“I’ll have a look around,” Evangeline said. “But it’s out of my jurisdiction. All I can do is ask a few questions. The sheriff down there is under no obligation to cooperate.”
Lena nodded. “I understand. But hopefully you’ll be able to get more out of him than I’ve been able to. You’ll give me a call if you find out anything?”
“Yes, but don’t expect a daily report. This could take a while. It’s not like I can devote myself to it full-time. Unless Lapierre sees fit to put me back on the Courtland case, I’ll have to do most of the legwork on my own time.”
“How will you explain your absence when you drive up to Pinehurst?”
“I’ll take a personal day,” Evangeline said. The first one since she’d returned from maternity leave.
“I’ve made some calls, too,” Lena said as she crossed the room to a sleek black writing desk. Opening a small notebook, she ripped off the top sheet. “I was afraid at first I wouldn’t have much to report. My sources at NOPD were reluctant to talk about Johnny’s case. Now I know why. Were you aware that the FBI has taken over the investigation?”
“What?” Evangeline stared at her in shock. “Why would the FBI have Johnny’s case? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I agree,” Lena said. “But that’s a question for this man.” She handed Evangeline the slip of paper she’d ripped from the notebook. “As I understand it, he’s the one who’s been put in charge of Johnny’s case.”
Evangeline looked down at the name neatly written in black ink.
Special Agent Declan Nash.
Nash could have refused to see Detective Theroux, but he suspected she would camp out in the parking lot until he left for the night.
Might as well let her have her say, he decided.
He went downstairs and got her himself. She had to sign in and surrender her weapon before passing through the metal detector, and as she walked toward him, clipping the visitor’s badge to her lapel, he could see that her eyes were burning with anger. She was absolutely furious and he wondered what she’d managed to dig up in the short time since he’d last seen her. Her resolve was pretty formidable.
“Let’s go upstairs to my office,” he said as he headed for the elevators.
She was silent on the way up. Facing forward, she glanced neither to the right nor left, and when they reached his floor, she disembarked and stepped aside so that he could lead the way.
Once they were in his office, he closed the door and motioned to a chair as he settled in behind his desk. “What can I do for you, Detective Theroux?”
“You can start by telling me why the FBI has taken charge of my husband’s murder investigation. Or more specifically, why you’ve taken charge of it.”
“You’ve obviously been misinformed. Again.”
“And you obviously still think I’m an idiot. You’ve been manipulating this whole thing right from the start. What I can’t figure out is why. I’m guessing Johnny had something to do with the Sonny Betts operation, am I right? Did he—how did you put it?—blunder in over his head and you failed to wade in and pull him out in time?”
Nash studied her from across his desk, wondering who in the hell at NOPD was leaking information to her.
He didn’t like loose lips and he liked mistakes even less, especially when they were of his own making. He’d made a gross miscalculation with Detective Theroux. He’d done the one thing he’d sworn he wouldn’t do. He’d underestimated her.
In spite of her impressive record, in spite of everything he knew about her, he’d never expected her to get this far.
He’d used bad judgment, including his failure to bring in Nathan Mallet when he had the chance. Now the poor bastard was dead, and some of his blood might arguably be on Nash’s hands.
But not Johnny Theroux’s blood.
That situation had already been set in motion before Nash had ever even arrived in New Orleans. His job had been the cleanup.
He was still cleaning up.
Rising, he walked over to the window to stare down at the parking lot. Some view, he thought.
“You’ve got some of it right,” he finally said as he turned back to face Evangeline.
Her blue eyes burned with anger. “Which part?”
“It does have something to do with the Betts operation. Johnny walked in on a buy.”
“You mean a drug deal?”
“Drugs, arms. Like I said, Sonny Betts has his fingers in a lot of pies these days. Whether Johnny knew what he was walking into or not, we don’t know. Maybe he was tipped off, maybe he was just at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Her eyes were still blazing, but her voice was unnaturally calm. “Nathan Mallet told me that Johnny went to the parking garage to meet a woman that night.”
“I wouldn’t put too much stock in anything Nathan Mallet had to say. I’m sure his main interest was getting you off his back.”
“Why?”
He turned back to the window for a moment, frowning into the sunlight. “Mallet was a dirty cop. He’d been on the take for years.” When she didn’t respond, he glanced over his shoulder. “You don’t seem surprised.”
“About Nathan? I guess I’m not. The way he behaved after Johnny’s shooting…I knew something was wrong. Was he working for Betts?”
“That’s a reasonable assumption.”
She looked annoyed by his parsing. “Is that a yes or a no?”
“I can’t give you a definitive answer.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
He shrugged.
She decided to try another tack. “Did Nathan lure Johnny into the parking garage that night?”
“He might have, if he thought Johnny was onto him.”
She got up and came over to the window where he stood. “You do know Nathan’s dead?”
“Yes.”
“Of course you do,” she said ruefully. “You probably knew before we did. You probably also know that he was killed the same way Johnny was. Three shots—two to the chest and one to the face.”
