Too Far Gone

2

Saturday, August 27, 2005

Using her SureFire flashlight in the dark to prevent tripping over tree limbs, FBI Special Agent Alexa Keen followed the string of Day-Glo plastic that had been run tree to tree by responding officers to lead the way to, then to form a bordered trapezoid around, the crime scene. Carefully, she entered the crime scene, illuminated by portable quartz floodlights. The corpse appeared to be wrapped tightly in a rust-colored blanket-a covering Alexa realized was comprised of tens of thousands of fire ants. As she squatted for a better look, the dead man’s lids suddenly opened and he stared at her through eyes of wet obsidian. His mouth formed a silent, screaming circle.

Alexa jerked awake and lay in the darkness, piecing the shards of reality together. Hotel room. New Orleans. Law-enforcement seminar. A real siren outside had clawed its way through the gossamer walls of her dream about a dead man she had seen only in photographs until his naked corpse had been discovered in the Tennessee woods two days after his family had paid a quarter-million-dollar ransom. Charles Tarlton had been her first case-involving the murder of an abducted individual-and it played in the theater of her dreams with some frequency. As Alexa’s nightmares went, this one was hardly a two-a ten was being awakened by labored wheezing and lying frozen in terror as a pair of clammy hands explored her prepubescent body. Alexa shuddered.

The bedside clock had the time at five past twelve. Alexa slid her hand beneath the pillow beside her to feel the knife. It was always there in case she was ever again surprised by anyone climbing into her bed. The knife’s edge was razor sharp, and Alexa Keen knew how to use it.

Except for her shoes placed beside the bed, Alexa was still dressed in the clothes she’d worn to dinner with two other agents, who she’d never met before. They’d all checked into the Marriott-each presenting the “new and more user-friendly” FBI to the law enforcement seminar. Alexa always slept in her clothes when she was away from her own bed. She lay awake for several more minutes with her eyes closed-her mind speeding through a dark forest of troubling thoughts. The most disturbing were of her sister, who was sitting in a military safe house, waiting to testify at a string of court-martial proceedings, which involved several high-ranking members of U.S. Army intelligence, all facing disgrace and terms in military prison, and in one case possible execution. Some of them also faced federal and state charges when the Army was done with them.

Beyond that stack of mind manure, Alexa’s brain started going through the cases she’d worked that had ended badly, wondering what she’d missed, how she should have done things differently. Everybody made mistakes, but when Alexa Keen made one, the consequences could be devastating for a family and deadly for the victim.

Alexa’s professional life was one long-running stress test. She thrived on edge living-consuming gallons of coffee and running headlong through nights and days without meaningful sleep. She loved the atmospheric highs that success brought, and she somehow slogged her way out from the pit that failures dug. The job was her life. She read inside politics expertly, for doing so was a necessary evil: it often meant the difference between being relevant and sitting behind a desk in some dismal Bureau FO-or field office-in the windswept boonies. Alexa walked the walk-navigating the spiderweb red-tape bureaucracy-and talked the requisite Bureau-jabber. This was the life she had freely chosen, and the other agents were almost the only family she had left. Alexa’s was a family headed by inflexible, often paranoid, and generally disapproving parent figures who were slow to reward and eager to punish-and the Bureau was a family where sibling rivalry was unrelenting and pitiless.

With the agility of a panther, Alexa rose from the bed and crossed to the window. Opening the heavy curtains, she peered down through the dark glass at a wide-awake city. Twenty floors below, an ambulance attendant slammed the door of the vehicle whose siren had awakened her and she listened to its scream as it made its way toward Charity Hospital, which had the best trauma care unit in the city. And New Orleans did its dead-level best to make sure the ER remained the busiest venue in town.

Alexa Keen sometimes wondered if there was a place she could call home. All through her adult life she had moved from city to city, settled in superficially, learned the relevant streets in those cities, developed preferences in stores and restaurants, but invariably they all felt cold to her.

