don’t like red wine and I didn’t want to drink too much. Please, tell me how to stop it!”
Casey’s face was a luminous white. She looked at the wineglass in front of her in disbelief. “Alexa, what did you do?”
Casey stared at Alexa with an expression that morphed into one of unbridled hatred. “You? You! You bitch! I…can’t die. I can’t! You…” She stiffened suddenly in her chair, locked her eyes on Deana, then turned them back to Alexa. “I…can’t…breee.”
Casey fell sideways to the floor. Alexa rushed around the table, rolled Casey over onto her back, and started CPR compressions.
“Mary! Call 911!” she yelled.
Alexa pressed as hard as she could on Casey’s chest as she counted the compressions. But as hard as she worked, as horrified as she was, she knew that Casey couldn’t be brought back from where she was going. Casey shuddered violently, and then was still.
“Mommy nigh-nigh,” Deana said, waving a partly eaten cookie in the air. “Ahm not your fren,” Deana said, smiling down at Alexa coyly.
Alexa kept working, compressing and blowing into Casey’s open mouth for ten minutes, then gave up. She realized that she was crying, and put her head in her hands. She heard the security guard talking to Mary, but she couldn’t make out the words.
The wind howled, rattling the windows violently like a raging man trying to beat them in to save his children from a fire inside. The moaning and creaking sounded like a chorus of grief-stricken mothers.
As she knelt staring into Casey’s fully dilated and clouded eyes, she was aware of an explosion as an oak tree gave up its grip on the earth, rolled over, and crashed into the long hallway, collapsing the roof and exploding the glass walls.
106
The J. Edgar Hoover Building
Washington, D.C.
March 2006
Alexa was aware of the ticking of the clock on her desk, of each second of precious time passing-the merciless race she was running. Her eyes were locked on a series of still photos depicting two dead bodyguards, whose employer, an industrialist from Akron, had been abducted from his house by unsubs, who’d demanded fifteen million dollars for his safe return. Alexa was painfully aware that the man was going to die unless she and her team could find him before his abductors decided to end his life. The FBI hadn’t been brought in by the local authorities until it was too late for Alexa to get on-site before the deadline had passed to pay the extortionists.
Her gut told her it wouldn’t matter if she was there. She wasn’t as convinced of her gut feelings being right as she once had been.
When her direct line rang, she reached for the receiver reflexively.
“Keen,” she said, automatically.
“How you doing, Alexa?”
“Michael Manseur!” Alexa exclaimed, sitting back in her chair. “How are you?”
“Well, you know as well as I do. You were here for the worst part of the afterward.”
Alexa had spent two days trying to help the city’s residents who had remained in New Orleans and become trapped by the flooding. She would have stayed even longer, but her director had ordered her to return to duty in D.C. and had sent a helicopter specifically to take her out. She had refused to leave until the pilot agreed to take Sibby Danielson from flooded Charity Hospital to safety.
“How are you feeling, Michael?”
“I can’t complain,” Manseur said. “My jaw isn’t wired shut now, and although my sinuses are giving me fits, I’m not drooling through a tube into a cup anymore. I’m back at work, up to my wide butt in alligators. Murders are way down, you know. City’s more like Mayberry RFD these days, since we exported our worst offenders.”
All of the evidence she and Manseur had collected had been destroyed by the floodwaters that had slammed into the NOPD’s property and evidence rooms. NOPD had also lost all case files and records that weren’t computerized. The same had happened to courthouse files, leaving a few hundred lucky criminals free-unless they continued their evil ways, which every cop knew most of them would, they’d never be brought to justice.
“Alligators.” Alexa laughed. “Figuratively this time, I hope.”
“We’re seeing a lot of progress, given everything. Emily and the girls hope to be coming back in a few weeks. I’ve got mixed feelings about that. We don’t know what all’s in the soil and the water, but the water’s been poison long as I can remember. No schools open yet, and the city is broke, like always. It’s never going to be like it was, but it’s where I live.”
“I see Jackson Evans wound up in Detroit.”
“Yeah, and good riddance. The new chief is all business, and he hates microphones and cameras.”
There was a long silence.
“What can I do for you, Michael?”
“Did you get the tape I sent?”
“Yes, I did. I’m sorry, I haven’t had time to watch it.”
“No hurry. Reason I called, I thought I should catch you up on what’s going on down here with you-know- who.”
Alexa closed her eyes and rubbed them gently. “Yeah, I’ve been meaning to call you too. You know how it is. So, what’s the latest?”
“Dr. LePointe hasn’t been indicted yet. You know where that’s at?”
“The federal prosecutor has offered Dr. LePointe a deal. I tried. I truly did. Interesting speculation, coincidences, circumstantial evidence, and the word of a lunatic, who is less than presentable to a jury against LePointe. Twenty-five years of heavy drugs-and a lobotomy, to boot. And after what Casey did, LePointe doesn’t look so despicable.”
“Sibby’s in a nice facility in Virginia, I understand.”
“Yes. I’ve been to visit her. Dr. LePointe set aside enough money to keep her wherever she likes. And he doesn’t know where she is.” The bastard. Since Alexa had recorded proof of what Casey had done, LePointe’s lawyers had managed to cast the public’s attention on Casey’s bad deeds, and to blunt the truth of what he had done, who he really was. What he and Nurse Fugate had done to Sibby had become mostly what Nurse Fugate had done due to some misguided loyalty blended with a sickness that LePointe, a very busy and dedicated professional who only wished to help Sibby, had been unaware of. No witnesses came forth to dispute his assertion of his naive innocence and misplaced trust in Fugate. It was disgusting, though hardly surprising.
“His wife, Sarah, passed away day before yesterday. If I were him, I’d take a long trip to Europe and never come back. He has nothing but time on his hands now-since the trusts are being run by a bunch of bankers and lawyers, and he’s surrendered his license to practice at the request of the medical ethics board.”
“He belongs in prison.”
“You don’t think what’s happened to him is worse than jail? He’s disgraced. He’s lost everything he gives a damn about. The media’s roasted him. People openly mock him. Despite the evidence, most people don’t really believe Casey was the insane psychopath LePointe claims she was.”
“Disgrace is temporary if you’re rich enough. He’s still very, very rich.”
“He is. And poor Leland Ticholet is on death row. His lawyers are trying to have his conviction overturned and him committed because he’s insane. Big surprise. He never denied any of it.”
“He wasn’t competent to stand trial,” Alexa said. She had testified at his trial, and he’d had to be taken from the courtroom because he had spent the time she was testifying interrupting the proceedings to ask her when she was giving him a new boat, and to yell out that she’d lied to him. “He never understood that he was on trial for his life.”
“The ME identified the poison that Casey used on Grace and herself. It was a mixture of jellyfish venom and something to get it in the bloodstream through the stomach wall. Very rare. Took a top lab to identify it. Iritableji or
