Too Far Gone (8 page)

20

Betty Crocker felt like an idiot as she followed Parnell's wide backside through the weeds and around the stunted trees and bushes. She had to fight laughing out loud, because the fool kept waving his hand around in the air, gesturing commands. The trouble was Parnell hadn't told her what his signals meant. As far as she could tell, he could have been saying anything from “Follow me” to “Gal, I've got me some itchy-ass hemorrhoids.”

She was carrying the video camera and was tempted to film him from behind, but she was afraid she'd erase the hulk toting up into his private dwelling that sheet-wrapped object Parnell said was probably a gator with its tail chopped off.

Wildlife and Fisheries Officer-in-Training Betty Crocker followed the wide-ass fool Elliot Parnell onto the blistered-wood dock that anchored the floating-on-rusting-oil-drums, crooked little shack. Betty was careful to avoid the pool of crusted blood that looked like a pizza-sized scab that had flies scrambling over it and buzzing in the warm still air. On the dock, just underneath the tin porch roof, bowls of rusted fishing hooks and all manner of spring-loaded traps and empty-halfway-up scum-coated milk jugs were stacked helter-skelter on chicken-wire crab traps. The shack's windows were covered inside with burlap sheets.

Parnell was sweating, so his shirt looked like he'd been juicing oranges using his armpits. The gun, a Smith & Wesson .38, in his hand was rock-steady. He reached out and slowly turned the shack's doorknob.

“It's not locked.” Officer Parnell's voice creaked just like the hinges on the door.

Pushing it open, Parnell looked inside. He took a step into the shack and his right foot crashed through rotten boards to his left knee. His right leg folded, causing him to bang his knee.

“Sheee-IT!” he bellowed.

Betty stared at him, trying not to laugh at what felt like a pratfall, but wasn't.

“My damn leg's caught in something. Shit! What was that!?”

Betty set the camera down and grabbed his left arm and pulled him up while he used his bent leg for additional leverage. When his leg came out of the hole, there was a large band of something wrapped around his boot. To Betty's horror, it flopped and writhed hideously, then fell back into the hole. “Moccasin! It was a cottonmouth!” he screamed.

“You git bit?” she asked.

“Can't bite through my boots. It was sliding all over my foot. If I hadn't been wearing my snake-proofs, I'd be good as dead.” Parnell sat back in the doorway, pulling off his boot. Using his fingers as well as his eyes, he explored his naked fish-belly-white ankle with veins in it looking like blue lightning strikes.

“It was a damned booby trap!” He leaned forward and looked down. “Two of the biggest cottonmouth bastards I ever saw! Christ almighty.” He laughed nervously as he stood and, holding on to the doorjamb, tested the floor beyond the rotten spot. When he found solid flooring, he moved into the room. “Careful, Betty. Wait a second.”

“I don't want none of them snakes,” she said, watching him lift a hinged plywood panel that he flipped over to cover the trap. She walked in and let her eyes grow accustomed to the dim interior and her nose to the remarkable stench comprised of God knew what all. The room was as cluttered as a junkyard storeroom and she knew she would have to be careful in case there were more booby traps, or snakes.

“Smells like a crack house,” she muttered.

“You been in a crack house?” Parnell smarted off.

Her eyes found a cot with a sheet covering something that appeared to be hiding a more human than alligator form beneath.

“Careful,” Parnell warned as she approached the cot. He was aiming his revolver at the still form.

“Your alligator's breathing,” Betty said. She leaned out, reached down, and threw back the sheet.

“Good God!” she said as air rushed from her lungs. “It's a man. He's been beat to shit.”

“You sure he's alive?” Parnell said.

“Put that gun away,” Betty said after noticing Parnell was still aiming his gun at the poor man. She felt the guy's neck. “He's got a pulse.”

“We need to call this in to the sheriff.” Parnell was looking around, probably hoping to find a fresh alligator skin or two in the mess, because that was the kind of prick Parnell was. A half-dead man and he's still looking for some evidence on Leland Ticholet, Betty thought. Just itching to write a damn citation, like he was paid by the piece.

“I need something to wash off his face,” she said. “Call for help.”

As she started looking for some water, she noticed Parnell slapping at his belt. “My radio,” he said.

“You must have left it on the boat.”

“No, I think I set it down when I was looking at the video out there. Go get it.”

