“It’s okay,” Alexa said. “No childhood is perfect.”
“Please, Alexa. I want to know all about you. You probably know more about me than most people I’ve known for years.”
Alexa didn’t want Casey’s pity, but she thought it might help Casey to know she wasn’t as alone as she felt. “My parents were addicts and low-level criminals feeding their habits. My father was killed by a store owner he was robbing. My mother died of an overdose when I was five. My little sister and I had no relatives, at least none that wanted to deal with two small children from a mixed-race relationship between two thieving junkies.
“We were split up and put into the foster system. We both acted out, so we were shuffled around a lot. When I was thirteen, this wonderful woman and her husband gave me a home, and when I asked, they brought my sister there and adopted us both. After that, life was easier. They were poor, but for the first time I felt loved and appreciated. Those people—and a very special young man who came into my life when I was fifteen—undid most of the emotional damage I sustained, by loving me unconditionally. I was unlucky for thirteen years, but lucky just the same. The way I see it, because of what my life was, I’m better able to relate to other people going through painful experiences.”
“Are you and your sister close?”
“We stay in touch. I get postcards from her from all over the place.”
Smiling warmly, Casey gripped Alexa’s hands in hers. “When I found Gary, I felt truly loved and valuable as a human being for the first time in my life. I mean, after my parents were killed. I never felt loved between the time I lived here with them and here with Gary and Deana.”
“Beg your pardon? You mean in different houses.”
Casey looked at Alexa, perplexed. “Alexa, this was their house, my house,” she said. “My mother owned it. She refused to live in the big house with my grandmother like William and Sarah did. It stayed vacant, except for a caretaker, until I was old enough to move back in. The estate kept it up so it wouldn’t lose value, and it was mine when I reached twenty-one. Unko and Sarah didn’t think it was a good idea for me to move back in, but it was the only place I’d ever been happy and felt loved. And it’s still the place where I am happiest and loved best.” She smiled warmly at Alexa. “As soon as you find Gary, it will be perfect again. You’ll really like Gary.”
Alexa didn’t know what to say. She was stunned that she and Casey were sitting in a twenty-six-year-old crime scene—maybe unaltered except for the removal of the mutilated bodies and a professional cleaning.
44
When his cell phone rang, Kenneth Decell was seated in an office at a bank, closed on Saturday afternoons to all but the most important customers, watching the distinguished-looking man across the room carefully count the bearer bonds he’d just placed on the conference table. Decell frowned when he saw the name on the phone’s caller ID.
“Decell,” he said.
“Kenneth,” Dr. LePointe said, sounding exhausted. “Jesus Christ.”
“What is it?”
“I need you here now. I…well, truth is…I don’t know…Truth is, this is all getting out of hand. Keen was here and she got Casey upset by telling her some things. Keen’s a problem.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can get out of the bank,” he said. “I’m picking up your paper now. Relax. You have nothing to worry about.” So much for playing all the chess matches at the same time, Decell thought.
“Good. Kenneth, I don’t know what I’d do without you. I depend on your expertise, loyalty, and discretion. Thank you.”
“My pleasure.” Decell closed the phone and smiled. I know where you’d be without me. And so do you.
After the banker had finished placing the counted bonds in the valise, he locked it, placed LePointe’s key on the table beside it, and stepped back, folding his hands so they covered his sex, posing like a mortician beside an open casket.
“Two and one-half million in ten-thousand-dollar denominations is the confirmed count,” the banker said, opening his fountain pen and placing it beside a document.
Decell crossed the room and lifted the valise.
“Please sign the receipt, Mr. Decell.”
Decell looked at the document and shook his head. “Dr. LePointe authorized it, didn’t he?”
“Yes,” the banker said nervously. “He did. Over the phone.”
“Are you satisfied that the man on the phone was Dr. LePointe?”
“I’ve known William since grade school,” the banker replied. “It was he.”
“And they’re his bonds to do with as he sees fit, right?”
The banker nodded.
“Then you can ask him to sign.”
