“It isn’t going to turn much. You should go now,” he said. “I-10’s bumper-to-bumper, and it’ll be worse in a few hours. The Toyota’s gassed up, and don’t forget to take the charger for your cell phone. Call me when you get there.”
“I wish you’d come with us,” Emily said. “Not like you don’t have weeks of sick leave and vacation time due you.”
“All leaves are canceled. I told you that.”
“Do you arrest people?” Emma asked Alexa.
“Of course she does,” Madge said. “She’s an FBI agent.”
“Sometimes I have to,” Alexa said.
“I’m going to be an FBI agent when I’m big,” Emma said.
“I’m sure the FBI would love to have you, Emma,” Alexa said.
“Do you have a gun like Daddy’s?” she asked immediately.
“Yes, I have a gun identical to your daddy’s,” Alexa said.
“Where is it?”
“I keep it in my purse.”
“You ever shoot anybody dead with your glop?” Emma asked.
“Glock,” Madge said, giggling. “Not glop. Glop is an ice cream that falls on the floor.”
“I’ve never had to shoot anybody with it yet,” Alexa answered.
“Neither has my daddy,” Emma said. “But you could if you wanted to, couldn’t you?”
“If she had to,” Madge corrected, frowning at her little sister.
Emma put her hands flat on the table and tossed her head to get her hair out of her eyes. “Daddy catches murder perks. Did you know that?”
“Yes, I did know he does that,” Alexa said, smiling. “You must be very proud of him.”
“Girls, let’s go see Aunt Janie,” Emily interposed.
“My sister was supposed to have her first communion Sunday,” Emma told Alexa. “I was going to wear a white dress, too, and watch her eat Jesus in front of everybody. Now I can’t because the church might get blown down.”
Madge nudged her little sister. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Emma.”
“I do too,” Emma said, nudging her sister playfully. “I’m going to be an FBI lady arrester when I grow up.”
“She is not,” Madge said to Alexa. “She’s just saying that because you’re one.”
Alexa told Emma, “You can be whatever you like.”
“Yesterday she was going to be a gymnast and get a gold medal,” Madge said. “And before that it was a nun and a teacher and a doctor and a high diver….”
Emma smiled. “When I’m an FBI, I’m going to arrest Madge and put her in jail for being mean to me.”
“That’s silly,” Madge said. “You can’t arrest your own sister.”
The words uttered by an innocent child shot through Alexa’s heart, and she felt her smile melt.
“Okay, girls,” Emily intervened. “Tell Agent Keen good-bye and go get your bags. We’ll leave you two to your work.” She kissed Michael on the lips before following the girls out.
“Something wrong?” Manseur asked Alexa. “You look like somebody just walked across your grave.”
“Nothing,” Alexa replied. “Just thinking about something. You have wonderful women around you.”
“I do at that,” he agreed.
She looked down at the phone numbers in front of her and fought to focus on them.
“They’re very competitive, my two. But they sure love each other,” Manseur commented.
Swallowing, she murmured, “Sisters can be very competitive.”
Alexa felt Manseur’s eyes on her, and she wondered if the detective knew what had happened between her and her sister. That she had arrested Antonia and charged her with a dozen serious federal crimes. She had no idea how widespread that particular knowledge was, because cops swapped more gossip than hairstylists.
56
Leland wasn’t a happy camper, because Doc had come up with yet another requested task, which was accompanied by a threat that he’d take back the new boat. While Doc was explaining how simple his transportation job was going to be, Leland was considering how he could beat the little jerk to death and let the crabs and gators handle the required disposal of his remains. It was just that simple, and ownership papers or not, he’d just keep the boat. Anybody showing up to take it away would be sorry.
Doc was still fussing with his fancy device, measuring with his roll-up ruler, fussing with this wire and that one and scurrying up and down the ladder here, moving it and climbing up into the rafters like a fussy little rat. He did remind Leland of a rat…or a nutria.
