by Rick Reed
The officer didn’t return the smile. His hand remained on his gun. “You can either drive there, or come with us.”
“We’ll follow you,” Jack said.
“Good choice,” the officer said. “You stay behind Pete. And I’ll be right behind you.”
“The whole way,” Jack finished the officer’s sentence under his breath.
“Did you say something, sweetheart?” the officer asked.
“I said, let’s do this.”
The officer went back to his car and made a U-turn. The car behind them backed up doing the same. Liddell pulled off the side of the road and turned around on the dirt shoulder to follow.
“The whole way?” Liddell said. “Do you want one of these yahoos blowing our shit away?”
“I had you covered,” Jack said, and retrieved the gun from under his leg. “Besides, if they were really going to do something they would have just run us off the road and shot our car up. These guys are more like Buford T. Justice in Smokey and the Bandit.”
Liddell said, “I wonder what she wants now?”
“Someone must have seen us going to or leaving Cotton’s place,” Jack said.
“I’m really getting sick of this.”
“Let’s see what she has to say, Bigfoot. What have we got to lose? We’re working for the Sheriff, and he told us she was going to have a shit fit.”
* * *
They were directed to park in front of the police station, and another officer came down the steps and ushered them into the Chief’s office. Jack knew that as far as any of them were concerned, Liddell was a cop killer and a traitor to his badge.
Chief Anna Whiteside sat behind her desk. She was dressed in blue jeans and a blue T-shirt with a PPD badge silkscreened on the left chest. She motioned for the officer to leave. Her dark eyes moved from Jack to Liddell and back to Jack.
“So you’re Jack Murphy,” she said.
He was surprised that she was attractive. Not that a female officer couldn’t be attractive. But most upper brass he’d ever known were ragged around the edges from climbing through the ranks and getting some of the stupid rubbed on them along the way.
“You got me,” he said. “Have I done something wrong?”
She said, “Why would you think that? Have you done something wrong, Detective Murphy?”
“When you’re called to the principal’s office you’re in trouble. But if you just wanted to meet me you could have called. I would have been happy to stop by. I know this place called Mama JuJu’s and—”
She silenced Jack with a look. She opened a desk drawer and took out a plastic evidence bag with a gun inside and set the bag on the desk.
“That’s my backup piece,” Liddell said. “It was in my car when it was towed.”
“This is your weapon.”
“That’s what I said. It’s my weapon. Where did you find it?” Liddell asked.
Jack had a sick feeling. He said, “I was with him when he tried to pick up his car today and . . .”
“I don’t want to hear anything out of you, Detective Murphy. In fact, if you say another word I’ll have you removed from my office.”
Liddell sat down in one of the chairs. “That’s my backup gun. I tried to pick up my car from the impound lot this morning and the tires had been slashed. My backup gun and my personal camera were missing from my car.”
“They were missing?” Her expression said this was the most ridiculous lie she’s ever heard.
“That’s what I just said.”
“A gun and a camera were missing from your personal vehicle and you didn’t report it to the police,” Whiteside said.
Liddell tried not to show his annoyance and anger. “I called your property guy this morning. He said my gun—that gun—was sent to the lab for ballistics. So, no, I didn’t make a police report.”
Jack said, “Chief, I if may . . .”
“No you may not. I’m warning you for the last time, Detective. Your chief may think you’re hot shit, but you’re in my city now. This isn’t the Wild West, and you can’t be a cowboy here.”
Jack’s fists tightened but he sat down and kept his mouth shut.
She continued. “Yeah. I read up on you after I heard you were here to get Mr. Blanchard. You’ve had some exciting times in Evansville. Would you say you’re capable of killing to protect the ones you love?”
“Where are you going with this, Chief Whiteside?” Jack asked.
“I’m just thinking out loud, Detective. I’m thinking that you and Mr. Blanchard have been partners for quite a while, and partners are willing to put themselves at great risk for each other. Great enough risk to kill someone. That is, if they thought that someone was going to harm their partner, that is.”
