Too Far Gone (4 page)

“I want to go on, if you need more information,” Casey said.

“The picture,” Kennedy said as he stood.

“I'll send it in the morning,” LePointe said. “Now, my niece needs to get some rest.”

“But—” Casey protested.

“It's settled,” LePointe said authoritatively. “I'm the doctor. I'll have the picture dropped off at your office, Detective. If that's acceptable?”

“Certainly, sir,” Kennedy said.

“Will you be working on finding Gary, Agent Keen?” Casey asked.

“I'm due to leave in the morning,” Alexa said. “Actually, I should get back to the Marriott.”

Casey crossed the room, took a framed picture from the shelves, slipped it out of the frame, and handed Kennedy the picture, at an angle that precluded Alexa from seeing it.

“You are in good hands, Mrs. West,” Alexa said, and left Casey, LePointe, and Kennedy in the kitchen. As she strode up the hallway toward the front door, her footsteps muted by the Oriental runners, she looked at the art on the walls for the first time. She loved art and had taken an advanced art appreciation class in college, so she knew that the paintings she saw were very valuable. Out of the ten paintings she saw on her way out, she recognized a Joan Miró oil she had seen in a book of his work, and a Marc Chagall. There was a large Rothko oil in the dining room. In a den she saw several framed Avedon photographs, including an incredibly large picture of Andy Warhol's wounded torso. The mantel in that room held dozens of framed pictures, most of which included Gary West. He was a strikingly handsome man.

When Alexa exited the house, Manseur was walking back from the street. The superintendent and the other detectives had left or were driving away.

“So, what you think?” he asked her.

“I think I need to go back to the hotel.”

“So, you think there's anything to this?” he asked her as they walked toward the gate. “Do you think he could have been abducted?”

“I think you have a D11 on your hands.”

“That FBI jargon for something?”

“It's a model of a bulldozer,” Alexa said. “I'm referring to Dr. LePointe. I suspect he's right that Gary West will come home. If not, maybe Dr. LePointe will allow your Detective Kennedy to start some sort of investigation. Two things I can tell you for certain.”

“What's that?”

“Casey West worships her husband, and Dr. LePointe is accustomed to calling the tunes.”

7

Elliot Parnell, as a Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries enforcement officer, was keeping his eye on the hurricane because it could affect his beat adversely. If there was a mandatory evacuation, he would have to run all over the lakes and channels making residents leave. Most of the people who lived in his district were dumb as snakes, and he'd have his work cut out for him. He hoped the storm turned: he had a lot more important job to do than shooing cow-brained swampers from their hovels.

Parnell was a patient man. He had been employed as an enforcement officer for the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Commission for eighteen years. For each of those years—night and day in every kind of weather condition—he had been outrunning scofflaws when necessary, outsmarting them when possible. His job was to catch offenders who dared to take more game or fish than the laws of Louisiana allowed, hunt or fish without procuring the proper licenses, hunt or fish out of season, hunt or fish in restricted areas, sell game or fish, or poach protected animals.

Elliot Parnell never let a transgressor off with only a warning, unless he knew he couldn't make a case, and the perp didn't know it. If he had a man, woman, or child dead to rights, he would issue the citation, do whatever confiscating the law allowed, and testify against them if the case went to court. Parnell had no patience with any type of violator, but he had a special hard-on for people who killed alligators without the proper permits. Leland Ticholet was one of the worst offenders in the state. Any game and fish regulation that a man could break, Ticholet broke. Parnell had caught him on several occasions, and had written him numerous summonses, but mostly the judges let him go. Ticholet was as smart as instincts and criminal genetics could make a man. Parnell had joked that Ticholet's whole family had been thumbing their noses at the law for so many generations that evolution had them emerging from the womb with the ends of their noses and their thumbs already calloused.

Parnell preferred to work alone, unless he was after poachers. A poacher could be dangerous. Although Parnell carried a Colt .38, it was best to have someone watching your back. Lawbreakers could get testy or desperate, and sometimes wardens got shot, cut up, or just plain vanished. With people in the swamps killing deer, ducks, and gators out of season and cooking their methamphetamine, getting shot was a very real prospect.

Parnell looked over at the rookie-in-training, Wildlife and Fisheries Enforcement Officer Betty Crocker. She was asleep, snoring with her mouth open. Betty swore she didn't mind people making jokes about her name, because she'd heard them all in her twenty-one years, and claimed she liked having a name people remembered easily. Some would have changed their names, but not her. She wasn't right for the job, and not just because she was a black woman from the projects. Elliot wasn't prejudiced. He'd had sex with black prostitutes when he was drunk. Probably he'd have sex with Crocker given the right circumstances.