The man in the duct-tape suit moved his head once and Leland saw for himself that he was still alive. Leland found it puzzling how some people were so much harder to kill than others. This one was sort of fragile-looking, and he’d been hit hard enough to kill him outright, but here he was not dead.
Doc had been talking on the phone to the woman he was always talking to and making silly sounds and kissing the little phone after he closed it. Leland thought about the pipe he had in the boat that he used to bash critters that he found alive in his traps, and to finish off the garfish he caught before he threw them back in the water for gator food. Gars were useless as balls on a cow. You couldn’t eat them because there were so little meat and too many little bitty bones in them. Plus they ate other fish you could sell, their teeth were like straight pins, and they were mean little suckers.
Once, when Leland was a little boy, he had been sitting on the camp’s dock with his feet in the water, wiggling his toes, when a two-foot-long gar had taken a good bite on Leland’s foot. When Leland jerked his foot to free it, the gar flip-flopped so hard that some of the fish’s teeth broke off right in his foot. Worst part was the foot had gotten infected and, before his daddy finally decided to take him to a doctor, it turned black as a moonless night and the doctor almost had to cut it off. His daddy told the doctor to take it off, but the doctor wouldn’t do it just so Jacklan Ticholet could get back to his camp sooner.
Leland had hated gars since the day he was bitten. He enjoyed catching them and opening up their jaws and wedging a stick in there so they couldn’t ever close their mouths again and they starved on account of it. It was more satisfying than just killing them outright with the pipe. It gave the sneaky mean bastards something to think about while they died—knowing who had done it to them.
Leland sometimes thought about his daddy, who had been a swamper and moonshiner. Leland didn’t know anything about his real mama, because his daddy never talked about her but to say she was a slut who’d spread her legs for anybody she saw. His stepmother hadn’t been any better, and a drunk too.
Leland’s daddy had made him help out with fishing, crabbing, trapping, and making clear liquor from the time he was real little, and he’d learned everything by being hollered at and having the crap knocked out of him as they went about it. His daddy’s favorite thing was making, selling, and drinking moonshine. Leland couldn’t hardly remember a single time when his daddy wasn’t sipping from a jar or a milk jug.
If Leland’s daddy had to go to town, he’d leave Leland locked in the cabin while he was gone. Sometimes he came back when he said he would, but other times he would be gone days, till, stinking drunk, he’d come stumbling in, collapse on his bed, and snore like a mill saw. Sometimes when Leland was hungry his daddy would make him drink whiskey to help him forget about his empty stomach, but Leland never liked the taste or how it made him feel.
Leland grew up without going to any schools, but he knew everything there was to know about the swamp, the bayous, and the lakes around there. He knew where to find the things that you could sell and how to catch them, how to clean them, and how to cook what you needed to eat.
When his stepmother killed his daddy, Leland had taken his body to the landing and got Moody the store owner to call the sheriff to come and fetch his body, which was the last Leland had heard about that. The sheriff had gone to visit his stepmother. She told the sheriff truthfully she’d done it and explained i
t was self-defense. But of course the sheriff, who said he just needed to talk to her, put her right in jail. Leland had gone to her and his daddy’s place, picked out the things worth keeping, like the Nylon 66 .22 and some food, then he’d gotten in her hound dogs and a one-eared cat, and set that cabin full of critters on fire. That done, Leland motored out a ways so the heat didn’t hurt his skin and drank some moonshine in his daddy’s memory while he watched that cabin burn to the ground. He hadn’t done it because Alice Fay shot his daddy dead. He knew if she hadn’t shot him, he would have done it himself. He burned her cabin because he knew she’d figure out that he had gotten all his father’s goods instead of her.