Liddell said, “I told you why I didn’t report the gun missing. Your property clerk said it had been sent to the lab with my duty weapon.”
She was quiet for a beat, then said, “Well, as you can see, your gun is not at the lab. It’s here. On my desk. In an evidence bag. I don’t know anything about a camera, but you can bet I’ll look into it.”
“That gun hasn’t been fired for weeks. Check it, and I want it back. And I want my camera. And I want my tires fixed.”
“Is that all?” she asked.
“No,” Liddell said. “I want to know what the hell is going on. Why do you have my gun?”
Instead of answering him, she asked a question of her own. “What were you and Detective Murphy doing at Cotton Walters’s today?”
Jack answered for him. “We have been asked to run a parallel investigation into the death of Elizabeth LeBoeuf.”
“This request came from Sheriff Guidry?”
Jack didn’t answer. It was a rhetorical question. She was playing cat and mouse with them and he had a suspicion why. He hoped he was wrong.
“Let me ask so you understand the question. Were you asked by Sheriff Guidry to conduct a parallel investigation, with this department, looking into the death of Elizabeth LeBoeuf?”
“I guess I didn’t understand the question, Chief. The answer is yes. Sheriff Guidry hired us and we were told your department had primary jurisdiction. That was why we were talking to Mr. Walters. He was a friend of Bitty’s,” Jack said.
“Was?”
Jack was getting tired of her repeating everything back to him as a question. “Yes, was. She’s dead, so he was a friend of hers. Past tense. Am I not speaking English here?”
“So, Mr. Blanchard admits this is his gun. And states it has not been fired for several weeks. And you admit you were both at Cotton’s house this morning. Have I got that straight?”
“He’s Detective Blanchard if you want to be correct. But yeah.”
She smiled like the cat that ate the canary. “Cotton Walters was found dead an hour ago.”
Jack was stunned. They had talked to the old man just hours ago. Jack thought Cotton was paranoid or crazy or both, but there’s an old saying: “You’re not paranoid if they really are out to get you.”
“How?” Jack asked. “When?”
“I want to know why you went to Cotton Walters’s house,” she said.
Jack watched her face. No one had searched them for weapons before they were ushered into her office. They hadn’t been read Miranda or handcuffed. But he figured he’d better ask. “Are we under arrest?”
“You’re not under arrest,” she said to Liddell. “Or you either, Detective Murphy.” She stood and walked to the window, looking down in the street, absently pulling at one ear lobe. “Although I have enough circumstantial evidence to hold you both for investigation, I’m not going to do it. If, that is, you cooperate with me.”
“So what do you want to know?” Jack asked.
“I want everything. Starting with the truth about why you are in Plaquemine, Detective Blanchard.”
Chapter Seventeen
Evie didn’t hear anyone come down the hall, and when the door opened it startled her. The woman standing in the lit do
orway was tiny and barefoot. Her skin was brown and perfectly contrasted with the long white silky dress. The woman’s hair was tucked under a white cloth skullcap, what the kids at school called a doo-rag. She might be Chinese or Korean or something because her friend at school, Amy, was Korean and this woman had the same shape face and dark eyes. Those eyes were fixed on her.
“Come with me,” the woman said.
Evie walked to the doorway. She turned and could see the other children were asleep or pretending to be.
“Where are we going?” Evie asked.
“Come,” the woman said and motioned for Evie to come to her.
Evie stepped into the hallway and asked, “Who are you? Where are we going?”
“My name is Ubaid,” she said with an accent that Evie couldn’t place. The woman pronounced the name “ooh-bed.”
“That doesn’t sound Korean,” Evie said, and the woman smiled.
“That’s because I’m not Korean,” Ubaid said in a quiet voice. “I’m Egyptian. A Muslim.”
“I’m pleased to meet you, Ubaid,” Evie said. She wasn’t pleased, not pleased at all. But her father taught her to be polite. Especially with older people, and Ubaid was older, in her thirties at least. “I’ve never met anyone from Egypt. Or a Muslim either. I don’t think I have.”