“What?”

“I'm in charge, Officer Crocker. Go get the radio.”

“You going to help this man while I'm gone, or search for alligator skins? He's your responsibility. He got to be cleaned up—top to bottom.”

“Okay,” Parnell said, “I'll go.”

“And bring the first-aid kit,” she said. She would have bet that Parnell had never changed a baby diaper, much less cleaned up a grown man.

Betty found a mason jar and filled it with questionable water from the faucet—rainwater that came from the cistern beside the cabin. For several minutes, she worked to clean the man's head wound and soften the dried blood so she could wipe it off. He was in his thirties, she figured. His long blond hair was matted with blood. He opened his mouth and said something that sounded to Betty like “Ca…zah?”

“I'm here to help you, sir.” She lifted his head, put the jar to his lips, and poured some water in, which he managed to swallow. He opened his eyes and she saw that the right pupil was a tight pinpoint set in a bright blue iris; the other was fully dilated. Her mother was a nurse's aide and she had told Betty what different-sized eyes meant. “You going to be just good as new. Betty gone get you to the hospital, and they'll fix your concussion.”

Finally she heard the door open and Parnell's lazy ass coming back. He stopped just behind her.

“He's going to be all right, I think. He's breathing, and took some water. He got himself a concussion. Did you bring the first-aid kit?”

When Parnell didn't say anything, she turned and looked up. Betty's eyes went first to the face—the features covered with tiny red droplets, the forehead filled with crisscrossed scars. She let her gaze shift downward to take in the gore-streaked length of pipe clenched tightly in Leland Ticholet's large hand, inches from her face. Betty felt her bladder give and the warm wetness as it flowed between her legs and pooled around her knees.

She opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out.

21

Despite the number of other boxes in Manseur's office, he pointed to the one that had arrived while they'd been out of the office. “The LePointe files.”

Alexa was closest, so she picked it up. The cardboard box was roughly the size typing paper came in, but with flaps that were secured with thin cord wrapped under hard plastic disks the size of quarters. On the end and top someone had used a permanent marker to write the subjects' names, a pair of consecutive case numbers, and the date of the crime. A bright orange sticker that said
CLOSED
had been added. As she lifted the box to the conference table, Alexa was struck by how remarkably light it was.

While Manseur looked on, she unwound the cording and opened the flaps. Inside there were file folders, one tabbed with the name Curry LePointe and the second with the name Rebecca LePointe. There were no more than ten sheets of paper in each file, which consisted of the medical examiner's report on the cause of the deaths; a sketch of the crime scene by homicide detectives, indicating the locations of the bodies; and photocopied pages of the detectives' spiral case notebooks.

“This is a very thin case file,” Alexa said. “Where are the autopsy pictures, the crime-scene photos?”

“Should all be in there,” Manseur said.

“Well, they aren't. So where would the rest be?”

“No idea. Maybe it got misfiled in another case box, lost, or stolen. Taken as a souvenir or something. Those were different days for the department, to say the least.”

Alexa was familiar enough with the New Orleans PD's reputation for corruption and criminality that came to a head in the early nineties, when the FBI came in and arrested a large number of cops, a lot of whom went to jail, two ending up on death row. The FBI had almost taken over the department, and state troopers had been used to patrol the streets alongside the cops who hadn't been arrested in the initial days of the crackdown. It was one of the reasons New Orleans cops didn't care for the FBI—like they needed more reasons than the cops in most other cities had collected in their own day-to-day dealings with the Bureau.

Alexa held up the detectives' report. “Investigating detectives were a Harvey Suggs and Robert Bryce. They still around?”

“Both are dead,” Manseur said.

“Wasn't Suggs your predecessor? Wasn't he murdered when Winter Massey…”

Manseur nodded. “Suggs was beaten to death with an aluminum baseball bat by a crooked businessman named Jerry Bennett, who murdered a judge and his wife. Bryce was dead before I got here—killed by Suggs—and totally crooked.”

“So, the files could have been sanitized by those two detectives for some reason.”

Manseur nodded, took some of the papers from her, and thumbed through them, reading. “Reason would be money.”

Alexa said, “The patrolman who answered the alarm that night was named Kenneth Decell. He suffered an injury when he disarmed the perpetrator, Sibby Danielson. The name
Decell
seems familiar to me.”