Alexa’s apartments were interchangeable. She hung the same art on the walls, shifted the same modern furniture in her space. There was no extraneous clutter, plants to be watered, pets to anchor her, and Alexa’s telephone seldom rang since the advent of the do-not-call list. Her residence mailboxes collected only spiderwebs and generic adver-junk. Due to the amount of time she was away on-site, all of her bills were automatically subtracted from her checking account or paid electronically. Her television set was only a means to monitor the flowing river of news and the local weather.

Her sound system played Billie Holiday, Wes Montgomery, the Gipsy Kings, R.E.M., The Beatles, the Stones, or Elmore James, depending on her mood. Alexa kept a library card, and she read fiction for entertainment, nonfiction for information.

She was five feet seven inches tall and maintained her weight between 125 and 130. She worked out at the FBI gym before daybreak, and in the evenings she ran several miles. For days when the weather was bad, she had a treadmill in her apartment. When she was on the road she did push-ups, sit-ups, and squats. And over the years she had taken both karate and kickboxing lessons to keep up her self-defense skills. She was strong, agile, had good stamina, was fast on her feet, had remarkable balance, and knew how to defend herself. She went to the firing range monthly to stay sharp, but she would never be more than adequate with a handgun.

Alexa looked down at the pedestrians on the sidewalks. Most were tourists-which was a polite way of saying they were marks whose wallets held the blood that powered the city’s real heart-the French Quarter, the casinos, the restaurants and bars.

Alexa had only visited the Crescent City on FBI business. It wasn’t her nature to spend her vacation time in tourist magnets like New Orleans, San Francisco, Las Vegas, or Miami. When she took her required vacations, she hiked obscure trails, floated down rivers, camped where few other people wanted to be. She liked the salt air and the solitude of beaches in the winter.

Alexa had mixed feelings where New Orleans was concerned. She loved the jazz, but didn’t drink. She enjoyed the restaurants, but she only ate rich foods on remarkable occasions. She appreciated antiques, but wouldn’t spend the money on them because she had no desire to own things she might worry about. She enjoyed the architecture and the art. She appreciated the way most of the locals accepted eccentrics and misfits and how they took everyday life with a grain of salt.

New Orleans was a cautionary illustration of what could happen to the entire country as it descended from its golden age. Alexa knew that the things residents and most nonresidents loved about the city were hardly more than smoke and mirrors that hid the real New Orleans, which was a collapsing sump, crippled by rampant ignorance, grinding poverty, shameless nepotism, an inadequate tax base, a crumbling infrastructure, a long-ignored levee system, a generational welfare system, wholesale crime, underpaid and overworked city employees, decaying structures, morally bankrupt leaders who propagated a third-world-style corruption-and it was all gathering speed in a downhill direction.

Some years earlier, she’d been hunting down a sexual predator who had abducted a girl and, in the process, killed two Chicago policemen. She had tracked him to New Orleans. The man had been staying in a motel, using the abducted sixteen-year-old girl to satisfy his sadistic sexual desires. Alexa had found him, and, when he’d run, he ended up abandoning the girl in his car, and Alexa had found herself chasing him through the French Quarter. Alexa wasn’t religious, but she had decided that if there was a hell, it must look and feel like Bourbon Street on Fat Tuesday. After catching him he’d wanted to fight with his much smaller adversary, so she’d used her fists and feet on him while the crowd had cheered wildly. As he’d begged for mercy, she handcuffed and arrested him.

Despite the fact that she was wide-awake, the ringing telephone startled her. The red numerals on the clock said 12:22.

“Yes,” she said.

“Special Agent Keen?” a male voice asked.

“Speaking.”

“This is Michael Manseur. I’m a detective with NOPD Homicide.”

“Winter Massey’s friend,” she said, smiling. Six months earlier, she and ex-Deputy U.S. Marshal Winter Massey, a close friend of hers since childhood, had worked together on a kidnapping case in North Carolina. Massey had spoken very highly of Michael Manseur, the man who had helped him locate and save a young girl’s life. The child, whose mother had been murdered by a professional killer, had become a member of Winter Massey’s family.