A week earlier Elliot Parnell had spotted Ticholet driving a new boat across the lake. People like Leland couldn't purchase such valuable items unless they were doing something very profitable, and such people could only make that sort of money illegally. Two days after that, Parnell had set up a digital video camera on a tree pointed so's to capture activity on Leland's camp house and dock. Triggered by motion of a boat or someone on the dock, the camera would record, and whatever the subject unloaded or skinned would be captured by the digital video camera, and Elliot would play it in court, and Leland would regret it. The expensive new boat would become property of the Wildlife and Fisheries Commission.

All Elliot needed was an image of Leland Ticholet pulling one gator carcass out of his boat onto the dock—just one.

8

Manseur had driven a good two miles before he spoke. “Would have been nice if you'd mentioned you and Jackson Evans knew each other,” he said.

“He had only praise for me, right?”

“He didn't go into any detail. But if he was ever in love with you, he's gotten over it.”

Alexa laughed.

“He wasn't happy about seeing you at the scene.”

“What was he telling you on the porch?”

“Just that Mr. Gary West married up. There's a prenuptial agreement. He gets nothing but a small allowance to live on, which he wastes. He's something of an embarrassment to the family. He is verbal about his extremely liberal points of view, which are not always in line with those LePointe thinks are constructive. He's also frivolous, and has Casey pouring money into causes like the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the like. The LePointes have their own bylaws and Gary West is never going to get his hands on any of the LePointe fortune. The impression I got is that LePointe hopes his niece will come to her senses and end the relationship. He thinks this abduction is just Gary West playing some game for sympathy or to get attention.”

“And yet Gary's wife seems genuinely distraught,” Alexa pointed out. “It's possible she agrees with her husband's politics, or at least respects his idealism.”

“Either way, Evans wants this deal handled as quickly as possible. It looks like Katrina is going to kick our ass. This storm keeps coming our way, we're likely to have a lot of wind damage, electricity out, a little looting, and maybe some flooding. We've been waiting for the big one for years.”

“The big one?”

“The whole city is below sea level, surrounded by levees and pumps. Someday some mean-ass hurricane is going to push the Mississippi River down her throat and Lake Pontchartrain up her butt.”

9

Back in her hotel room, Alexa decided to take a hot bath and get a couple of hours' sleep before she left. After she got out of the tub, she put on her robe and switched on the TV, changing channels until she found the weather channel.

“Now for the latest on Hurricane Katrina,”
the weatherwoman anchor was saying.
“Katrina entered the Gulf of Mexico yesterday after leaving a path of destruction in South Florida. She has been gathering strength due to the extremely warm waters. Katrina is now a category three, with measured winds in excess of 130 miles per hour. The National Weather Service's Hurricane Center is predicting this storm will keep gathering strength and will be a category four by late tonight. It could well be a category five before it makes landfall on Sunday night.

“For reference, Hurricane Camille, which decimated the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 1969, was a category four when it made landfall. Two hundred and fifty six people died due to the storm surge.”

Alexa turned off the set. She would be long gone before the storm was within five hundred miles of the coast. She was towel-drying her short hair when she heard a light, but persistent, tapping at her door. Stopping at her purse for her Glock, she put her eye to the peep lens and was met by the sight of Casey West nervously chewing on her bottom lip.

Alexa returned the gun to her purse, slipped the bolt, and opened the door.

Casey smiled uncertainly. “Please forgive my intrusion. I know it's really late…but I was hoping I could talk to you in private.”

“How did you find me?”

“I heard you say you were staying here.”

“I didn't say which room.” Alexa hadn't moved an inch or changed her facial expression since opening the door. This was a complication she didn't need, and guests' room numbers were not supposed to be given out to anybody.

“I know my uncle well enough to know that he probably told everybody that Gary is a gold digger. Probably said that if there was a kidnapping, Gary staged it himself, or something equally absurd. I know nobody's looking very hard, or as hard as they should be, and I have to change that.”

“I understand there was a prenuptial agreement,” Alexa said.

“There was. But if Gary is alive on Tuesday, he will be presented with a check for twenty-five million dollars.”

“Come in,” Alexa said.

10

When it came to reading people, Alexa Keen's instincts were like radar. Hard-learned lessons about human behavior had left deep scars on her psyche. She and her younger sister, both products of her dark-skinned mother's liaisons with white men of dubious reputation, had resided in a series of foster homes in Mississippi. Those many residential assignations had been homes with every sort of person imaginable—some decent, some interested in the accompanying state funds, and a couple of them inhabited by predatory beasts.

“First off,” Casey said, “Gary did not marry me for my money.”

Alexa said nothing.