“But I’m turning them over to you—”
“He said to, right?”
“Yes. But you are taking possession.”
“Okay. Hit REDIAL on my phone, or call him yourself and tell him he’ll have to come sign the receipt. I’m not going to put my name on any piece of official paper.”
“Why?”
“Well, for one thing, I can’t possibly repay it if anything happens to it. If the FBI comes to you, you’ll tumble to the badges and show the receipt to them, and they’ll come to me and I’ll have to account for it by explaining why I picked it up and what I did with it, which would be problematic. I doubt Dr. LePointe would like having his private business thrown back in his face by the authorities. Dr. LePointe is a major depositor and his family the major stockholder in this institution. You want to go against his wishes, be my guest. Maybe nothing will happen, but maybe the board of directors will suddenly decide this institution could use some fresh blood in your position. Dr. LePointe is under a great deal of stress, and where his family is involved…” Decell shrugged. “I’ll just leave the bonds here and you can explain it to him. Maybe he’ll just get in his car and come get them himself and sign your paper and have no ill feelings about it.”
“Take them.” The banker wiped the beads of perspiration from his upper lip with a handkerchief he pulled from his suit pocket. “Do you need an escort?”
“I don’t,” Decell said, patting the gun in his shoulder holster. He lifted the valise and walked casually from the office.
45
The mayor of New Orleans and the governor were making another one of the many announcements that Alexa had heard earlier during the day. “I have ordered the police to close off inbound traffic to New Orleans. As of four o’clock, all lanes of state roads are designated as outbound lanes only. We are opening the Superdome as an emergency shelter for residents who cannot leave the city. I have directed that city transit buses will carry residents to the shelter. Residents are directed to immediately evacuate Orleans, Jefferson, and St. Bernard parishes, in an orderly manner. Again, I want to stress that this is a mandatory evacuation and all residents in the affected areas must leave or they will be forcibly removed from their property by law enforcement officers.”
Alexa switched off the radio. She could use her identification to go where she needed to. Grace Smythe kept invading her thoughts as she drove to meet Manseur in his office. She would have sent the supposed West letter to the FBI labs, but she didn’t want to lose the time it would take to courier a package to D.C. on the next flight out. She gave it to Manseur when she walked in, along with the envelopes containing her Glock magazines and some articles of Gary West’s Casey had given to Alexa for collection.
“Tell your lab to hurry it up. We need to check for prints on the West letter. They’ll probably find Casey West’s, William LePointe’s, and Kenneth Decell’s. I seriously doubt you’ll find Gary West’s on either his envelope or the letter.”
“What about the letter carrier? Whoever picks up the mail and gives it to LePointe?”
“The envelope has a crack-and-peel stamp and a peel-and-stick flap, so forget DNA. And to answer your question, there’s no mailman, because there’s no cancellation mark.”
“So whoever came up with
this brilliant subterfuge didn’t actually bother to mail it.”
Alexa nodded. “Decell maybe, on LePointe’s behalf. He told me Kenneth Decell had read it.”
“Not Decell’s work,” Manseur disagreed. “He was too good a detective. He would have either mailed it or had LePointe say the letter was delivered to the gate by courier. I suspect LePointe just showed it to Decell, who didn’t bother to look at the envelope, or doubted anyone would ask LePointe for the letter.”
“Know what I think?” Alexa asked.
“No man ever knows what a woman is thinking.”
Alexa smiled. “This letter was supposed to be misdirection, which opens an interesting avenue.”
“I’m listening,” Manseur said.
“I’m wondering if he knew that by the time anyone started snooping, it wouldn’t matter.”
“Because the hurricane would destroy evidence?”
“No. Because he knew that Gary West was going to be home before that. The letter might be an impromptu ruse designed just to get Evans to call us off.”
“So we didn’t find out about Sibby?”