Ubaid made a slight bow, and bade Evie walk in front of her down the hall. “Please don’t speak. You understand?”
Evie said she understood. They were in a hallway she didn’t think she’d seen before, but then everything in this underground maze was concrete hallways and steel doors and motion-activated lights. They came to a set of stairs leading up, and Ubaid stopped.
“Please,” Ubaid said and directed Evie go up the stairs.
At the top of the stairs a set of steel doors were straight ahead and another steel door was to their right. This one was open and led into a brightly lit hall with wood-paneled walls, a real ceiling, and tiled floor. She had felt the air warm as she came up the stairs, but now it was more than warm. She imagined that on the other side of the paneled walls was the outside, and it was daytime, and the sun was shining.
They reached a door and Ubaid opened it. The mouthwatering smell of fresh baked bread and baked ham hit her. Down below it always smelled mildewy, or damp, except for where they ate the meals.
“Where are we going?” she whispered to Ubaid.
“Somewhere nice,” Ubaid said.
Evie walked through the doorway into a large kitchen. The kind they had at her school, but not as big. Two people were working in the kitchen. One at the oven and one washing dishes. Neither of them paid them any attention. She was taken to a set of wooden stairs leading up. This was a house. A huge house.
At the top of the stairs was a room, like a suite at a fancy hotel, the kind she saw in magazines that her father didn’t like her to read. A bed sat against the far wall, next to a tall window whose curtains were tightly closed. She could just see a seam of light down the sides of the curtains. The bed was massive. Someone would have to use a step stool to get on top of it, and it was big enough to get lost in. She thought it was the nicest bed she’d ever seen. Not anything like the lumpy, smelly pad in her downstairs room.
Ubaid shut the door and locked it with a gold-colored skeleton key that hung from her wrist. She opened two sets of folding doors, and Evie’s eyes lit up. It was a dressing room. A dressing room like she had always imagined celebrities owning. Dresses and evening gowns and shoes of every kind and color hung on rods and filled shelves on both sides of the opening, and at the back was a mirror as big as one wall in her bathroom at home. To one side of the mirror was a dressing table with lit glass balls shining down on an array of perfumes and lotions and makeup.
Ubaid touched her shoulder and she jumped. Ubaid said, “Take your shower now. Go in there.” She pointed to an open door in an alcove. “Take as long of a shower as you want. When you come out, we’ll fix you up. Okay?”
“You bet!” Evie said and hurried to the shower.
* * *
They sky was black to the west, and it was coming their way. If it were as bad as she imagined it would flood the streets. But the Chief didn’t care if it was a hurricane coming. Her orders were to say on the street and patrol. She reminded them about the screwup during Katrina, and said people needed to know the cops were the authority and not thugs. But Barbierre dreaded storms. They had scared him since he was a teenager. His roof had been blown off one time, and he felt like he was being sucked out of the house. He didn’t like that helpless feeling.
Officer Barbierre exited his patrol vehicle, repositioned his gun, and tugged at the notch of his ballistic vest that had an annoying habit of riding up when he sat down. It was rubbing his neck raw. But, as his instructor at the police academy had told him, “Better raw than dead.” He’d heard stories of guys who didn’t wear them getting popped. Some crippled for life. Most dead. And detectives were the worst of the lot. They dressed sloppy, and some of them still carried revolvers. Detective Troup would never go for that. Troup was a cop’s cop.
He gazed up and down the street of dilapidated homes and rubbish-strewn lots and gutters full of trash and fast-food wrappers and could feel the sickness that was growing in his city. The people that lived down here didn’t care about anything. Themselves. Their property. Even the law. Laws were for breaking. If you ate a McBurger you just threw the wrapper in the street. For God’s sake, don’t walk ten feet and put it in a trash container. In fact, they got their jollies down here by setting trash containers on fire and watching the emergency vehicles come.
