“Hello,” Alexa called again, easing toward the hallway, which was painted Granny Smith green. She flipped the light switch, which chased away the gloom.
“Ms. Fugate? Are you home?”
The smell of decomposition was stronger. Alexa didn’t relish the prospect of opening a door and finding Fugate lying dead and decomposing. If the nurse wasn’t dead, Alexa dreaded the awkward conversation that would follow if the woman came in from out back and caught a strange and uninvited FBI agent-sans warrant-deep inside her home.
“Ms. Fugate!” she called out, convinced now that it was a waste of effort. Alexa was just snooping now.
Alexa paused at the first door and pushed it open. Light made entrance into the bedroom through the curtains. There was no corpse. Centered on the bed’s coverlet was an open steel security box with four brown pill bottles inside it.
Alexa picked up one of the bottles by the top and bottom edges. The prescription for a strong tranquilizer was filled for Dorothy Fugate. The prescribing physician was William LePointe, MD. The label dated the issuing of that prescription in July, just a month earlier.
The security box had been opened with a key that was still in the lock; a beaded neck chain similar to those used for military dog tags ran through it. Alexa could see several long blond hairs caught in the links.
Personal items lined the dressing table. Nurse Fugate had stacked magazines and books in the precise pyramids that indicated an anal-compulsive personality. In the open closet, several neatly pressed, heavily starched white uniforms sealed in plastic cleaner bags had fallen to the floor. All of the other hanging clothes had been parted and shoved to the sides.
One of the drawers in the chest had trapped a pair of panties, an edge sticking out like a handkerchief accenting the pocket of a gentleman’s suit.
Alexa left the bedroom and peered into the bathroom across the hall. There was a toothpaste tube on the sink, beneath a rack that held a pair of dry toothbrushes. The faucet dripped onto a brown stain in the porcelain sink bowl. A nightgown hung on a hook on the door, and the toilet seat was up. Veronica Malouf had called Nurse Fugate a spinster, but, as far as Alexa knew, only men lifted toilet seats.
The sliding bolt that could be thrown to secure the last door on the right side of the hallway was engaged. Alexa drew the bolt and gently pushed the door open, to reveal a bedroom in the sort of thoughtless disarray you’d expect from a teenager. Flickering light from a television set on a TV tray pulsed over the narrow, unmade bed. Why is the set on, with the sound off? She quickly scanned the room, which also contained a rocking chair on an oval braided rug, and a small dresser. Steel security bars were mounted on the inside of the window frames, probably to prevent anyone from leaving that way, as opposed to preventing someone from breaking in. This was Sibby’s room.
Alexa left Sibby’s new cell without searching.
Maybe Veronica’s call to Decell had caused him to warn Fugate to vacate, to move her prisoner. The house sure felt abandoned. As if in answer to the question, Alexa heard, from the back of the house, the loud creaking of a floorboard, followed by the unmistakable sound of a door snapping closed. She pulled out her Glock and held it aimed at the ceiling. “FBI! Come out, I have a gun!”
Getting no response, Alexa lowered the barrel and moved to the swinging kitchen door. Heart pounding from an adrenaline rush, her mouth dry. Breathing slowly, Alexa steadied herself. If she’s armed and it’s between the two of us, I’m the one going home and she’s the one going to the morgue zipped in a bag.
Taking a position of cover behind the jamb, Alexa pushed the door open with her left foot and followed her gun into the kitchen, pivoting and taking in the entire room. The putrid stench of decomposition hit her like the wave of heat from an oven door.
The kitchen and dining room were combined in one large space. There were two partially open doors-a pantry and a broom closet-as well as a third door, this one closed, beside the refrigerator, and a back door with glass panels. Buzzing black flies performed acrobatic maneuvers in the still air over the garbage can.
A bucket filled with rose-colored bleach water rested against the back door, which was locked; the dead bolt was missing the key required to open it. The window over the sink was cracked open, its screen missing, which was obviously how the flies got in.
The flies were gathering on the garbage can. Thanks to its partly open lid, flies crawled in and out freely. Pressing her foot on the pedal to fully open it, Alexa saw a paper sack filled with shrimp husks, the source of the stench.
Stiff spaghettilike strands of a cloth mop filled the sink, its handle resting on the counter. The message machine-also on the counter, beside the telephone-was blinking the number eighteen; the open trapdoors showed her that both its cassettes had been removed. From the time she had called and gotten Nurse Fugate’s outgoing message, someone had removed the tapes in the ten minutes since.
Alexa kept her attention focused on the one door that was closed. Whoever was in the house had to have pulled that door shut from inside, and was hiding behind it.
The floor creaked as she moved carefully to the side of the door. “Nurse Fugate! FBI! I have a gun, come out now!”
Using her left hand, Alexa twisted the knob, pulled the door open, and was surprised to find a set of steep stairs leading down into the darkness. She knew that basements were rare in New Orleans because of the water table. Bodies were buried aboveground in crypts or inside concrete vaults, because a casket buried belowground would, with the first rain, pop up out of the ground like a surfacing submarine.
“Ms. Fugate! You need to come up here. I need to ask you some questions.” Like why you’re running a private insane asylum.
She didn’t see a light switch where it should have been located, so Alexa figured the switch for the light must be downstairs. There wasn’t one good reason to go downstairs alone, and a hundred reasons not to. Even if Fugate was down there with Sibby Danielson, how would Alexa justify coming into the woman’s home and pointing a gun at her? That she’d sweat over later. Alexa, you’ve got some ’splainin’ to do!
She reached her left hand into her purse for the small SureFire flashlight. “I said come on up!”
Alexa took a tentative step down, turned on the flashlight, and aimed it down the steep stairs. She was assailed by flies swarming up into the kitchen, and put her hand up to protect her face. There was a creaking noise behind her, and before she could turn, someone shouldered the door hard, slamming it against her and knocking her down the staircase-her left side, her hip, and her arm hitting the edges.
She saw a flash of light when her head struck the floor. The flashlight and the Glock landed noisily on the concrete floor.
She blinked her eyes slowly, stunned. She knew, lying there, unsure whether she was seriously injured, that Fugate or Sibby must have been hiding in the pantry or broom closet, and she cursed herself for not looking inside them. She had driven that person to the kitchen, where there was no escape without the back door key, so they had shut the basement door and had hidden in one of the tiny spaces.
Lying there dazed, Alexa distinctly heard the skeleton key turning-the door into the basement being locked.
She listened to footsteps moving out of the kitchen and down the hallway. When the front door slammed shut, it sounded a million miles away.
Alexa rolled her head and saw the flashlight a few feet away from her, illuminating a circle of brick wall next to the base of an old furnace. Flies swarmed in the beam. There was an odor of blood and decomposition down here that wasn’t coming from a pile of shrimp.