“No. What if Gary’s abductor contacted LePointe, and he’s going to pay a ransom to get Gary West back safely? Doesn’t want us in the way. How he accomplishes getting Gary back—whatever deception or ruse he employs—becomes irrelevant then because everybody’s happy and Gary’s back and nobody is going to look too closely at anything else. So Sibby stays hidden, which has been undone, but he wouldn’t have known that would happen at the time he was pulling the plan together.”
“Makes sense,” Manseur said.
“Although I can’t prove it yet, Sibby’s vanishing act from the hospital, Gary’s abduction, and the Fugate murder are directly related,” Alexa said. “The tipping of the press at this moment is too coincidental. The same people are behind the grab and tipping the press to Sibby’s exit from River Run. I have a feeling that they knew about Sibby before they grabbed Gary, and they may have killed Fugate and framed Sibby. Maybe she didn’t leave earlier because she hadn’t done anything—didn’t know Dorothy was in the basement.”
“That’s a stretch. I mean, it might be true, but there’s nothing to support it but your hunch. And the press might have been snooping on their own.”
Alexa nodded. “LePointe and Fugate were much more than coworkers. It’s just my gut talking, but I think that not only did LePointe know Sibby was at Fugate’s, but he knew Fugate was dead, and was only surprised that I brought it up. I’d bet his and Fugate’s phone records will tie him to her.”
“He’ll have plausible denial. You may well be right about the ransom,” Manseur said. “It would explain one thing.”
“What?”
“Why Kenneth Decell arrived at his office two hours ago, picked up a briefcase, and then went to a bank. He left the bank twenty minutes ago carrying said valise and proceeded directly to Dr. LePointe’s house, arriving there twenty minutes after you and Casey West left.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because my old partner Larry Bond staked out Decell’s office.”
“Your partner’s working on this case?” Alexa asked.
“My former partner. We worked together for six years.”
“You failed to mention to me that you brought him in,” Alexa said.
“I just told you.”
“I’m not always good with time lines, but you mean to tell me your ex-partner wasn’t already watching Decell’s house when we were at River Run?”
“You think I’d keep information from you on purpose? I didn’t think it was important, I guess. I didn’t know for sure how Decell was involved.”
“Gosh, Michael, I sure hope not. If I thought I couldn’t trust you, I’d be really upset. You are the one who pulled me into this mess,” she said, anger rising.
“Casey West did that,” he protested.
“If I hadn’t been in Casey West’s kitchen, she would never have asked for me. Who was it that woke me in the middle of the night, and placed me there?”
“Not like you were asleep.”
“Is this about who gets the credit?”
“No! Look, I wanted to compile more before we had a meeting to assimilate our separate findings and make a plan for bringing this to a joint close. Sometimes I play things close to the chest. Habit. I’m sorry.”
“Okay,” Alexa said. “Clean slate. So what have you compiled so far from Fugate’s?”
46
Leland’s mouth was packed with a large wad of Juicy Fruit and he was humming a song his daddy used to sing all the time. Something about me ho my toe down the bayou. Leland’s boat pulled the wardens’ piece of crap flat-bottom easily. Leland’s father had said his son had eyes like razor blades. That morning when he was leaving to check lines and get gas, he had spotted the tree camera because the sun made the thing cast a shadow where he’d never seen one. He had searched the bank and found the place where a boat’s hull had pressed reeds down and left the impression of its bow in the mud, so he followed the boot prints across the peninsula to the suspect tree and looked at the camera from the side.
He had known that whoever had put it there would come back for it, and when they did, he’d make sure they paid for invading his place and spying on him. He remembered now that he had spotted the game wardens several times in the past two weeks, far more often than he usually saw wardens. One had been the bastard whose name was something that sounded like pump handle. The bastard had ticketed Leland more than a few times over the years, so he knew him.
Nobody liked them wardens.
Nobody would miss them.
Even if one was a woman.
He had never made a woman disappear before.
Their boat was aluminum.