But he had to keep all that to himself because it wasn’t “politically correct” to say anything. God forbid he should have an opinion. He hated these people, and they hated him, but they were too chicken shit to face him down. Let them try.
He noticed a black male standing in the alleyway between two condemned houses. The guy was just looking at him.
“What do you want?” Barbie yelled across the street, and the man tucked tail and slunk off. Just like the rest of the rat bastards down here. Someone had given him the finger—once. The guy was without a finger now. Barbie had beaten an Internal Affairs investigation over that incident because Detective Troup had helped him, but after that he’d checked a Taser out of the armory. No one else had complained.
He crossed the street and walked between the houses where he’d run the creep off. No one was around. He was confident no one would mess with his police car, but he hated being out of sight of it. He gazed up at the sky. The clouds were pregnant with rain, and the wind was picking up.
He hurried around to the back of the house just as the sky opened and a deluge of rain came down. Luckily the door was unlocked. He stamped the water off his feet and pinched the water out of his eyes with a finger and thumb. He shut the door, and the room went dark. He squinted his eyes but he couldn’t see jack-shit. He reached for the flashlight on his gun belt and a voice said from the darkness, “That won’t be necessary, Officer Barbierre. Come into the front room.”
Barbie did as instructed, and it was even darker in that room. “I can’t see you,” Barbie said, trying to locate the voice.
“That’s the point.”
Barbie thought for a second and said, “Oh yeah. I get it. We shouldn’t be seen together.”
“You’re going to make a fine detective,” the voice said.
“I did everything you said.” He squinted into the darkness. He didn’t like being at a disadvantage. They were somewhere to his left.
“Does anyone know you were coming here?”
Barbie felt water trickling down his forehead, mixing with sweat and stinging his eyes. “No one still alive,” he said with a laugh and wiped at his eyes with the backs of his hands.
“And the car?”
Barbie grinned, because that part was fun as hell. “Both tires. I wish I could’ve seen his face.”
The voice didn’t respond, so Barbie hurriedly said, “All I wan
t out of this is a chance to prove myself. I’ve done everything you’ve asked. And I’m willing to do more, but I’ve got to know if I’m getting what I want when this is over.”
The voice came from a different location. Closer. “You’ve proven yourself. We’ll take care of you.”
“I need to know if I’m getting . . .” Barbierre managed to say before he noticed a red dot moving up the front of his shirt.
He reached for his weapon and heard a soft sound as something struck his neck. It felt like a bee sting. But it wasn’t a bee sting, because his arms wouldn’t move and he couldn’t feel his hands. The numbness spread quickly, and his legs wouldn’t hold him. He fell to the floor, but he didn’t pass out. He could see and hear everything.
He lay on the floor and watched as boots and legs materialized out of the dark.
Chapter Eighteen
Luke Perry watched the woman named Ubaid and the teenager go up the stairs. Ubaid was hot, but—he hated himself for the thought—the teen was hotter. Papa’d get a good price for that one. Of course, Luke wasn’t supposed to know what was going on with these children, but he wasn’t ignorant. He’d seen Marie recruit her “acolytes” and bring them to the mansion for their final initiation rites. All the acolytes were hot too. But Luke didn’t benefit. Papa had him out cruising the bus stations in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, picking up runaway boys that were never over the age of twelve or under the age of eight. He hadn’t picked up any younger than twelve yet. Luke knew where these boys were going to end up. They’d be sold just like the girls. It made him sick that the boys would be used for sex too. He wasn’t supposed to know, but he wasn’t ignorant like Papa thought.
He felt sorry for them. He had two younger brothers himself, Levi and Leonard. Levi was thirteen, much younger than Luke. Leonard, who preferred to be called Len, was ten. Len was a fighter. He had the heart of a lion, his momma always said, because when he was born he came out squalling and twisting and punching, not to mention the mane of dark hair that ran down his neck and feathered out on his back. Luke tried not to think of his brothers when he was sent on these “shopping trips” by Papa, but it was hard not to. He hadn’t seen them for quite a while.