“Decell was at the Wests' house last night when we got there. Red-haired fellow in his early fifties. Been a private detective since he retired about ten years ago. Mostly rich people uptown call him when they have family that get themselves entangled with issues of the unpleasant type. Police problems, runaway or out-of-control kids or spouses, extortion threats, cheating husbands or wives, background checks on people they are curious about. Security issues.”

“He bent?”

“Bent? Oh.” Manseur shrugged. “More than some, less than others. He was a detective and…” Manseur turned his sad eyes to hers. “New Orleans has all kinds of people in it. Some rich.”

“Expensive, is he?”

“People Decell works for don't complain about price when the work gets the results they want. He's got a pretty big operation, with lots of licensed investigators. Some were cops, some weren't. He's well connected.”

“As in, to the mob?”

Manseur shrugged. “As in, to lawyers, prosecutors, police officials, politicians, and the like. Around here more people go to prison for doing other people favors than for stealing cars. ‘Do me one' is a way of life. A friend will help you move across town today, and in return he might ask you to help him move a body across town.”

Alexa laughed. Then she said, “The murderer was a twenty-one-year-old woman. Why did she kill them?”

“She was crazy. It was a long time ago. The reasons for things that happen here aren't always written down accurately. Most people on the job in New Orleans could teach a creative writing course. Back when that report was written, our detectives wrote more fiction than Anne Rice.”

“That still the case?”

“I wouldn't know for sure, naturally.”

Alexa went over to Manseur's computer, and within seconds she had the LePointe murders' media coverage on the screen. “Says here that Sibhon Danielson was a paranoid schizophrenic. Committed to a state facility for the criminally insane.”

“She went by ‘Sibby,'” Manseur said.

“Maybe it's just me, but I find it an odd coincidence that Dr. LePointe, the brother and brother-in-law of the victims, is a psychiatrist who's an expert on
criminal
psychology. Don't you find that strange?”

“I find it an interesting coincidence,” Manseur said. “But in New Orleans, painting your privates blue and dancing in the street with a bottle in your hand while people file past isn't considered noteworthy. Curry LePointe was the star of that family. William was smart, but without the charisma and personality his big brother Curry had.”

Alexa said, “I wonder if there was any connection between our psychopath and Dr. LePointe
before
the murders. But I guess, however interesting all this is, the question for us is whether we waste valuable time chasing down twenty-six-year-old murder information.”

“I doubt this has anything to do with finding Gary West. It's a sidetrack of the investigation at best. And I'm not writing a book or investigating for some cold-case television show,” Manseur said.

“Seeing that we're talking about Dr. LePointe—the number-one philanthropist and authority on mental defectives—the LePointe murders are best left to historians?”

“You're catching on,” Manseur said, chuckling. “Let the big sleeping dogs lie if and when possible.”

“You're not going to be any fun,” Alexa said.

At that moment Manseur's office door flew open and Jackson Evans strode in stiffly with a grim expression on his face.

“I need a progress report,” he said, crossing his arms.

Manseur gave him a quick rundown of the physical evidence they'd collected. He explained that neither the canvass of the area near the Volvo nor the waitress's interview had produced anything helpful.

“You're the big-deal expert, Alexa,” Evans said. “Is Gary West dead or alive?”

“I'd say the odds that he is alive depend directly on who has him—”

“If anyone
does
have him,” Evans interrupted.

“And why they have him. If Gary was the victim of a road-rage incident, he could be dead or seriously injured and lying in a backyard or a ditch nearby. If it was a murder for hire or some other reason, like revenge, he'd have likely been left in the Volvo.”

“Unless they didn't want a body found,” Manseur added.

“If he was taken out of the car alive, it means there was a reason to go to the trouble and risk being seen grabbing him. Hopefully he's still alive. If so, the most likely reason for that is because he's been kidnapped for ransom. In that case, he might live through it, depending on several factors.”

“Like?” Evans demanded.

“The odds of us retrieving him alive—if he doesn't know his kidnappers' identities, and if a ransom is demanded and paid—may be as high as eighty percent.”

“It's still possible he staged it,” Evans said.

“It took some concerted effort if he did,” Manseur said.

Alexa said, “In my experience, people rarely beat themselves in the head. Maybe fingerprint evidence from the Volvo will give us a perp, but I don't think it will. If West was kidnapped, I seriously doubt the person who did it was some disorganized, naked-fingered, liquored-up, or cracked-out thug.”