“When I met Gary, I was staying in New York doing a photography internship with Richard Avedon. That's when I saw Gary's play,
Trailer Park Tales,
which was off-off-Broadway. It was both funny and poignant—a comedy, but tragic, and showed a sensitivity that floored me. Gary is a highly intelligent, very funny, gloriously handsome—a complex individual who tolerates no bullshit. He isn't impressed by wealth or the people who have and hoard it. He's into justice for all, culture for the masses, food for the hungry, and affordable health care for the sick. He cries when he sees starving children on television.

“Despite the differences in our backgrounds, we hit it off. For the first time in my life I felt important—and appreciated for who I really am, on the inside. We talked for hours and hours on the phone and we fell in love like normal people do. With other men I dated, I was never sure it wasn't my money that interested them—or I was convinced it was. He didn't even know about my ties to money until after he'd proposed and I'd accepted. He was shocked by it and he actually tried to back out of the commitment because of it. He is a proud man, and he has never once taken advantage of the fact that he can have whatever he desires that my money can buy. He's never even let me finance a play, even though I've begged him to allow me to. He doesn't spend any of my money on himself. He goes out of his way to ground Deana and me, which is an uphill battle, because I've been spoiled rotten since birth. Gary is the best of me. Without him I am just another miserable, shallow rich girl.”

“Tell me about the prenup,” Alexa said.

“That's standard with all marriages in the family. Only a blood LePointe can inherit more than a spousal allowance, sit in control of the foundations, direct the dispersal of interest, or make decisions on grants and investments. Did my uncle imply that if I divorce him, Gary gets nothing?”

“I got a short-form version. But yes, I got that impression.”

“What my uncle told you was probably a half-truth to make his personal opinion of Gary valid. It is fact that Gary can't ever get his hands on any of the LePointe holdings because he isn't a blood heir. His allowance is two hundred thousand a year, which is only meant to cover his personal expenses. Most of that Gary gives away. The trust pays our household bills, pays the help, all expenses related to the vehicles and insurances, food, et cetera. There are two separate prenuptial agreements, both of which Gary signed. One never changes. The other runs out on our fifth anniversary and isn't connected to the LePointes. Five years ago, when I decided to marry Gary against my uncle's wishes, I had my lawyers draw up a prenup to cover my personal assets. On Tuesday, Gary will get one quarter of everything I have—twenty-five million. It will be his with no strings attached, to do with as he sees fit. Period.”

“A quarter of your assets.”

“I had a trust from my maternal grandfather that I could draw living expenses from until I was twenty-five. When I turned twenty-five I inherited half of my mother's estate. When Deana was born I inherited the remainder. My great-grandfather was Ben McLintock from Houston, Texas. He was one of the early oil wildcatters and buyers of mineral rights in what turned out to be big oil country. He built a real estate empire that spread his oil holdings into shopping centers, office buildings, and housing developments around the country.

“My mother was one of three children, and her marriage to Curry LePointe was a merger of sorts, but her prenuptial agreement ensured that her inheritance would pass directly to me. Upon the birth of my first child, the rest was transferred to me. When our prenup expires, Gary gets ten percent or twenty-five million dollars. On Tuesday, Gary West will be twice as personally wealthy as my uncle. In the event of my death, Deana and any other of my children will share my estate equally, but Deana alone, being the firstborn, will be entitled to head the LePointe legacy. Barring a total collapse in the world markets, she will someday control a multibillion-dollar fortune.”

“What about your father?”

“He's dead,” Casey said, averting her eyes. “I was four when my parents passed away.”

Alexa didn't know what to say. Her mind was running in several directions at once. Based on what Casey had told her, Gary West had no reason to make any waves. In fact, he had twenty-five-million reasons not to do so.

“Gary's far too good for me. I try every single day to deserve his love and trust,” Casey continued. “He worships Deana. He's never been unfaithful to me, and while he does drink more than he should on occasion, it's very rare. He's unbelievably thoughtful to everybody. He hates it when I give him extravagant gifts. He dresses in inexpensive clothes and buys me gifts with his money from royalties. He is a wonderful human being.”

“He has no close friends?”

“His best friends are theater people or people from his life before he started writing plays. Gary tolerates my friends, and is always polite to everybody. He is the only man I have ever loved. If I don't get him back, I don't know what I'll do.”

Alexa found herself being far more jealous of Casey's good fortune in love than her fortune in dollars.

“Gary really does love us.” Casey started crying and Alexa got a tissue for her and waited in silence for the younger woman to gain control of herself. “I don't really remember my parents,” Casey sobbed. “What I do remember about them is that they loved me unconditionally. For twenty years I didn't have that.”

“What about your uncle? Your pet name for him is Unko. I got the impression he isn't crazy about being called that.”

