Three hours later, Maureen sat in her patrol car, chain-smoking.
She was parked under a big magnolia tree and between two streetlights, having positioned the car in a convenient pool of shadow. Her location, unknown to her fellow cops, put her not far from Audubon Park and not anywhere near where she was supposed to be at that hour. In addition to the cruiser’s engine, Maureen had turned off the lights and the radio. She needed to concentrate. An hour ago, word had gone out that Preacher had survived his surgery. He had been moved into recovery. He certainly wasn’t well, but he wasn’t dying. Wasn’t close to it. Earlier reports, Maureen had learned, had exaggerated the direness of his condition. With the news about Preacher, the emotional scaffolding inside her had collapsed, leaving her physically wobbly and mentally zombified.
To resharpen her focus, she’d rolled down the car window, inviting in the damp nighttime chill. She turned her face to the wet cold, breathing it deep into her lungs. Between drags on her cigarette she blew into her cupped hands. Running the engine so she could use the heater tempted her, but the steady warmth would put her right to sleep. She needed to be cold. Also, she needed to remain inconspicuous. Better if no one saw her sitting there. She wasn’t on a street, or in a neighborhood, that the common street cop often visited, not without an invitation.
This particular short, narrow, smoothly paved dead-end street existed to access the two enormous homes on it. Homes that faced the park. One of them, the brick behemoth in Maureen’s rearview, belonged to a retired federal prosecutor. The other home, the one she watched, was the regal antebellum mansion belonging to Solomon Heath.
The house was dark, and had been since Maureen had arrived. If Heath was home, he either slept or was sequestered deep inside the house. A lone gas lamp burned beside the back door, the reflected flame igniting glowing crystals in the door’s cut-glass window. That was the same door Solomon had made Maureen use the night she’d met him, when she’d worked a security detail at this very house. That was the night he’d bribed her, or had tried to, depending on how she interpreted things. She’d done nothing for the man, but she’d kept his money.
Recalling that security cameras watched every inch of the Heath property, she had parked the cruiser beyond their range. She’d found a spot to be invisible, as she had in the Irish Garden. What she had to decide was what to do next. She wasn’t tucked in a barroom booth, a big sweatshirt hiding her appearance. She was in a police cruiser tonight, in uniform.
Maureen settled deeper into her seat, her arm hanging out the window. She fixed her gaze on the gas lamp’s dancing flame.
She didn’t know what she had expected to discover sitting outside Solomon’s house. Even if the lights were on, what did she hope to see? She felt he needed watching, so she watched. Her thought process hadn’t advanced much beyond that basic instinct. Did she think he’d have a late-night visitor arriving at the back door? Or did she think she’d be able to accost him as he came creeping home in the wee hours from nefarious doings about town, maybe with a young girl or young boy on his arm? She had tailed him on and off for a month and had found no indication of such behavior. If only he would make it that easy, she thought. If only he were that sloppy. That ordinary. But you didn’t get to where he was, and remain where he had managed to stay, by being sloppy. He wasn’t the kind of man to commit common sins.
After weeks of watching his house, of following him to work, she had witnessed no wrongdoing of any kind. She had gained no leverage against him, had none to provide to Atkinson or Detillier. She could sit outside his house a hundred nights in a row and Solomon would give her nothing. Anything useful she got from him, she was going to have to take.
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