He was fifteen then and he had waited for months, but nobody had come to take him away from his cabin, and so Leland just went on doing what he’d been taught to do, because there wasn’t anything else he knew how to do, or wanted to try. His father’s boat was one he’d traded liquor for, and when the motor got used up, Leland just went to a fishing camp when there weren’t any people around and stole a good one, which he painted black so it looked just like the old one he’d thrown off in the lake. He never got in trouble for doing that, so he figured rich people didn’t spend time looking for their missing motors, just bought another one.
Leland looked up, to see Doc studying him from way up on the ladder.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Doc said.
“I don’t got no penny,” Leland told him.
“Leland,” Doc started. He opened his hooded sweatshirt, probably so Leland could see the handle of the little lady gun he had stuck in his pants. “I know this must be frustrating for you, that the sirens of the bayou are singing to you. I give you my word that as soon as you do your part this evening, you can head off to whatever scuzzy fishing hole your little heart desires and pull fish out of the scummy water with reckless abandon until you have filled up your boat to the gunwales.”
“Gun whales?”
“Fill to the top until you are knee-deep in eels, or whatever it is you collect out of the vast stagnant purgatory you inhabit.”
Leland didn’t know the words, but he didn’t like the whiny tone. He wondered if Doc was mocking him. “When do I get the papers?”
“What papers are you referring to?”
“The owning papers on the boat.”
Doc smiled. “You mean the pink slip? The registration?”
“Yeah, the paper saying it’s mine and nobody else’s.”
“Tonight when you drop me at my car, I will give you your just reward. Scout’s honor. You’ll drop me and I’ll drop you…the owning papers.”
Leland said, “I guess so, but dropping them to me right now would be better.”
“If I gave them to you now, you’d go out that door, get in the boat, and haul ass back to your little home in the sticks. For all I know, if you had the papers in your pocket, you might be tempted to keep time on my head with that pipe.”
“You give me the pink papers and I won’t do nothing but say good-bye-dee-by.”
“And I’ll never see you again, not even in the funny papers?”
Leland nodded his head slowly.
Doc closed his sweatshirt so the gun was hidden and he clapped his hands together. “Absolutely positively tonight. Cross my heart and hope to die. Stick a needle in my eye. Guaranteed. Signed, sealed, and delivered, I’m yours.”
Doc made an X on his chest with his fingers. “Before the sun comes up in the morning, you will be hotfooting your way home to Valhalla aboard your new vessel. You have my most absolute disingenuous word of honor.”
“Okay, then,” Leland said, smiling. “Before the sun comes up again.”
57
There were so many calls made and received from the requested numbers that it was going to take hours to go through them all and cross-reference them. Alexa had Casey’s list of friends and acquaintances for cross-reference.
“How did you get the cellular records so fast? All the different providers—that takes us weeks and we have to raise hell.”
“There are advantages in being FBI. Especially when the director is running interference for you.”
“The Wests’ home phone and cells are clean,” Manseur said. “Calls to and from the friends on her list, stores, tradesmen, attorneys, accountants, LePointe, Grace. No surprises.”
Alexa was looking for specific calls that pointed to a conspiracy. “We’ve got Grace and Casey talking before eight and after nine on most days. Talking with Casey takes up the majority of Grace’s cell minutes. No surprise she doesn’t have much of a life aside from her employer. Through this morning is where the record ends. But in the past two weeks, Grace Smythe has been talking a lot to someone who’s using a paid-in-advance disposable unit. The disposable unit called her several times today. I’d love to know who that is. She probably won’t tell the truth unless we can confront her with evidence, and I don’t want to tip her just yet that we’re interested.”
“She won’t be hard to find,” Manseur said.
“Maybe this prepaid-phone owner is her outside man willing to do the heavy lifting. Who’s in a better position to plan the grab? Grace knows Gary’s schedule. Right after the grab, the prepaid unit calls Grace, and she calls it back a little while later. And several times after we left Casey’s last night they talked back and forth. And she called a travel agent three times; once before the grab, twice after.”
