Penn laughed as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Then he put a big square-headed key in the lock and opened the door to what had once been her dream house. When he turned, lifted her effortlessly, and carried her over the threshold, she felt wings beating wildly in her chest. Passing through the door, she realized that the first time someone had done that in this house, Queen Victoria had been sitting on the throne.
Caitlin smelled new paint and plaster, lemon oil and varnish. Yet as Penn carried her deeper into the house, she had a sense that dreams and reality had begun to diverge at some inaccessible level where nothing could be influenced by human action. Whatever was going to happen had been determined at some point in the past—perhaps decades ago, or maybe only a few hours—but either way it was irrevocable. From this point forward, she sensed, choice was illusory. All they could do now was ride out the waves of consequence.
“What do you think?” Penn asked, his eyes filled with pride.
She blinked and tried to focus on her surroundings, but all she could think about was tomorrow’s rendezvous with Toby Rambin, the poacher who had sworn to guide her through the trackless swamp to the Bone Tree.
“I don’t want to think,” she whispered, recalling this afternoon at Penn’s house, when she’d used sex to stop him asking questions about the Bone Tree. Now she needed it to take her mind off the same thing, and to connect with the man she felt slipping away from her. “Is there a bed upstairs?”
“Of course. This is a wedding present.”
She looked up the long, narrow flight of steps that led to the third floor. “Can you carry me up those?”
Without a word he swung her in a circle and started up the stairs, his legs pumping as though they would never tire.
Caitlin shut her eyes like a little girl on a carnival ride, but inside she felt like a traitor.
CHAPTER 40
FORREST KNOX HAD not yet gone to Concordia Parish, as he’d told Snake he meant to do. After pulling back onto Highway 61, he’d decided to return to Baton Rouge and check on how things were progressing at headquarters without Colonel Mackiever, then go home to pack a bag and make sure his wife hadn’t been too rattled by the kiddie porn she’d seen on his desk. He also packed a briefcase with sensitive material he had removed from Valhalla, and to this he added certain files and digital media from his home. He would deposit the briefcase in a nearby storage unit that he rented under another name. Given that he was locked in battle with Colonel Mackiever, he could not risk a surprise search turning up material that could destroy him.
When his bags stood packed by his office chair, he began skimming the online edition of the Natchez Examiner for updates. He’d scarcely gotten through page one when his departmental cell phone rang.
The caller was the duty officer of the tech division at LSP headquarters, a man from Shreveport named Keith Caton.
“Sir, I’ve been going back over all the digital records on Dr. Tom Cage. His family, known associates, some patients—everybody we know about.”
“And?”
“On Monday, Dr. Cage made two calls to an attorney named Quentin Avery. Those were cell to cell. I’ve recently gotten the phone records of City Hall in Natchez, and I show a flurry of calls to Quentin Avery from there also, to three different numbers. One was to his cell, another was to his residence in McLean, Virginia.”
“And the third?”
“To a house in Jefferson County, Mississippi. Avery’s got a residence there also.”
Forrest felt something shift in his gut—a familiar sensation that always accompanied the discovery of a fresh track. “Who made those calls?”
“Some came from what looks to be the office of the mayor. This past Monday.”
“Quentin Avery must be Tom Cage’s lawyer,” Forrest thought aloud. “The Viola Turner case was just unfolding then. It’s natural that they would try to get hold of Avery.”
“Yes, sir. But I’ve also been analyzing the call patterns on the Jefferson County house, and also the Internet traffic.”
“And?”
“I can’t see the searches, but this morning about three A.M. somebody logged on to the Internet and stayed on for two and a half hours. That’s totally anomalous, relative to the normal pattern.”
“You can’t see the actual searches that were done?”
“Not yet, sir.”
Forrest thought about this. “What do you know about this house?”
“I checked it on Google Earth. It’s very isolated. Practically a mansion, for that area. It’s sitting on eighty acres of forestland.”
Certainty clicked in Forrest’s mind like a trap snapping shut. He thought about Tom Cage’s last known position—dumping that stupid cop Grimsby in a northeast Louisiana cotton field. To reach Quentin Avery’s Mississippi estate, Cage would have had to pass through one of the roadblocks guarding the bridges over the river. Motorists had complained so much about the bottleneck those barriers had created that he’d finally had to take them down, but there were still the bridge cameras.
“Have you guys been working the relatives of Dr. Cage’s wife, like I told you to?”
“Yes, sir. Augustin handled that. He spoke to all the known relatives, then went home around fifteen minutes ago. He didn’t think anybody acted suspicious.”
Lazy prick, Forrest thought, marking his underling for later punishment. As he thought about the geography of Jefferson County, a new thought struck him. “Sergeant, I want you to find every vehicle registered to any of Mrs. Cage’s relatives, then see whether any have crossed the bridge at Vicksburg in the past twenty-four hours.”
“Not at Natchez?”
“Natchez and Vicksburg, but give Vicksburg priority. How long will that take?”
“I’m not sure. We’ve been having trouble getting the records of the camera data from Homeland Security. They say it’s a technical glitch.”
“Do you have the data now?”
“Let me check Augustin’s box. Yes, sir, it came in twenty minutes ago.”
“Run the plates.”
“Yes, sir. You want me to call you back?”