Casey offered a weak smile. “He hates it when I call him that around other people, because he thinks it somehow minimizes him, but despite his infuriating aloofness, he loves me truly and dearly. His concern for us—me and Deana—is out of affection.”

“Your uncle raised you?”

“My grandmother was in control of my upbringing. She was in control of everything else, too, including my uncle. We—my uncle and Aunt Sarah and me—lived with her because Grandmother wanted it that way. My father lived away from her, but what my father wanted, he got. She doted on him and accepted my mother like she accepted few others. After my parents died, servants actually raised me until I was old enough to be some sort of company worthy of her attention. I had nannies, maids, a driver, tutors, and the right playmates. Grandmother said often that I reminded her of my father. She wasn't exactly the warm and fuzzy type.” Casey smiled, her eyes becoming misty. “But she loved me…in her own way. She was my protector and she was the person who taught me what was expected of me. She drilled into me what duties I had been born to assume and how to comport myself properly. I wasn't always an attentive student and she was often angry with me.”

“Did she like Gary?”

“She passed before we met. But I think she would have absolutely hated him. Our relationship could never have been possible had she lived. She would have made short work of him, the way she did of any threats to the way she believed things were supposed to be. And I couldn't have stood up to her the way I did to Unko. You'd have to have known her to understand. Nobody said no to my grandmother without regretting having done so.”

“Do your aunt and uncle have children?”

“Uncle William and Aunt Sarah had a son. He died when he was an infant. Sarah couldn't have another child, and she was very kind to me. She has Alzheimer's now and lives totally in the past. She doesn't even know my uncle's name, or who he is. It's been hard on him.”

Alexa imagined that
hard on him
was a relative term, since Dr. LePointe had the ability to pay others to do any necessary caretaking.

“Could your uncle dislike Gary enough to do something about him?” Alexa asked.

Casey smiled. “Unko wouldn't harm anyone. He tried to buy Gary off at the beginning, and failed. The only way Unko could understand a man refusing a great deal of money is he wants a lot more. The idea that anyone could be uninterested in wealth makes wealthy people suspicious. Gary doesn't like my uncle, and he doesn't like for Deana to be around Unko, because he thinks Unko will warp her somehow, and my uncle resents that. Not that Unko is comfortable around a child, but he hates it that Gary makes it obvious he isn't welcome in her life, or mine, in any meaningful way—or in the way he chooses to be.”

“Who would have a motive to harm Gary?”

“Nobody.”

“Obviously Gary would be an attractive target for a kidnapper looking for a big score. Unless there's a motive I'm not aware of. Except…” Casey started to say something, but stopped.

“What is it?”

“Gary is not a threat to my uncle, but it's possible others might not know that….”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, someone else might take it upon themselves to do something that they thought would please Unko. Especially before Tuesday.”

“Before the prenuptial agreement expires. Who else knows about the prenup?”

“Very few people. Aside from Grace, just lawyers for the trusts, bankers, people running the companies I own who might be affected by Gary's participation—if he ever chose to become involved in any of those businesses, which I seriously doubt. And there's Unko, of course, and maybe whoever he's told, but he would never hang family laundry in the open. His investigator, Kenneth Decell, is the closest thing to a confidant Unko has, but I don't know what he tells him. Unko compartmentalizes every aspect of his life. Sometimes people do things because they think they will be rewarded for it one way or another. It's possible, isn't it? If Gary was kidnapped for a ransom, that's federal, isn't it? You could become actively involved, couldn't you? Please?” Casey's moist eyes—the eyes of a child in pain—plucked at Alexa's heartstrings.

“Yes,” Alexa answered. “In the case of a kidnapping, the locals could ask for our involvement, but they don't usually do so if they can avoid it. And in the event they do, I might or might not be assigned to the case. There are a lot of variables and politics at work within the Bureau, and the friction between federal and local authorities is often the least of it. If you think of law enforcement as parts of a large complex corporation with all the red tape, rules, competition between employees, and cliques, you begin to see it as it is.”

“You would be assigned to us,” Casey said, beaming. “I know you would. I mean, you're an expert and you're here already, so you've got a head start. And you have a wonderful track record.”

She stood, extended her hand, holding Alexa's hand for what seemed to Alexa a very long time. “It will work out, I know it will. You are our only hope.”

“I truly want to help you, Casey. If this does turn out to be an abduction, I'll do whatever I can.”

“I have to go. I don't want Deana to wake up and not find me there. She's already upset that Gary isn't home, and the excitement and strangers in the house has her terribly confused. Please try to help us, Alexa. Without Gary, my daughter doesn't have a chance. As deeply as I love her, I think without Gary I can't stand up to Unko. I simply don't have it in me to give her all that Gary can. We need him in our lives.”