opened the back doors and inspected for the Montoya woman's body, yet no one was talking. Rather, everyone stood stone silent as if in mourning. “Have you found the dead girl or not?” she asked a man who introduced himself as Assistant M.E. Brunner.
“ Dr. Coran… heard about you from downtown. The van's empty except for a lot of soaked rags and trash. We're having it towed to a place where we can thoroughly work it,” he said in a nasally voice. Fighting a cold, he sneezed into a handkerchief, knocking his glasses down his nose.
“ We found nothing. Apparently, the perpetrator saw no reason to lock his doors,” said a voice in her ear. She turned to stare at the fiery blue eyes of a determined man. “Lt. Besant, NOPD, Dr. Coran,” said the tall, thin man with a mustache who now stood between her and Brunner. Brunner had chosen to back off. “You should first let us determine if there're any water moccasins or other poisonous snakes inside. We're still removing water and-”
“ Yes, I can see you've removed quite a lot,” she indicated the debris at the foot of the van doors, seeing a license plate swim by, wondering what else had floated out. “Thanks for your concern, Lieutenant, but please, out of my way.”
After donning gloves, Jessica climbed in the van, where the water was still ankle deep. The officer in the front shouted, “The rest of the water'll come out when we hoist it again. Then we can tow it.” Jessica pulled a penlight from her pocket and scanned the rear of the van. She felt Sorrento before she saw him climb in behind her. “Whata we got, Doctor?”
Her light showed the leather viselike head shackle peeking out from beneath the water. She estimated where the hands would have been held, and she found thick blood-crusted chains attached to both seats. Her light telegraphed this fact to Sorrento. He then located the ankle shackles lying beneath the water, heavy and slick like a string of mollusks.
Jessica announced, “It's his killing ground all right.”
“ We've got men in the water, searching,” said Besant. “They are black water divers, capable of locating anyone who might be down there.”
“ Did you find any tools? The damned bone cutter, a scalpel, anything along those lines?” asked Jessica.
Besant shook his head and rubbed the back of his neck. “Cutting tools, no. But we did fetch a shotgun, a completely ruined laptop computer and some audiotapes and a tape machine, all soaked, but with FBI help perhaps we can restore the tapes, and get something out of that computer.”
“ We have that capability here in New Orleans, right, Michael?” Jessica asked.
“ That's right,” replied Sorrento.
Besant turned the laptop and the tapes over, exactly five, the number of known victims. They were labeled by number, not name. “This could be a good sign,” Jessica suggested. “If he has a tape for each victim, and he failed to make one for Selese Montoya, she may still be alive.”
“ You think she's on Lands End, too?” asked Sorrento in a conspiratorial whisper.
“ I'm thinking aloud. If he didn't have time to make a tape, he may not have had time to feed on her, and if Swantor's incapacitated him, she may still be alive.” And you think Swantor's taken her with them.”
“ And if the two of them are kindred spirits… Swantor may be as dangerous as Kenyon,” said Jessica as she and Sorrento climbed from the death van.
“ Taken her where?” asked Nick Besant who'd listened to their conversation.
“ We're not sure, but we have a Coast Guard cutter and a helicopter searching the river for any suspicious- looking watercraft.”
“ Suspicious how?”
Sorrento updated Besant.
Jessica heard only snatches of what Agent Sorrento told Besant, but she heard enough to know that he had made it a simple abduction theory, that Kenyon had commandeered the boat and taken its owner hostage along with the girl. She did hear Sorrento add, “It's a long shot, but one we thought worth pursuing.”
“ I'll see about getting some NOPD water cops out there to help the Coast Guard,” Besant replied.
“ That's the scene, Nick,” lied Sorrento, the look in his eyes told Jessica to play along. Jessica wanted no part of the petty games played between these two, so she instead turned away and returned to Mike's still open trunk to remove the boots and climb back into the car. Once settled in her seat, she opened her laptop to check Cahil's Web page to see if any additional images of Kenyon had been put up on the board.
Sitting amid the mud, shrouded in a fog that chilled her to the bone, Jessica keystroked in the necessary dot-com.
Jessica was startled to find a woman cuffed to a bed in what appeared the same room where she'd seen Kenyon in earlier. The camera motion was the same, too, swaying… bobbing.
The woman on the screen appeared exhausted from long hours of tears and crying. She only whined now, unable it seemed to shout. Her eyes appeared glazed and dull. She looked as if drugged.
Jessica stared at the struggling young woman, presumably Selese Montoya. She felt the helplessness of the poor woman's situation from where she sat in Sorrento's car, unable to affect anything. The victim was likely miles and miles away, and here Jessica sat hopelessly mired in the gloom of a place called Turtle Fork Bend.
She could save Besant and his divers any trouble now. They would not find the body in the river, at least not yet. Selese was being held somewhere, likely Swantor's boat.
“ That's her! I've seen her picture,” said Sorrento, looking in on Jessica. “That's the Montoya woman.”
“ And this is being fed to us live.”
Sorrento had tossed his boots in the trunk, and he'd climbed in beside her. No one else saw the images being fed them. Now the image of the woman in chains was replaced by Kenyon, pacing like an animal. His ankle chain rattling and visible in the shot. He paced. He shouted into the camera, presumably at Swantor, but the words were edited, and at times nothing came out of his open mouth.
“ We've got to locate Swantor and fast. I don't know what his plans are for the next installment, but I can imagine it's not going to get any prettier.”
“ We'll get him,” promised Sorrento. “He belongs to the FBI, not the NOPD. We take him, he's ours. Besant gets to him first, we lose him. It's as simple as that. They'll put him up on charges of murdering Labruto and-”
“ We've got to tell them the Montoya woman's not down there in the river,” Jessica said.
“ No, that's valuable lead time that we need, so we can make the grab, Dr. Coran. Trust me, NOPD just wants to blow this guy away as a cop killer.” “Michael, we have an obligation to cooperate with these guys.”
“ Do you want this guy to stand trial for the string of murders of all his victims in a federal court or not? Louisiana's got some jurisdictional loopholes a homegrown lawyer could run a twenty-ton elephant through. Unless we pick him up, they could spend a year prosecuting him here for cop killing, he goes away to Angora to serve time. I want him the fuck executed. How about you?”
She mulled over Sorrento's logic. It made a certain sense, although she knew the state had the death penalty. Still, she didn't know Besant, but she had gotten the distinct impression that he wanted Kenyon every bit as badly as she did.
“ Just buy us a little time. They were going to do the search here anyway. If we hadn't seen that video…” He backed the car up into an embankment, cut hard to the left and turned the car around, heading back toward the marina.
As they drove away, Jessica had mulled over the names, SquealsLoud, Sweet, Swantor in her mind. Were they all the same man? “All right,” she finally agreed. “We do it our way.”
FIFTEEN
Your eyes are so sharp that you cannot only look through a millstone, but clean through the mind.
Downriver Later that night
Jervis Swantor awoke to the sound of a boat whistle, someone hailing his ship, he feared. It was far too soon to be caught and stopped.
