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!”
23
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.
Knowing when people are lying is a blessing and a curse. In any event, hunches were not admissible in court, or valid cause for a search warrant.
Kyler Kennedy pulled up out front of the Wests’ home. “You want me to come in with you?” he asked, violating his silence. “Mrs. West knows me, feels comfortable with me since I’ve interviewed her already.”
“Thanks, but this needs to be a girl-to-girl thing,” Alexa said as she climbed from the car, taking her shoulder bag with her.
She closed the door and Kennedy roared off down the street like a teenager who’d just been jilted. Alexa walked to the gate, which was opened by a man built like a professional boxer. He locked his intense eyes on her. “May I help you?” he asked, but his body language said that being accommodating was dead last on his list of things he wanted to do.
Alexa reached into her purse, which caused the man to slip his hand deeper inside his jacket, until she pulled out her badge case. He scrutinized her FBI identification and stepped aside, saying, “Mrs. West is expecting you.” Alexa wondered what the man would have done if she had come out with her Glock instead of her badge. There was no way he could have drawn his gun before Alexa had blown his heart out. Standing so close, he should have kept his right hand free so he could use it to disarm her, were she so inclined to pull a weapon.
Grace, Casey’s assistant and best friend from childhood, opened the front door. “Casey’s taking a shower. She didn’t sleep at all. She thought she looked terrible. Like that’s possible.”
Deana trotted up the hall, hugged Grace’s leg, and, sticking out her bottom lip, peered up at Alexa.
“Hello, Deana,” Alexa said, smiling.
“She’s acting out because of the thing. Come on back to the den,” Grace said, leading the way. Deana took off, running ahead of them, but Grace scooped her up and held her to her side as the child squealed and kicked violently to free herself.
“Me-do-ee!” she protested.
“No, Aunt Grace will help you, Deans. She’s at the age where she wants to do everything herself, like she’s capable. It slows everything to a crawl. Gary spoils her by caving in to her whims. But who am I to say that isn’t how I’d do it?” As they passed by the dining room, Alexa saw a man seated at the table with a tape-recording device in front of him. Grace said, “He’s monitoring the phone in case there’s a ransom demand.” The man looked up from the magazine he was reading and stared at Alexa as she went by. “Casey told me she went to see you at your hotel. We are absolutely thrilled you’re on the case. Casey says she can’t live without Gary, and if anything has happened to him, I’m afraid of what she’ll do to herself.”
Alexa sat on the sleek Italian leather sofa. The coffee table was a long slab of rose-colored hardwood with several lighter wood butterflies to keep the cracks from enlarging. Alexa couldn’t remember the maker’s Japanese name, but she knew he had worked in a studio in the Pacific Northwest and his work was very collectable and valuable. Alexa was familiar with the Avedon image of Andy Warhol’s scarred torso. In the picture Warhol’s hand held up his black leather jacket to allow Richard Avedon’s view camera to capture the damage to his chest that a psychotic woman inflicted by shooting him several times point-blank for not making her a movie star, or some imagined slight. The Frankenstein-like stitching on the lily-white torso-this one enlarged to four-by-five feet, and framed by black lacquered wood-was a visual jackhammer that dominated the warm, sunlit room like a rogue elephant.
Deana went straight to a box of her toys and started lifting them out one by one and throwing them behind her without seeming to care where they landed.
“Casey tells me you two have known each other for a long time.”
“We’ve been thick as thieves since second grade,” Grace said. “Casey is the kindest, most generous person who ever lived, and the most thoughtful. I hung out with her-of course, everybody wanted to, but most of the time it was just us two. Mrs. LePointe, Casey’s grandmother, started taking me with them all over the world when we were twelve-Casey insisted because she was always bored to death when she was with her family by herself. We got in our share of girlish mischief. We were as close as twins.” Grace smiled. “Casey could do no wrong, of course. When she went to boarding school, she begged to take me along, but my parents wouldn’t hear of it. Mrs. LePointe
