Alphonse Ozan awaits me on the porch, a pistol in one hand and his black wand in the other. The sight forces me to accept a grim reality: before I can speak to Forrest Knox, I must give up my ability to defend myself. I could leave my gun in the car, but some primitive impulse makes me jam it into my waistband at the small of my back.
As I get out of my mother’s car, Ozan watches me as he might a rabid dog. He doesn’t take his weapon off me for a moment. After I climb the steps, he instructs me to lean against the porch rail, and I comply like the most docile of prisoners. The Redbone kicks my calves apart, then pats me down from shoulders to ankles. Yanking the .357 from my belt, he pulls me away from the rail and, with a flourish like an overzealous doorman, motions for me to enter the lodge.
The great room of Valhalla is a surreal museum filled with dozens of stuffed animal heads. Some appear to be endangered species. A fully grown mountain gorilla squats in one corner, its glassy gaze trained on the massive flat-screen TV across the room.
Ozan prods me toward a cypress door at the far end of the room.
As I make my way toward it, four gleaming samurai swords catch my eye. To the right of them hangs a photograph of an American sergeant beheading a Japanese officer in a World War II uniform. It makes me think of John Kaiser and his psychological history of the Knox family, but Kaiser is a million miles away from here.
In a study beyond the door, Forrest Knox sits waiting behind an antique desk, his freshly pressed state trooper’s uniform worn like protective armor. He regards me with curiosity but does not speak as I survey the room. His trooper’s hat hangs from an iron coatrack in the corner to his right. A finely tooled leather holster containing a semiautomatic pistol hangs beside it. Opposite the desk stands a massive feral hog, stuffed and mounted on an ash pedestal against the wall. A long spear protrudes from the animal’s back, but it’s clear to me that whoever killed that tusked giant must have struck it through the heart in order to get away alive.
“Seven hundred pounds,” Forrest says. “A worthy opponent, wouldn’t you say?”
“An armed man against a pig?”
Forrest smiles. “Get out there in those woods on horseback and you’ll change your mind.” He glances at Ozan. “He’s clean?”
“As the sheets in a convent.”
“Give us a few minutes, Alphonse.”
Obviously disappointed, the Redbone slips through the door and pulls it shut behind him. Knox smiles enigmatically, then motions for me to take the chair that faces his desk. As I sit, he leans back in his leather chair and cradles his hands behind his head.
“Alphonse told me you want to talk,” he says. “You here to give me another ultimatum? That last one didn’t work out too well.”
Yet again I note that Forrest is darker even than Sonny Thornfield was, and could well be Lincoln Turner’s father.
“Maybe I can save us some time,” he says, impatient with my silence. “You made some serious threats yesterday. I don’t know what your plans are, and you don’t seem in a very talkative mood. But I know one thing without you saying a word. Today you know something you didn’t know yesterday, which is that loss is not theoretical.”
I say nothing, and he takes my silence as encouragement to go on.
“Mayor, sooner or later, your fiancée was bound to die like she did. She nearly died two months ago during that gambling mess, didn’t she? See, her way was to grab the snake by the tail and try to pull it from its hole. Henry Sexton had the same problem. He lacked an appreciation of nature’s laws. It may be a cliché, but when you enter a lion’s territory, you become prey.”
Forrest waits for me to object, but I don’t.
“Let’s look at how things stand as of today.” He ticks off points on his fingertips. “Your mother and daughter are still alive, which is a blessing. Your father is also alive, which isn’t ideal from my perspective, but something I can tolerate under certain conditions. Besides, Doc hasn’t got that much time left, from what I understand. As for me . . . any minute now I’ll be superintendent of the state police. The FBI may have an army wading through the swamp a few miles from here, but nothing they find there will ever be tied to me. They already searched this lodge.” He gestures around us, then leans back again, satisfied. “They found nothing. So, no worries here. The Double Eagles aren’t going to say a word to anybody, especially since that planted meth disappeared from the evidence room at the Concordia Parish Sheriff’s Office.”
Forrest stops talking and regards me with the seemingly detached interest of a poker player. But the animal cleverness in his eyes tells me that, despite his calm affect, he’s trying to decide whether I’m an annoyance that can be mollified or a threat that must be eliminated.
“The long and the short of all this,” he concludes, “is that I’m content with the way things stand. You paid a heavy price, granted, but I’m hoping you’re smart enough to count the blessings you still have, rather than dwell on what you lost.”
When my silence becomes intolerable to him, he gives me an odd look and says, “I think it’s time for you to talk, Mayor.”
“You ordered Caitlin’s death,” I say softly. “I can prove that.”
Knox blinks twice but otherwise shows no surprise.
“You also raped Viola Turner when you were sixteen. Like father, like son, right? Grandfather, too.”
Now some color has come into his cheeks. With any other man, I’d have expected to see blood drain from them, but Forrest Knox is not a man to run from threats. “Go on,” he says, “if you have more to say.”
“You raped another woman, too, at the Bone Tree. I don’t have her name yet, but I will. You probably raped a dozen or more over the years, right? Killed them, too.”
Forrest cocks his head as though unsure of my sanity. Then he gives me a broad, conspiratorial smile that reveals gleaming yellow teeth. “Let me tell you a little secret, Mayor. If you’ve never taken a woman by force, you’ve never had a woman. Do you understand?”