numbers by juries who actually were peers of the accused or just anti-cop enough to ignore the truth, ignorant enough not to get the evidence, or nullify the charges because they didn’t like prosecutors. She couldn’t know that he wouldn’t fold up on her if his career were to be in jeopardy. She still wanted to trust him, but she wondered if trust was something he hadn’t earned, something that shouldn’t be given out like a door prize. True, Winter liked him, admired him, and trusted him based on one situation that had elevated Manseur to his present position. But any way you cut it, Manseur was no Winter Massey.
She tried to picture all of the people she trusted as much as she did Winter, and the gallery walls of her mind were as painfully bare as those of a museum between exhibitions.
There was a lot to admire about Manseur. He seemed to be a good enough detective in a town-to put it kindly-not known for having a gentle, good, or honest police department. He was a family man, who had a picture of his wife and daughters banded to the visor of his vehicle and in his office.
Manseur’s cell phone played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” breaking Alexa’s train of thought. They drove into the parking lot of the strip mall where she’d left the Bucar.
“Manseur,” he said, pulling to a stop beside the dark green Ford Taurus owned and maintained by the FBI.
“Okay, I’ll tell her,” Manseur finished, closing his phone. “That was Evans. Said to tell you Dr. LePointe heard from Gary West, so thank you for your help.”
“Heard how?”
“Letter in the morning mail. West said he’s coming back tomorrow morning from a little trip he took to go off and commune with nature or some other happy crap.”
“You’re serious?” Alexa said.
“It’s what my boss told me. You think he’s lying?”
“Somebody is.”
“Why?”
“You’re joking, right?” Alexa retorted.
“What makes you so sure it isn’t true?” Manseur asked.
“Well, for one thing, when a person is taking a trip to commune or whatever, would he get somebody to crash into his car and hit him in the head with a pipe? LePointe or somebody close to him wants to shut us down. You’re a detective, Michael. What do you really think?”
“I think maybe you’re being a bit paranoid,” Manseur answered. “You’re convinced there’s a conspiracy.”
“Well, why would I imagine such an odd thing? Let me see…Dr. LePointe most likely had the ability to exercise his will over the woman who savagely murdered his only brother and sister-in-law, leaving their young daughter, who witnessed the horrific scene, orphaned and emotionally devastated. He certainly doesn’t want that known, even in New Orleans. Even a plumber’s assistant in any other city in the country would see that as less than a normal circumstance.”
“Maybe he’s a dedicated professional who can set his personal emotions aside in order to help a very sick woman, who isn’t responsible for her actions, regain her sanity. Look, if I were the superintendent of police, and if one of the beat cops gave my wife a ticket, I wouldn’t have to leave the department because his sergeant, a man under my command and control, put him on a foot beat in the projects to teach him a lesson.”
“What if the patrolman had been on drugs and he murdered your wife, and your daughters saw it happen?”
“In that case, he’d be in prison,” Manseur reasoned. “Hopefully on death row. Would I want to kill him? You’re damned straight I would. But I’m a detective and a professional and I do not take the law into my own hands. And I would have the responsibility to my girls not to end up in jail myself.”
“Right. So you are a professional and you could, if not forgive, let the system deal with him. How would it look if you left the department to become the warden of the prison where the man who murdered your wife was doing time? Say he can be paroled whenever the guards agreed he wasn’t a threat to anybody because he had the drug thing kicked?”
“Saddled with two fashion-conscious young girls and the expenses associated with a deceased wife, like a burial and having to hire babysitters, I could never take the pay cut,” Manseur countered, smiling.
“Don’t you feel a burning need to know the truth?”
“About LePointe’s job and if he gave butcher-girl a few extra shock treatments? Most people would say the more shocks the murderess got, the merrier.”
“In the homicide report, it says that Sibby was Dr. LePointe’s patient before the murders. I can’t help but wonder if a psychiatrist could manipulate a mentally unbalanced person to commit a brutal double homicide. Why, you may ask. Because that would make him guilty of double homicide.”
“Motive?”
“Gee, I don’t know. Maybe his brother beat him at backgammon and said, ‘nanny-nanny boo-boo.’ Look, if Dr. LePointe did, how could he make sure the truth never came to light? Me, I might do something like make sure she could never rat me out by keeping her drugged stupid in my own private hospital. And if I were retiring and someone else were taking over her care, I could make certain the ugly truth would remain buried by making her vanish. I might bribe or blackmail someone to help me pull it off. Maybe I would turn to a nurse who would agree to help me.”
“Why would a nurse agree to do such a thing? The man is a multimillionaire! You’d never convince a jury he could or would do such a thing. You couldn’t convince me.”
“A box of chocolates. A lot more money, which he has access to. But I suspect it is worth looking into. Since we haven’t found a shortcut to Gary West, we actually could take a few minutes to check it out. Especially since it could lead us to his abductors.”
“Dr. LePointe did it in the kitchen with a lunatic.” He turned his basset hound eyes to Alexa. “You might make sure your potential witness, who is insane and couldn’t get anybody to believe her if she said Christmas was in December, remains under your control?” Manseur asked, sarcastically. “At the risk of his freedom?”
“Exactly,” Alexa said. “Say she’s where he can still do that. And it’s not too much of a stretch that it’s connected to Gary West’s disappearance. Suppose we can find and use Sibby to pressure LePointe or Decell to come clean, and maybe that gets us Gary West.”
“Evans called it off.”
“Fine. Let him think you’re off it. This hurricane has him with plenty more to think about than what you’re actually doing. In the meanwhile, we keep following the evidence off his radar.”
“If you are right and this does involve them spiriting Sibby away somewhere, like LePointe’s private torture chamber in his basement-”
“Or another hospital,” Alexa offered.
“Okay, another hospital. The nurse will tell Decell immediately and Decell will tell LePointe and LePointe will tell Jackson Evans and then, best case here, he’ll come down on me with a ten-pound hammer and I’ll be ticketing parked cars for the rest of my career. If I’m lucky.”
“Fine. I’ll go talk to Nurse Fugate myself.”
“It’s a free country. I expect you can defend yourself if anybody wants some answers why you kept going on this after it was over and done. The fact is, I’ve been ordered to report to HQ as soon as I’ve dropped you off. The West case is officially closed until something shows up that merits reopening it.”
“So you’re going to HQ?”
“I have no choice in the matter unless I choose to ignore my superintendent’s direct orders,” Manseur said. “It isn’t like I don’t have pressing cases that I’m ignoring to hunt for escaped lunatics and Baby Big Bucks. If I disobey Evans, he’ll cut me a new you-know-what. This is our stopping place. Go home, Alexa.”
“I’m not leaving,” Alexa said, angry. “Not until Gary West is home with his wife and child. I don’t care how much sway LePointe has or even that we are in New Orleans. If he or Decell are in any way involved in Gary West’s abduction, they’re in my sights. If and when I’m sure they’ve committed a federal crime, I’ll push for an indictment with everything I have. If my director calls me off because he is LePointe’s pal, he’ll have to face the consequences of this pissed-off Mississippi gal who can take whatever punishment his Harvard-going ass can devise, and more, because I know firsthand what real meanness is all about.”
“Men like LePointe don’t go to jail,” Manseur pointed out. “Will not happen.”
“The prisons are full of rich people like him who thought the very same thing,” Alexa snapped.
