John Miller - Too Far Gone

“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.”

The black warden woman had pissed herself in the cabin, but she did what Leland said to do and even grabbed one of the fat warden’s ankles to help Leland move the heavy bastard through the brush over to the boat they’d come to his camp in. The man he’d brought to the camp ought to be dead, but he wasn’t. His head was smashed in where Leland had taken the pipe to him, but he was still breathing, taking in water, and making rattle sounds and gurgling to beat the band.

“You give your promise you’ll wait here without running off while I load this bastard in y’all’s boat?” Leland asked her.

“I won’t run off. I promise.”

Leland knelt, grabbed the warden’s wrists, and lifted him up over his shoulder like a burlap bag filled with grain. Standing, Leland steadied himself under the dead weight.

“Are you going to…kill me?” the woman asked, her voice breaking, tears running down her cheeks.

“Of course,” Leland told her. He sure wasn’t going to let her go and tell people how easy it was to sneak into his camp house. Telling lies to people wasn’t something he did if he could help it.

She started blubbering and shaking. “P-please, p-please. Noooo.”

“It’s all right. My daddy used to say that dying is just the tail end of living. You do what I tell you and you won’t suffer none. I’m good at making it so it don’t hurt.”

Leland stepped onto the boat, causing it to rock, and dropped the dead warden’s sorry ass onto the floor. When he turned around, he saw the warden woman had run off. Leland hated liars worse than gar. He shook his head, grabbed his pipe out from inside his belt, and trotted off to catch her.

“I don’t want to die!” she hollered into the swamp.

“If you don’t want people to kill you,” he hollered as he ran after her, “stay outta their personal places!”

Other than saying he’d learned a lot from her talk at the Marriott, Kyler Kennedy didn’t speak to Alexa during most of the long ride to Casey’s house from HQ. She knew the young detective felt slighted because Manseur hadn’t shared what was happening inside the investigation, which he almost certainly had to believe should have been his to run. Alexa was actually thankful he wasn’t making small talk, because she used the heavy silence to think about the case.

She had requested a Bucar, an official FBI vehicle, from the local FO, and had been assured that one (complete with a GPS mapping system) would be delivered to her at the West residence within the hour. Alexa was also told that the Bureau’s office was being readied for a move out, because the hurricane probably wasn’t going to change course enough to spare New Orleans some serious damage. The decision had been made that nonessential staff and the families of agents were being evacuated from the city the next morning. The office in Baton Rouge would become their temporary HQ until it was safe to return to their offices at the Lakefront in New Orleans.

Alexa trusted Michael Manseur because Winter Massey vouched for him-not something the ex-U.S. deputy marshal, and Alexa’s dearest friend, did often or lightly. If Massey recommended she trust somebody, she would do so without reservation-but she would also verify periodically just to make sure that trust wasn’t misplaced. It wasn’t that Alexa couldn’t trust people-not exactly. Some people were such good liars and manipulators, though, that you either never knew the truth of them, or didn’t learn their agendas until it was too late. She was 99.9 percent certain that Michael Manseur was every bit as trustworthy as he appeared to be-as Massey believed him to be-but having the GPS would free her to travel independently, so they could work the case much more effectively and require fewer bodies. She certainly didn’t trust anyone else in the New Orleans Police Department.

As an FBI agent in the field, Alexa sometimes had to ignore her instincts and go in whatever directions her superiors pointed her. Cases she’d worked on had turned out badly because she’d had to follow orders instead of her own instincts. But, as importantly, she had been wrong on a few occasions and had paid a price for letting her opinions or impressions color an investigation. Her superiors didn’t care that nine times out of ten her initial read on people and situations was right. For instance, in child abductions, she could spend ten minutes with the family and know which, if any, of them were lying and therefore hiding something they were ashamed of, or might even be involved in the crime. She wasn’t psychic-didn’t believe in the ability to see through the eyes of dead people or talk to spirits-but sometimes she could stand at a crime scene and see how things had happened with the clarity of a film.

It is scientific fact that some people have an instinctive ability to detect lies. People can learn to read others with amazing accuracy, because there are scores of facial expressions, eye motions, and facial muscles that act independently and denote a person’s truthfulness in responding to a question with far greater accuracy than either a lie detector or voice-stress analysis. Professors at Duke University who were studying human ability to detect deceit agreed that Alexa Keen was very talented when it came to spotting liars. After she took an advanced course in reading evasion techniques and standard facial tics, she was even better.