“I hear you.”

Walt was about to give his old comrade a stern dose of reality when an F-150 pickup swerved into the driveway of the Bouchard lake house and rolled toward the built-in garage.

“I’ll call you later,” Walt said, dropping the phone and picking up the scope again.

He sighted in on the driver as the Ford passed and recognized Alphonse Ozan behind the wheel. So . . . the servant had come to the master. Walt saw no passengers in the truck, but when the garage door rose and swallowed the F-150, he began to worry that Tom might be lying on the backseat, on the floor, or even wrapped in a rug in the truck bed.

He had to get closer to that house.

FORREST STOOD STIFFLY ON the lake house deck and stared down at the cell phone he used to talk to the moles he maintained in various parishes around the state. Hiram Hunt should have called back by now. Forrest needed to know what was going on. Something told him not to try to reach Hunt, but that didn’t mean he shouldn’t try one of his other sources in Walker Dennis’s department. Yet Forrest continued to stare at the phone without touching it. He almost felt as though the device had been turned against him somehow, that the tool he used so often to spy on others now made him vulnerable to attack.

As Forrest stared, the cell phone began to ring.

His heartbeat skittered, then stabilized. Odds were, this was Hunt calling to report that he’d discovered the fate of the planted methamphetamine. The phone rang again. Out on the lake, another bass boat skated by with a midrange growl, but Forrest’s eyes remained locked on the cell phone.

He made no move to answer it.

CHAPTER 53

I PULL INTO the motor-pool bay of the sheriff’s department, which is located beneath the western end of the Concordia Parish courthouse. As I show my ID to a mustached deputy at the basement entrance, I notice a large number of inmates being held in fenced pens beyond the parked cruisers. The pens have a makeshift look, and most of the men inside are wearing street clothes.

“Who are those guys?” I ask. “Trustees about to go work on the highway?”

“Naw,” says the deputy. “Most of ’em are the meth cookers and mules we hit yesterday, the ones who ain’t made bail. Some we just busted this morning. They’re waiting for their initial appearance upstairs. This circus could take all damn day.”

“Why are they out here in those pens?”

“The fed upstairs wanted the jail empty ’cept for the boys they’re gonna question up there.”

The fed upstairs? “Do you mean Agent John Kaiser?”

“Kaiser . . . yeah, that’s him.”

“Is he with Sheriff Dennis?”

“No, the sheriff ain’t made it in yet.”

I check my watch, trying to mask my worry. If Dennis’s plan was to plant meth on the Eagles before this interrogation, then there could be a lot of bad reasons he’s not here yet. “Have the men he’s going to question shown up?”

“Not that I know of.”

Shit. “Sheriff Dennis told me he was going to be here fifteen minutes ago, if not earlier.”

“He usually is. And we need him this morning.”

The deputy hands me back my ID, and I walk up the staircase beyond the door. The staircase terminates in an open-plan office. About half the desks are empty, but at the one nearest the front sits a young deputy with the burly build of a baseball player. Unlike the potbellied deputy down in the motor pool, this guy looks like the twenty-first-century version of the southern lawman. He has strapping forearms and wears a mustache and goatee trimmed nearly to the skin, with a baseball-style sheriff’s department SWAT cap pulled low over his blue eyes. Far behind him I see a steel security door that leads to the cellblock, and to the right of that, the mahogany door that Henry and I walked through to visit Sheriff Dennis on Tuesday morning.

“Morning, Mayor,” says the young deputy, half rising to his feet and offering his hand. “Spanky Ford. I used to watch you play ball with Drew Elliott when I was a kid. St. Stephen’s had a hell of a team in those days.”

I walk up and shake his hand, which is thickly padded with muscle.

“That was a long time ago, Deputy.”

“Call me Spanky.”

“Why hasn’t the sheriff gotten in yet?”

Ford’s smile disappears. “Not sure. He called about an hour ago and told me he might be late. Told me to put Snake Knox and his geriatric buddies in the jail dining room till he got here.”

My scalp tightens. “Are they here now?”

“Yes, sir. I put ’em right where the sheriff said.”

This actually brings me some relief, though I’m not sure it’s justified. “Did they bring a lawyer?”

“No, sir. None so far.”

“No sign of Claude Devereux?”

Spanky Ford laughs. “Man, I ain’t seen old Claude in here for two, three years at least. He stays drunk out at the lake or drives up to the casinos for high-stakes poker.”

“Where’s Agent Kaiser?”

The smile vanishes again, and Ford’s eyes go hard. “In the sheriff’s private office. He’s acting like he owns the damn place.”

I nod in sympathy. “Feds are the same all over. I’ll go make sure he’s not rifling through Walker’s files.”

“Good idea.”

A lot of eyes follow me as I cross the office to the mahogany door, but I don’t return anyone’s gaze.

When I open the door, John Kaiser looks up as if I’m exactly the person he expected to see. “Morning, Mayor,” he says. “Your fiancée had quite a few interesting stories in her paper this morning.”

Kaiser doesn’t look like he got much sleep after our intensive session with Dwight Stone last night. “I’ll tell her you enjoyed them.”

“I wouldn’t say that. What I’d say is that she seems to have a lot of information that I don’t. I think she’s been holding back on me.”

Seeing Kaiser behind Sheriff Dennis’s desk is like seeing a trim, combat-blooded colonel take over the desk of a heavyset captain at a stateside army post. When I first saw Walker in that chair, he looked like he’d be happy not to have to get out of it often. Kaiser looks like he could organize and implement a Rhine crossing at a moment’s notice.

“Sheriff Dennis is AWOL,” he says. “Any idea where he might be?”

“None. By the way, thanks for e-mailing me that assessment of the Knox family.”

Kaiser ignores this. “I also find it odd that with six Double Eagles waiting patiently in the jail dining room to be questioned, we haven’t seen hide nor hair of an attorney. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”

“A little.”

“It could only mean one of two things. One, Snake and his crew have nothing to hide—which we know is absurd. Or they don’t really expect to be questioned today. And so far as I know, the only person who could guarantee that outcome is Sheriff Walker Dennis, who appears to be missing.”

“If you think Dennis is going to lift a finger to help Forrest Knox, you’re crazy. He blames Knox for killing a family member. Not to mention two deputies yesterday morning.”

“Then where is he?”

I glance at my watch. “I guess time will tell.”

“You know exactly where he is, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t.” I sit in one of the chairs opposite Walker’s desk. “I thought you were going to skip this little party, John.”

“The more I thought about it, the more certain I became that I couldn’t afford to.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because if the Double Eagles are going to be questioned, I should be the person doing it. You have no legal authority here, and between Walker Dennis and myself, I’m the more experienced interrogator by far.”

“Didn’t I tell you that Dennis deputized me? Special Deputy Penn Cage. I even get a tin star.”

Kaiser rolls his eyes. “Well, as soon as Marshal Dennis gets finished at the Long Branch, or wherever he is, we need to sort out a batting order for these interrogations—if they absolutely must happen.”