“Sounds like somebody wanted to make sure he didn’t talk.”
“You think Betts had him killed?”
“I think there were a number of people who wanted Nathan Mallet to go away.”
“Including you guys?”
“We’re not in the extermination business,” he said.
“Not lately, anyway,” she muttered. She walked back over to the chair, but she didn’t sit. She was too amped for that. “Why wasn’t I told any of this before?”
“You weren’t asking questions before. When you came back to work after your baby was born, you started shaking things up. That’s when you got our attention. We couldn’t allow you to take things too far.”
“Allow?” Her outrage flared. “That’s why you had me removed from the Courtland case. You didn’t want me connecting it to Johnny.”
“We didn’t want you going anywhere near Sonny Betts with some half-cocked notion of revenge.”
“I’m not into revenge,” she said. “What I am into is justice.”
“You’ll get it,” he said. “It may take a while, but you’ll have your justice.”
“And why should I believe that?” she asked coldly. “When I haven’t been able to trust a single word out of your mouth yet.”
Nash stood at the window and watched her stride across the parking lot to her car.
He’d done a piss-poor job of containing this whole situation, but at least now he was dealing with Evangeline Theroux face-to-face.
He’d never had much of a taste for the machinations that came with his job. He preferred a much more straightforward approach, though he didn’t delude himself into thinking this was over. Evangeline Theroux was now a woman on a mission, and he knew she wouldn’t give up without a fight. She’d keeping digging and digging until she uncovered the truth.
But truth was a relative term.
The question now wasn’t so much if she found out, but when and how. It wa
s a matter of degrees and increments. Control was the key.
His phone rang and he removed it from his pocket to glance at the name on the display: Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women.
He closed his eyes and drew a breath. “Hello?”
“Dad?”
At the sound of his daughter’s voice, Nash’s chest tightened and he felt a familiar wave of helplessness wash over him even as he tried to keep his voice calm and normal. “Hi, baby. How are you today?”
“Not so good. This place is awful, Dad. I don’t think I can stand it here one more day. I’m going crazy. Sometimes I wish I could just…” Her voice caught as she trailed off. She sounded like the lost little girl that she was. “I just want to come home.”
“I know you do.” He drew another breath as he ran a hand through his hair. “But that’s not going to happen anytime soon.”
“I know.”
“I’ll try to come up there to see you this weekend,” he said. “Would you like that?”
“Yes. But, Dad…when’s Mom coming? It’s been so long since I’ve seen her. Is she mad at me?”
“No, baby. She’s just busy. New husband and all that. I’ll give her a call and see if we can stagger our weekends. That way it won’t be so long between visits. Would that help?”
“I guess so. I just want to get out of here. Please, Daddy. Please. There must be something you can do.”
She started to sob quietly into the phone.
Nash looked out over the sun-baked parking lot as his throat tightened and his chest felt ready to explode. “You killed someone, Jamie. I can’t make that go away.”
Twenty-one
Evangeline called Mitchell as soon as she got back to her car. While she waited for him to answer, she lifted her gaze to the building in front of her and idly counted the floors. For a moment, she thought she spotted Nash in the window of his office. Then she lost him in the glare of sunlight off the glass, and she decided it probably hadn’t been him anyway.
“Hebert,” Mitchell said on the other end.
Evangeline leaned forward and started her car. “Where are you right now?”
“I’m at the station,” he said. “What’s up?”
“I thought we might take a drive out to the lake.”
“I’m all for that,” he said. “But something tells me we’re not going out there for lunch.”
“We’re going to see Sonny Betts again,” Evangeline said.
“Wait a minute. I think we have a bad connection. Because I could have sworn I just heard you say something about going to see Sonny Betts. And I know you didn’t actually say that because you’re not stuck on stupid.”
“What’s stupid about wanting to ask him a few more questions regarding the murder of his former attorney?”
“What isn’t stupid about it? One, you’re not even on the case, and two, you heard what Lapierre said about Betts. We don’t make another move on a guy like that unless we have got some heavy-duty artillery to use against him. Right now, we’ve got squat.”
“I’m not suggesting we go in with guns blazing,” Evangeline said. “I’m talking about a friendly little chat. I’m headed out there right now. I was kind of hoping you’d meet me.”
“And then Lapierre can kick both our asses, is that it?”
“What do you care about Lapierre? You’re moving to Houston.”
“That’s not a done deal, and it’s beside the point anyway.”
“What if I told you that Betts had something to do with Johnny’s death?”
He gave a loud, exasperated sigh. “Based on what, Evie?”
“Based on what Special Agent Declan Nash of the FBI just told me in his office. Johnny’s death wasn’t random, Mitchell. There’s a good chance he was set up.”
“By who?”
“Nathan Mallet.”
“Why would Nathan set up Johnny?”
“Because I think Johnny found out Nathan was dirty. He worked for Betts.”
“And just what do you hope to prove by going out there and rattling Betts’s cage again?”