“Naked-fingered? Is that FBI terminology?” Evans asked sarcastically.

“It's the latest in hot Bureau-speak,” she said without missing a beat.

Jackson Evans looked down at the open evidence box on the table beside him and turned his head so he could read the writing on the flap. “The LePointe murders? What's this, Michael?”

“First thing this morning the media requested the LePointe homicides' file from seventy-nine,” Manseur said. “So I had them delivered here so I could see what was in them the press might be interested in.”

“The twenty-fifth anniversary of the murders,” Evans said, quickly, “so maybe they're just looking into it for some prurient media reason.”

“Could be,” Manseur agreed.

“My math sucks,” Alexa said, “but the twenty-fifth anniversary was last year. And it occurred in July, not August. Timing's wrong.”

“Good move, grabbing the files. You find anything interesting?” Evans asked Manseur, ignoring Alexa.

“No, but the media sure will,” Alexa said.

“Like…?”

“Like what isn't there,” she said. “That box is like an Egyptian tomb that has been pilfered until all that's left inside is a few old bones scattered about. The media gets their hands on that box, there's a bigger story in the missing items than there would have been if it were complete.”

“What happened to the rest of it?” Evans asked.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Manseur said.

“Who had access to it last?” Evans asked.

Manseur picked up the phone and dialed the evidence morgue.

“Percy, did you inventory the contents of that evidence box you sent me? Read me the sheet.” Manseur took out a pen and made notes as he listened. “Okay, and can you check and see who checked out the box last and what the inventory sheet said was in it when it was last checked out? You find that out for me?” He covered the receiver with a hand. “We got what was in it when he sent it to me.”

Thirty seconds later Manseur grew alert as Percy found the list. “Yes. Okay.” Manseur scribbled as he listened, thanked the evidence clerk, and hung up. “File was last checked out by Harvey Suggs, nine years ago. According to the paperwork, it was inventoried by the clerk last time it was checked out. The original list had a meat cleaver, fingerprint cards on Danielson, the interviews conducted, Sibby Danielson's psychiatric evaluation, the autopsy report, and transcripts from the sanity hearing, as well as Kenneth Decell's incident report.”

“Okay,” Evans said, sourly. “Let's concentrate on locating Gary West. I spoke to Dr. LePointe thirty minutes ago and there's been no ransom demand.” He focused on Alexa. “I mentioned your assistance was continuing and he seemed genuinely surprised.”

“He had to have called Director Bender to get me on board,” Alexa said.

“I don't think so,” Evans replied. “Anyway, you two keep me posted. I don't want to get blindsided here. Not like I don't have other things to keep me occupied. They expect me to deal with evacuation plans, scheduling officers, and making sure of a million things key to survival of thousands and thousands, not just one rich brat who's probably on a bender. If West was beat up, it was probably by some crackhead or pimp. We're facing a potential disaster of biblical proportions if this hurricane does what the experts say. You find Gary West and I'll handle everything else.”

“Gary West is no substance abuser,” Alexa said, her anger rising. “From everything we've learned, he has never shown any side but that of loving and dedicated husband and father.”

Manseur nodded. “That's a fact, sir.”

Evans ignored their words, flipped open his cell phone, and swept from the room as suddenly as he had come in, not bothering to close the door behind him. Alexa saw a phalanx of his staff clustered out in the open area, awaiting their leader.

“Sisyphus,” Alexa muttered.

“What?” Manseur asked.

“Mythology. Evans is pushing a giant ball of crap up the mountain so he can roll it down on us.”

“If Dr. LePointe didn't call your director, who the hell did?” Manseur asked.

“The only other person I know of who has the clout,” Alexa said, smiling to herself. She took her cell phone from her purse and, after consulting the slip of paper Casey had given her in her hotel room, started to dial the private number that was on the card, but stopped. “It's time to talk to Casey West again. Face-to-face, I think.”

“You want to handle that end? I'll go see what the evidence lab staff has got, and meet you later,” Manseur told her. “I'll have Kennedy drop you off and I can pick you up myself when you're done. Why didn't you mention the twenty-five million?”

“It isn't my job to keep Evans informed about every little thing, knowing he'll pass it up the chain. Besides, he has too much on his mind already. What with saving the city from God's plan and all.”