Leland truly loved his boat’s shallow-draft fiberglass hull, but he was suspicious that Doc was going to try to pull a take-back deal. Doc had told Leland not to tell anybody he owned the boat or where he’d gotten it. He couldn’t see why he should tell a lie about it, so he’d told Moody it was his on account he did a job to get it. Leland didn’t like liars. Well, you could lie to wardens, because they were sneaky bastards that thought they owned the birds, the fish, and everything else God put around the world.
Most people couldn’t be trusted to do what they said. They’d say they just wanted to talk to you, then they’d handcuff you, lock you up, and stick needles in you and say you were crazy.
Leland knew that he was only safe from being monitored deep in the swamp, because they wouldn’t ever dare come in here. He had fixed it so if they ever did somehow track him to his cabin, they’d never get a chance to tell any of the others about it.
The boat was his because he had done everything Doc and the woman with the dark hair told him he had to do for it. If they kept adding things onto the list as long as they felt like it, Leland would have no choice but to fix them both good.
Every time Leland turned around and finished one thing, they had this next thing that needed to be done, and Doc went on about how they only trusted Leland to do it right, and how much the boat was worth, like he wasn’t close to being even.
Doc said an FBI lady was fixing to make trouble, and what they might need to do about that, which meant what Leland might need to do. Doc said she could put Leland back in the hospital for keeps. Okay, if the FBI lady really had a mind to put Leland back in there and let them bastards shoot electricity into his head and all that, he’d knock her in the head. If need be, he would.
Well, maybe he could do one or two more things. It was a nice boat.
47
Grace Smythe unlocked her door and entered carrying packages containing clothes and things she’d be needing. She was surprised to see a paper bag and a bottle of wine and a glass on her kitchen table. Inside the sack were several stacks of new currency.
Grace smiled. She had expected the money, but the wine was unexpected lagniappe—a little something extra.
She picked up the stacks
of new one-hundred-dollar bills. It would be fifty thousand dollars—traveling money.
She went into the bedroom and dropped the bags she’d brought in, as well as the sack of cash. She rushed into the bathroom and started hot water running into the tub.
Back in the kitchen, she opened the wine. Grace took the bottle and the glass with her to the bathroom, where she tested the water. The way to appreciate a good vintage was to open your pores with hot water, and sip the wine slowly, savoring the fragrance, the richness, the variety of flavors.
She poured herself a glass and took a test sip. She rested the glass on the side of the tub, and scooted the bottle to the floor so she wouldn’t knock it over accidentally. You didn’t waste wine this good. Not this special a Burgundy.
Lowering her pants and sitting on the toilet, she sighed as relief swept through her like a warm wave. After she finished, Grace stepped out of her slacks and underpants and removed her blouse and bra. Standing naked before the door mirror, she admired her body for several long seconds, turning first one way and then the other, trying to see her buttocks. She could stand to lose a few ounces, perhaps pounds, and inches here and there.
She put in her blue contacts, removed her wig, took out the hairpins, and shook out her bleached blond hair, which reached almost to her shoulders. Using her fingernails, she scraped the gold studs from her ear. Using cotton and polish remover, she rubbed the glue residue that held them on, and slipped on a pair of dark-framed eyeglasses. You are not Grace Smythe anymore. After tonight, Grace Smythe is no longer.
She turned again to look at herself in the mirror, and smiled. She looked, if not just like Casey, like her actual sister. They had always been sisters. Thinking about Casey made her feel giddy, and she blushed. She hugged herself, closed her eyes, and imagined she was in Casey’s embrace, feeling Casey’s beautiful body against hers, their tongues entwined.
Soon it would all be over, and Casey would be hers alone. Grace understood, far better than Casey, that Gary had never belonged in their world. He said he loved Casey, but he could never love her like Grace did. He said he loved Deana, but, despite what he said, Deana was more Grace’s daughter than his. The fact that he had given his sperm didn’t mean anything. There were laboratories that did that without the complications a man brought to a situation. And the lily-hearted asshole had been going to give twenty-five million of Casey’s money to a bunch of Africans for drugs and food, and who gives a shit if they die like they’re supposed to anyway.
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