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.