“Well,” Manseur responded, “I expect friend might be a stretch. Acquaintance is closer to it. I have nothing but respect for Winter, that’s for sure. He is one memorable individual.”

“I spoke to him last week, and he told me I should call you. I really did mean to.”

“He called me a few days ago to tell me I should call you while you were in town. I intended to ask you to join my family for dinner while you’re here, but I’ve been up to my belt loops in alligators. And this hurricane track is looking bad.”

“I’m leaving first thing in the morning,” she told him truthfully.

“I’m sorry to hear it,” Manseur replied.

What Alexa couldn’t imagine was why Manseur was calling her after midnight. Maybe the detective had been working late shift in a windowless room and lost track of time. It had happened to her enough.

“Maybe the next time I’m in town…” she suggested.

“Kyler Kennedy, our Missing Persons detective, sat in on your talk today.” His heavy Southern accent was warm and comforting. Alexa liked the way he stretched his vowels out like soft taffy.

“Well, maybe we can get together next time I’m here. It was nice talking to you, Detective Manseur.”

“That isn’t why I called you, Agent Keen. I’m thoughtless to a fault, but I sure wouldn’t bother you at this hour just to chat. I was wondering if I could impose on you a little bit.”

“Please do.” Perhaps he had a pressing question on a case he thought she might have an answer to.

“We’ve got ourselves a potential situation. I was hoping you could spare me a couple of hours.”

“My flight leaves just after nine.”

“I mean right now. This deal is what you do, and Winter said you’re one of the best there is at it.”

“An abduction?” She straightened and let the curtains drop shut, closing out the night.

“Possibly. Going missing in New Orleans is hardly unusual. Ninety-nine times out of ten, the case solves itself pretty quick. I hope you might be able to help us assess a situation. Tell us what you think we’ve got. It’s a pretty delicate deal.”

“You’re the head of Homicide, aren’t you?”

“Missing Persons is understaffed, and, like in most places, we work hand in hand a lot. I hoped I could get your opinion on this since you’re here and have the reputation you do. That’s all.”

“I see.” She was flattered.

“And then I can tell Massey truthfully that we got together. Are you free to go to a location with me?”

This wasn’t going to be a question or two over the phone. “How soon?”

“I’m in the lobby now,” he told her. “Standing by the elevators. I’m wearing a green suit.”

If he hadn’t been the only man in a dark green suit watching the elevators, Alexa would have kept scanning the lobby until the detective approached her. Michael Manseur’s voice had thoroughly misrepresented him. He sounded like Tommy Lee Jones but looked more like a chronically unsuccessful door-to-door salesman. Even with the thickness of the soles of his scuffed brown wingtips, Manseur was no more than five-seven and, except for the laurel of short pale hair anchored by small ears, he was bald. His pasty round face featured intelligent but sad eyes with large bags beneath them, a razor-thin nose, acne scars, and a smile like that of a child with a secret. The loosened knot on his predominantly yellow tie rested between stiff shirt collars, one of them bent up at the end like a hand waving.

“Agent Keen?” he said, uncertainly.

“Alexa,” she said, smiling. “Michael, please call me Alexa.” She realized that he had expected her to be a white woman-and not a light-skinned black woman. She knew there was nothing in her voice that gave away her ethnicity.

“Certainly,” he replied, nodding. He swept his arm to indicate the direction she should travel to get to his car, which turned out to be a large white sedan waiting at the curb.

Manseur opened the passenger door for Alexa, and closed it gently before hurrying around to get in behind the wheel. He checked the rearview, pulled out, and headed away from the Mississippi River, flipping on the blue light centered on the dash to cut a path through the traffic as the vehicle gathered speed.

“Where are we going?” she asked him.

“Uptown a little way,” he replied, as if that answered her question.

Alexa sat back and watched the Big Easy rush by.