they can. A lot of dope goes through here; that’s where the money is. There’s some gambling and so on, but not like it used to be. Smith knows the players, and his law firm does a lot of work for them.”
“Was he a competent lawyer?”
“He was okay, when he was practicing,” Tremanty said. “He doesn’t practice anymore. He has a dozen or so associates to do the trial work. He’s the CEO; he mostly coordinates. He’s the biggest loan shark in town. We’ve heard . . . no, we know that he’s got a million or more on the street at any one time. He charges ten percent per week, that’s around five hundred percent per year. It comes back all cash.”
“Ten percent isn’t bad, for a shark,” Lucas said. “New York, Chicago, they get fifteen or twenty percent.”
“That’s why he’s the biggest in town. He’s driven most of the others out of business,” Tremanty said. “He’s smart. Takes a smaller bite that still brings in five mil a year, donates money to widows and orphans at Christmas, only gets mean when he really has to. Like with our boy Howell Paine.”
They talked through a second round of drinks, and when they were done Lucas said, “I’ll roll this out tomorrow. Right now, I need to know where there’s a Walmart.”
* * *
—
BOB AND RAE were staying at a Best Western in Plaquemine, but Lucas suggested that they check out and go with him to New Orleans. “I’ve already got rooms reserved for the three of us. I’ll need you down there. Depending on what we find out tomorrow, we might be flying.”
“We thought we might,” Rae said. “We’re basically packed; we’ve got our gear bag.”
Lucas nodded. Their gear bag contained enough weaponry to start a revolution.
After leaving the Best Western, and a brief stop at a Walmart, they went on to downtown New Orleans and checked into a Hampton Inn. The trip down took an hour and a half, and they agreed to meet in the restaurant for breakfast at eight o’clock. “We should be at Smith’s place by nine o’clock at the latest. I don’t want to miss him,” Lucas said.
Alone in his room, Lucas opened up his new burner phone, the one he’d bought at Walmart, and called WVUE. “I need to talk to the producer on the Clayton Deese cannibal story. I just got back from there and I have a tip for you.”
Neon Prey Page 4