Jamie probably unplugged it.
She folded her arms and put her head down on her desk. As though watching a film in her mind, she saw Tom Cage standing in the dark, reading her text message about the baby. That message had been a last-ditch effort to try to persuade him to turn himself in—to come back to his family and put his trust in Penn. As Tom read the message in her vision, an awestruck smile lit his white-bearded face. I’ve got to find him, Caitlin thought. Surely I can do that. If he’s still alive . . .
“Caitlin?” said a voice, and then someone shook her.
She opened her eyes and found Jordan Glass kneeling beside her chair. “Hey,” Jordan said. “You need some real sack time.”
“Nooo,” Caitlin moaned in protest. “I’ve got tons of work to do.”
“You’re no good to anybody like this. You’ve hit the wall.”
“Two hours,” Caitlin pleaded. “Two hours’ work, and then I can grab a little sleep. Can you help me?”
Jordan sighed heavily, then got to her feet. “What’s your poison? More coffee?”
“No. