“What do you mean?”
“He’s not going to sit still and wait for the Bureau to come at him, no matter what he said on the phone. And with Caitlin Masters dead, her paper might come at us twice as hard as they did before. Snake won’t sit still for that. He figures we’ll take Tom Cage and Walt Garrity out of the equation—as fugitives—so he’ll move against the mayor, and maybe even Kaiser.”
“Bullshit. You think he’d hit an FBI agent?”
“Alphonse, Snake would kill the pope and twelve nuns if he thought it would keep him out of jail. He does not give a fuck.”
“And you’re saying we should let him do that? The heat would be unbearable.”
A tight smile came to Forrest’s lips. “You’ve forgotten the plan I brought up the night Snake missed killing Sexton and Brody got killed instead.”
“Which was?”
“We let Snake hit the people he wants to hit. Then we paint him as an out-of-control psycho. Once the pursuit starts up, he’ll come to me for an escape route. I’ll send him to what he thinks is a safe house, then when he’s cornered, I’ll go there myself to ‘arrange a surrender.’ Once I’m inside . . . I’ll blow him away. After that, I’m not only washed clean—I’m a hero. I was willing to kill my own uncle in the name of justice.”
Ozan nodded steadily. “That’s a cold play, boss, and a ballsy one. Which pretty much makes it perfect. But Snake has to be out of jail to make that work. Do you really think he can get himself out?”
“If he says he can, I believe it.”
“You think he’s planning on busting out?”
“I hope so. The bloodier it is, the better.”
Ozan looked like he was thinking hard.
“What is it?” Forrest asked.
“I had another idea. Didn’t you say our hotel bugs told you the FBI’s planning to fly their evidence up to D.C. on that Bureau plane out at the airport?”
“They’re still discussing it.”
“If you tipped Snake about that flight . . . he’d probably go after the plane.”
Forrest shook his head. “We don’t want that. For one thing, the feds might capture Snake alive. For another, Snake might actually succeed in destroying the evidence.”
It took a while, but a smile slowly spread on the Redbone’s face. At last he understood the reason Forrest had thrown more than fifty bones into the water near the Bone Tree before they’d set it afire.
“Once Snake’s dead,” he said, “you’re gonna bury him in blood and bones.”
“That’s right.” Forrest snapped his fingers. “I want him to look so demonic that I look like a saint by comparison.”
Ozan rubbed his eyes, then shook his head. “One thing. I’ve read up on the mayor a little bit. He’s been in some scrapes before, and he did what he had to do to get out of them. He’s killed some people. And after what happened to his girl today, he’s never going to stop trying to nail us. Never.”
“That’s what Snake is for,” Forrest said. “It was probably always coming to this. Sometimes you just have to wait and see which way things break.”
JOHN KAISER STOOD IN the study of the Valhalla hunting lodge and stared into the eyes of the seven-hundred-pound hog that stood opposite the desk. He’d spent most of the night working beneath the Bone Tree, in shadows thrown by klieg lights like the ones Londoners had used during the Blitz. Kaiser had visited countless crime scenes during his career, especially during his time with the Investigative Support Unit, but few could compare in scale or horror to the Bone Tree. From the Civil War–era chains hanging from the limb outside to the inverted skeleton wired to the wall within—now badly charred by the diesel fire—the whole scene forced you to contemplate the essential savagery of the human species.
The tree had still been burning when Kaiser arrived. From the helicopter it looked like a colossal column of flame burning on a vast landscape. After bringing in some pumps on airboats, a fire department team from Baton Rouge had managed to douse the flames. Even so, Kaiser and his team had been forced to wait to get inside the tree. He lost no time getting divers into the water around the gigantic cypress, and they’d already brought up more than a hundred human bones. Once the interior of the tree cooled sufficiently, an evidence team began using archaeological picks and brushes to sift through the layers of bone and human remains buried beneath the new ash.
All that time, he had been haunted by an image of Tom Cage trying desperately to save Caitlin Masters, sucking blood from her wounded heart with his hands cuffed behind him. Kaiser found it hard to view a man who would do that in a negative light.
A half hour ago, he’d tired of slogging around in hip waders, so he’d airboated to their base of operations on the shore, then ridden an ATV to the main Valhalla lodge, which stood on a high ridge over the Mississippi River.
The search team here had already uncovered two floor safes in the study, but they had been cleaned out. A file cabinet contained some corporate papers from Billy Knox’s media company, the one that produced an outdoors show for cable TV. They found no computers in the lodge (despite it having a Wi-Fi connection), and no other papers that could implicate Forrest Knox in any crime. As far as weapons, there were some samurai swords mounted on the walls, and there was a gun room that held about thirty hunting rifles, but Kaiser didn’t see anything that looked suspicious. Still, he would have them checked against any unsolved murders in the state.
The real question now was whether the Bone Tree stood on federal land or property owned by the hunting camp. If you judged by the game fence, then it was on Valhalla land, which meant the corpses inside the tree were automatically tied to the men on the Valhalla deed. But there was apparently some question about the real property line, and Kaiser had a feeling that the great cypress might actually be on federal land.