“Call the travel agency and find out if she bought tickets, how many, where and when they’re for. Now, what do you have on LePointe’s lines?”
“LePointe has talked to Decell a lot since the grab, but not once in the weeks before. That makes sense. But LePointe called Fugate scores of times: last call was an hour before you arrived at her house. After that call, LePointe called Decell. Decell called LePointe a few minutes after you got clobbered. Talked three minutes. Minutes after that, LePointe called the president of the bank Decell visited an hour later. Looks like maybe LePointe is going to pay somebody for something.”
“Could there be a ransom demand the doctor hasn’t mentioned?” Alexa asked.
“I don’t see Fugate tied in with Grace. Fugate didn’t make any calls to anyone else on the list, did she?”
“Fugate didn’t call anybody the month before the grab except LePointe. Short-duration calls. She’d been dead two days when Gary was taken. LePointe always called her. A lot of those calls from LePointe were immediate hang-ups. Eighteen ran thirty seconds or longer. It looks like LePointe didn’t know about Fugate’s death until after it happened. He didn’t start frantically calling Fugate until a few hours ago. What was the trigger?” Alexa wondered.
“If LePointe found out the media was hunting for Sibby, he could have started calling Fugate to tell her to circle the wagons. But she doesn’t answer. He panics. When LePointe can’t reach Fugate, Decell goes over to check on her for LePointe—see why she wasn’t taking his calls. Once he gets there he finds her dead and Sibby’s gone. He begins to sanitize the house, but you interrupt him. He pushed you down the stairs and ran away with all the evidence he could carry. Bond saw Decell twenty minutes later go to his office to ditch the evidence. It fits.”
“And then Decell goes to the bank when it’s closed to normal people,” Alexa said. “Decell went to the bank because he found something at Fugate’s house that LePointe needed money to deal with.”
“This is giving me a headache,” Manseur said.
“Or because LePointe got a ransom demand.”
“How do we find Gary West?”
Manseur’s cell phone rang and he answered it.
Alexa watched his face as he listened. “Good work. We need to put out a BOLO on him.” Manseur closed the phone. “Got a hit on a partial fingerprint taken from Gary West’s Volvo.”
“Leland Ticholet?” Alexa guessed.
Manseur nodded and smiled.
“If you can deal with the travel agency, I need to talk to Veronica Malouf.”
“Why?”
“After that, you join Bond watching LePointe’s. I’ll meet you there. We’re going to need some help staying with the money. Can you get GPS trackers?”
“I’ll see if I can. Finding help to follow money sounds easy enough.”
58
When Veronica Malouf answered her door and saw Alexa, her face crumpled.
“This isn’t a good time,” she said, after looking up and down the street.
Alexa heard the volume of the stereo drop and knew Veronica wasn’t alone. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
“I have a friend here.”
“That’s fine. I don’t have time to come in.”
“What do you want?”
“A favor.”
“What kind?” Veronica pulled the door shut behind her.
“I want you to go to the hospital and get me a set of records.”
“I gave you everything I had.”
“On Sibby. But I need the records on another inmate.”
“Who?”
“Leland Ticholet.”
“Who?”
“Swamp Boy.”
“Now?”
“Yes, now.”
“But I never go there after five. The offices are closed except for a skeleton crew. How about early in the morning? I might not be able to come back home. The way back into town is being blocked by highway patrolmen.”
“If they won’t let you through, call me.”
“You’re going to get me fired,” Veronica said weakly.
“That is the least of your worries,” Alexa told her.
59
It was dark when Alexa arrived on St. Charles Avenue, parked, and climbed into Manseur’s car. A man she had never seen before was in the back seat.
“Alexa, Larry Bond. Larry, Agent Keen,” Manseur said.
“Pleasure,” Bond said. Manseur’s ex-partner wasn’t at all what Alexa expected. He was blond, muscular, and tall. His face was all sharp angles and sunburnt. “Decell’s been in the house since he got here from the bank.”
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