“This time, it’s not Betts’s cage I’m trying to rattle,” she said. “It’s Declan Nash’s.”
Evangeline was five minutes from her rendezvous point with Mitchell when she realized she was being followed. Earlier she’d spotted a red Mustang behind her when she left the federal building, and she’d thought at first it might be Nathan’s stolen car.
But the driver made a right at the first traffic light, and Evangeline hadn’t caught sight of the car again.
The vehicle behind her now was a black Lincoln with heavily tinted windows.
Keeping an eye in the rearview mirror, Evangeline made a quick left on a red light, hoping to lose the tail, but the Lincoln shot up behind her, tapping her bumper just as a car approaching from the other direction swerved in front of her.
Evangeline had no choice but to hit the brakes as the two cars wedged her between them. Heavily armed men spilled out of the vehicles and surrounded her car with enough artillery to start a small war. Guns were suddenly pointed at her from every direction.
“Get out of the car now!”
A dozen different actions raced through Evangeline’s head, none of them viable at the moment. She had no choice but to do as she was told.
Pushing open the door, she slowly climbed out.
“Throw your weapon on the ground. Do it now!”
Rough hands seized her then and her arms were pulled behind her back and cuffed. Dragging her over to one of the cars, they shoved her into the backseat and slammed the door.
By the time Evangeline could struggle to a sitting position, the car was already moving. The whole confrontation had taken less than thirty seconds. So fast any onlookers probably wouldn’t have even realized what was going on until it was too late.
“Who are you people?” Her heart thudded against her chest and she tried to ignore the pain that streaked across her shoulders.
“You have no idea what you’ve been meddling in,” the man on the passenger side said.
“What are you talking about? Who are you?” she asked again.
But he merely gave her a withering look and turned back to face the front.
She glanced out the window at the passing scenery. She thought at first they were going to Sonny Betts’s place, but instead they cut back and traveled a maze of side streets and alleys until they reached a warehouse. The overhead door was activated by a remote and the big car slid inside. A moment later, the door rumbled closed behind them.
Evangeline glanced around, trying to get some sense of her surroundings, but they were in total darkness. She was taken out of the car and led to the back of the building, where her cuffs were removed and a gruff voice instructed her to sit. When she failed to comply, she was pushed down on a wooden, straight-back chair, and her wrists were once again fastened behind her.
“What do you want?” she asked.
No response.
“Who are you?”
Only silence.
“If you people think you can snatch a New Orleans homicide detective without consequences, I suggest you think again.”
Someone laughed this time.
“You should be worrying about the consequences of your own actions, Detective Theroux. You just don’t know when to quit, do you?”
She tried to get up, but a hand on her shoulder pressed her back down.
“You may as well get comfortable,” a second voice said behind her. “You’ve got a wait ahead of you.”
“What am I waiting for?”
“If I told you that, it’d take all the fun out of it, now wouldn’t it?”
The room fell silent. No one spoke again until a side door opened and a third man stepped into the warehouse. Evangeline could hear the low murmur of voices in the dark, but she couldn’t make out what any of them were saying.
The door opened again and for a moment, Evangeline thought they had left her. Then an overhead light came o
n and she squinted, momentarily blinded by the brilliance.
When her vision cleared, she saw Declan Nash standing in front her.
“I figured it would come to this,” he said. “But I didn’t think it would be this soon.”
“Come to what?” she asked angrily. “Kidnapping?”
“A lot of people went to a great deal of trouble to keep this day from happening,” he said. “You have no idea.”
“Why don’t you stop speaking in riddles and tell me what the hell is going on.” Evangeline tugged at the handcuffs. “And while you’re at it, how about taking these things off me?”
He reached behind him and plucked a key off a small wooden desk. Then he walked around the chair and unfastened the cuffs.
Evangeline jumped up and whirled to face him as she massaged her wrists. “Was that really necessary?”
“With you, yes.” His glance traveled over her and she thought for a moment he looked anxious. “You’re not hurt, are you?”
She was still rubbing her wrists. “I’ll live.”
He moved around to the front of the table.
“What’s going on?” she demanded. “Why did you bring me here?”
“This seemed as good a place as any to give you what you want.”
“And that is?”
“The truth,” he said, “About Johnny.”
Her heart skipped a beat as she walked toward the desk. “And why should I believe you this time?”
“You don’t have to believe me.” He lifted the lid from a cardboard crate on the table and removed a thick file folder, which he plopped down in front of her. “You can reach your own conclusions.”
Her gaze dropped to the folder. “What is this?”
“Your husband’s file. If you’re not convinced by the time you’ve reached the end, there’s more where that came from.”
When she made no move to open the folder, he said, “Go on. Take a look.” He grabbed a wooden chair and shoved it toward her. “Here,” he said. “You better sit. This could take a while.”
Reluctantly Evangeline pulled up the chair and sat down. She placed her hand on the folder, but for some reason, she couldn’t bring herself to open it. She didn’t understand fully what was going on here, but she instinctively knew she wasn’t going to like what she found inside that file.
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