John Miller - Too Far Gone

Alexa shook her head, and turned the page. On the seventh page, she found an entry highlighted with a marker. Flipping rapidly through the remaining pages, she discovered that there were a lot of highlighted sections of text. These she went back to and read carefully. Seeing no reason for the author to have defaced her all-important work that way, Alexa was certain that Doc, or Grace, had marked the most important sections-the most threatening to LePointe’s reputation.

Alexa noticed something else too. The pages were bound by spiral wire, but they were scored so that a page could be removed without leaving tattered torn edges. By removing pages that way, a strip still connected to the wire by the tiny holes remained after the page was removed. Three consecutive pages had been removed at some point by someone, perhaps Dorothy herself. Why? What could have been worse than what she had left in the book?

When Alexa finally closed the notebook, she took a deep breath and exhaled slowly to lessen her tension, gather her thoughts. The illuminated entries made her feel sick. It seemed obvious that the nurse had never intended the book to be read by anybody else. These revelations of Dorothy Fugate, committed to paper for whatever reason, explained why LePointe had agreed to pay the ransom. The nurse’s words had the power to turn not only LePointe’s world upside down, but Casey’s as well. Alexa’s dilemma was in how to close the distance between her duty as a law enforcement officer and as a human being.

She jumped when her cell phone rang. She reached into her purse for it. It was Manseur. She looked at her watch. It was two A.M.

“Yes, Michael,” she answered.

“I’m at Grace’s house. I think you’d better come over here.”

“Is she being cooperative?”

“At the moment she’s being dead.”

Grace Smythe lived Uptown in a small house, three blocks from St. Charles Avenue. Manseur’s sedan was parked in the driveway. All of the interior lights in the rear unit were burning, and Alexa pulled up to the curb, parked, and as she approached the house, Manseur opened the front door. He handed her a pair of surgical gloves.

“Where is she?” Alexa asked.

“The lady of the house is presently in the bath.”

“How did she die?”

“Appears for the world to be a suicide.”

“Means?”

“Looks like she just slipped under the water. She’d be no less dead whether she started breathing water for the hell of it or took drugs and passed out. She didn’t smother herself or choke on a pill bottle cap, because the whites of her eyes are clear. Well, except for blue contacts.”

“Was she helped along?”

“I’m in Homicide, Alexa. No signs of a struggle. No water splashed on anything.”

“Water dries. Bruises show up later. Maybe somebody killed her.”

“Then it had to be some ghost that floated out through the walls. Windows are all locked from inside. Doors, the same thing. Clothes and mat on the floor were dry is all I do know. No noticeable bruising or marks of any kind on her body. Glove up and follow me.”

In the bedroom, two suitcases open on the bed reminded Alexa of hungry clams.

Manseur said, “I tossed those.”

Grace’s bedroom walls were covered with framed pictures of Casey, or Casey with Grace Smythe, or Casey with Deana, or both women with Deana. Not one picture included Gary West. There were several of Casey’s photo artworks, just as Grace said there would be, but all of them rested on the floor, leaning against the walls. “Jesus,” Alexa murmured.

“Woman was a Caseyholic. You have any idea she was like that?”

“I got some odd vibes. This confirms it.”

Manseur pushed open the bathroom door. Grace Smythe’s nude body lay in the now-drained bathtub. Her hair was blond, as was her pubic hair. A wineglass, lying between her legs, contained some trapped bathwater. The gold ear studs were missing, and Alexa saw that there were no pierce holes where they’d been. Two black wigs were perched on foam heads standing on the back of the toilet. Beside the tub stood a nearly full wine bottle.

“Sure looks like she and Doc Doe were working together, and Ticholet was their worker bee.” Alexa reached down and lifted Grace’s arm to gauge the rigor. “How long, you think?” she asked. “Before or after the ransom drop?”

“Since the interior lights were off, I think this happened during daylight. Well before the drop. The medical examiner can nail it down. Think she did this out of remorse?”

Alexa shrugged. “Maybe she realized she couldn’t get away with it.”

“She left a trail Helen Keller could follow.”

“Her cell phone here?”

“Come with me,” Manseur said. He led Alexa to the kitchen. On the table Manseur had placed a series of evidence bags. “First we have a plane ticket to Paris in her name, and a second-Paris to Madrid, under the name Bridget Longwood. I found a passport in her purse in that name with her picture on it. Bridget the blonde.”

“She’d probably been planning this a good while.”

“I also thought this was interesting,” Manseur said, pointing to several stacks of bills. “There’s fifty thousand there in crisp new currency. Tossed into her suitcase. Enough to hold her until her boyfriend met her with the rest.”

Alexa looked at the pristine bills, and reached for the cell phone on the table. She opened it.

“Last calls are from Casey, who kept getting Grace’s recorded voice.” Alexa hit the MESSAGES key and listened to Casey’s voice on four messages, asking Grace to call her back as soon as she got back.

“And this I found in the garbage.” Manseur opened a plastic grocery store bag and removed a stack of photocopied pages. Alexa recognized them as duplicates of the highlighted pages from Fugate’s diary.

“You read them?” she asked.

“What do you think?” he said. “Are they from the notebook?”

Alexa nodded. “So, what are you going to do with them?”

Manseur’s face showed surprise. “It’s evidence. Turn them over, eventually.”

“Why did Grace have a copy?” Alexa asked. “They’re worthless without the original to authenticate them. Michael, if you place this into evidence now, what do you think the upside will be?”

“Aside from exposing LePointe for the sick sack of crab shells he is? He could do time for kidnapping, holding Sibby and torturing her, or at the least conspiracy to kidnap her.”

“You really think he’ll do time? Who is it who’s always saying, ‘This is New Orleans.’ Evidence vanishes all the time in places that aren’t New Orleans.”

“Okay, I understand. You can take it federal.”

“I could possibly make a case using Veronica Malouf’s testimony. It isn’t going to be my decision to prosecute, but they might file on it, and they might get a conviction in the federal courts. Of course, you realize they’d try him in federal court here in New Orleans. It’s a long shot,” Alexa said.

“And so you would do what? Let it go? Let the old son of a bitch walk?”

Alexa said, “Gary’s found. He’s free now, and he’ll stay that way no matter what we do. LePointe would pay a fortune to get that notebook. Millions.”

“So, he pays us or he pays somebody else?”

Alexa watched as Manseur’s eyes narrowed, his face turning into solid rock. “Wait a minute,” he growled.

Alexa put her hand up, palm out. “Relax, Michael. I needed to make sure you were willing to go to the wall.”

“Tit for tat. Okay.”

“The diary will certainly destroy LePointe’s reputation, and Casey will hate him, but she has to find out the rest, even though she’s already suffered more than anybody deserves to. I think we need to put some serious thought into this. I can’t see where making a case on him will have any negative effect on me, but even disgraced, LePointe could still destroy your career. Might cost you your job.”