“Okay, then. I’ll see you when I see you.”
That was eighty minutes ago.
The sky has been clear for our southward flight, and on final approach to New Orleans Danny gives us a good look at the state of the city six months after Katrina. As mayor of Natchez, I know the statistics well, but they pale in comparison to what we can see on the ground. Bed frames and masonry piled in the streets. Overturned boats lying in yards. A telephone pole sticking up through a wrecked house. An upside-down school bus. A pack of dogs loping along the Seventeenth Street Canal.
As Serenity drives our rental car into the city, negotiating a depressing number of uprooted trees, I tell her some of the stats I know. More than half the homes in the city are still without electricity. Three hundred thousand people have yet to return. Eighty-three thousand families are living in asbestos-filled FEMA trailers. Serenity nods through my recitation. Then, when I pause, she says, “Were you down here during the storm?”
“No. It hit Natchez, too. I was trying to hold things together up there.”
Another nod. “I came down and worked a boat with a rescue crew.”
Of course she did. I should have guessed by now.
“I have some cousins here,” she explains. “Distant. We spent two days pulling people off roofs and out of trees. Then I helped with some recovery work. The bodies, you know. Man, in some ways this place was worse than Iraq. Way worse.”
“What was your takeaway?”
A bitter laugh escapes her mouth. “Politicians don’t give a shit about the South. Except at election time. If Katrina would have hit the East Coast, most of this shit would never have happened the way it did.”
By the time we reach the Garden District, the light is fading. Here on the high ground the houses have power, and as the lights come up, it’s easy to tell myself that the storm had never happened. But then the wind changes, and I catch the funk of rotting wood and black mold.
To my surprise, Dolores St. Denis lives in a mansion only two blocks from St. Charles Avenue, on Dufossat Street. Set behind ivy-covered brick walls, the cream-colored three-story chateau is fronted with pine trees, and heavy wrought iron spans the spaces between all the columns.
We use an intercom to announce ourselves, and Mrs. St. Denis herself buzzes us inside. When the huge cypress door opens, I find myself looking at a remarkably striking woman in her midsixties. As expected, her features are almost entirely Caucasian—far more so than Serenity’s—but there’s a subtle darkness to her skin that no one who knew her background would mistake for a suntan. When she speaks to introduce herself, her diction is not only perfect but refined, and I know with certainty that this woman could “pass” for white in any environment she chose.
“I’ve gone by Dee for decades now,” she says, leading us deeper into the house, which is furnished with a mixture of antiques and modern pieces. “But you may call me Dolores. I rather like hearing it again, actually.”
“What does your husband do?”
“Maurice was an executive for an insurance company. He passed away three years ago. I’m alone now.”
She seats herself in a burgundy velvet chair, then motions for Serenity and me to sit on a low-slung sofa that looks like a Roche Bobois.
“Mr. Cage, I agreed to see you because of your father. When I was in a very dark place, he tried to help me. He really tried. But I was beyond help at that time.”
“I appreciate that. It’s my father who’s in serious trouble now. Anything you can tell us might help him considerably. I know that your—your time in Mississippi was very difficult. And I’m sorry to have to ask you about it.”
Dolores St. Denis folds her hands in her lap, then looks up at me with startling intensity. “Mr. Cage, I know you were once a lawyer. Do you have any experience with violent crime?”
“A great deal, ma’am. I was an assistant district attorney in Houston for eight years. I worked the most violent cases that came through our office. Gang murders, serial killers, everything.”
“Sexual assault? Gang rapes?”
“That, too, I’m sorry to say. Group assaults on both women and men.”
She sighs and shakes her head, and I notice that her hair is very straight and fine. “Then you have some idea of what I was trying to deal with back then.”
I nod. “We’re here because I believe some of the men who killed your husband may have been the ones who ordered the murder of my fiancée.”
She blinks in surprise, as if she’s only just put together my deepest personal connection to the case. “I see. Well . . . what would you like to know?”
“I’ve been wondering whether the woman who suffered the horrific assault Mrs. Booker described might remember a lot more detail than she confided to her mother-in-law.”
After a few moments, Dolores nods. “I didn’t tell her everything, of course. I couldn’t. It would have broken her. I didn’t want her suffering as I was. I didn’t have any peace after that night. Not one night of peace, for the dreams.”
I don’t want to hear worse than I heard in Mrs. Booker’s house, but this is what we came for. “What did you dream, Dolores?”
“They . . . they did terrible things to Sam that night. They mutilated him. In my dreams, early on, he came to me without his eyes, and his privates gone. He still does sometimes, even today. Oh, dear Lord. Why would men do that?”
“Some of the Double Eagles are sociopaths. Sadists, more than racists. They used war and the violence of the civil rights struggle to cover their natural predilections.”
She considers this for a while. “That makes complete sense to me.”
“How many men were there altogether, Dolores?”
She shudders and closes her eyes. “Six.”
I want to ask her to look at some photographs of the Double Eagles, but instinct tells me not to—not yet, anyway.
“Are you here because you want me to testify against those men?”
“We’re here first because we want to know if you even have information that could positively identify any of the men who killed your husband.”
She nods slowly, warily.
“Is that a yes?” Serenity asks.
Dolores doesn’t reply.
Something tells me to get off the couch, kneel before her, and promise not to divulge anything she might tell us. But I remain where I am. Serenity cuts her eyes at me, and what I read there is: Don’t say anything. She’s coming to it in her own way. Then Dolores begins to speak in a soft, hoarse voice.
“As for identification . . . one of the men had a stutter. He was a big man, very big, and he was drunk. He had trouble getting an erection when he tried to take his turn, and he almost killed me by beating me, all the while yelling it was my fault.”
I nod encouragement, but my mind is racing.
“That triggered something,” she guesses. “Didn’t it?”
“Your description fits Glenn Morehouse, the Double Eagle who first broke their code of silence and talked to Henry Sexton. The FBI thinks he was murdered by his old comrades. His sister may have helped to kill him.”