He paused, shaking his head at the recollection. “I cut him off after that. Turned my back on him. I got the others I’d persuaded to finance him before to cut him off as well. His resources dried up. I heard there was infighting in his ranks.”
“You undermined him.”
“He had to go. It was clear. People like him never get less angry. Letting it out only lets it grow.”
“I’d imagine he didn’t take to that,” Maureen said. “To you shunning him.”
And I can see, she thought, what he wanted with your son. Knowing Caleb’s money came from Solomon, Gage built his movement, his army with Heath money all over again. Until it cost him his own son. The sins of the father weigh heavy, indeed.
“I admit I felt a twinge of admiration,” Heath said. “All the time I thought I was using him, he was using me right back.” He finished his cold coffee. “And I admit that after I stopped the money I was afraid of him and his thugs. I spent a good six months looking over my shoulder. Then there was a terrible fire, a lesbian bar on the edge of the Quarter. Multiple deaths. He was never connected to it, but he disappeared from New Orleans before the ashes went cold.
“I’m telling you these things,” Heath said, “because you need to believe that Leon Gage is the real thing. The worst kind of true believer. He’s a dangerous man, and completely capable of the atrocities that happened today. And I have no loyalty to him, no reason to protect him.”
“It works out real well for you,” Maureen said, “if we believe that someone else is the real threat here. The radical, the fringe player, the lone wolf. You’d love for us to believe there’s only one rat in the kitchen. That there’s not a big, teeming nest just out of sight.”
“You’re so terribly new to all of this,” Heath said. “This place, its history. Our history. You’re in so far over your head you don’t even know you’re drowning. Wake up. Why do you think Detillier picked you as the canary in the coal mine? Because you have no idea who Leon Gage really is. You couldn’t have a conversation with him if you did. You couldn’t stomach it. And because he’d never talk to a cop who might remember who he was.”
Maureen handed Heath back the plastic cup. She couldn’t look at him. She had to get away from him. Talking to him was worse than talking to Gage, because what Heath said made sense to her. “Thanks for the coffee.”
“Do yourself a favor,” Heath said, taking the cup from her. “Ask your FBI friend about a man named Leo Freeman and an abortion clinic in Baker, Florida, what happened there in 1993. Ask about the dead doctor. Ask him about the girls’ shelter in Crestview, about the fire there in 1995. The eight bodies pulled from the ruins.”
He offered her the thermos. “Take the rest, bring the thermos back another time. You need all the help you can get.”
“That’s okay,” Maureen said, and she climbed into the cruiser. “I have what I need.”
Before dawn, she decided, she would find proof of who both Solomon Heath and Napoleon Gage really were, one way or another.
She started the car and turned on the headlights. She pulled into Solomon Heath’s driveway, the headlights shining into the first-floor windows. Then she backed out of the driveway, easing the car alongside Solomon. “Good night for now, Mr. Heath. I have things to do tonight. But you’ll see me again. Believe that.”
27
Maureen parked the patrol car at the back of Touro Infirmary, by the loading docks and service entrances, away from the cops and the press crowding the front of the hospital.
As she got out of the car, two security guards came to meet her. Without a word, they escorted her into the bowels of the hospital. Maureen knew they were being overly careful and she let them. She didn’t expect to get shot at tonight. The Watchmen had slunk back into their hiding places, she figured, as is typical of bullies, because they were cowards at their core. Now we know about them. Now we’re on the lookout. Not just me—every one of us cops, Maureen thought, is living under a death threat. And every one of us knows it. Who she’d been avoiding by sneaking around the back was not the Watchmen, but other cops. She didn’t want to talk to them. Maybe later she would, maybe in the morning, but not right then. Every ounce of energy she had left, physical and emotional, was devoted to getting to Preacher’s hospital room.
Once inside the hospital, Maureen’s uniform let her move freely.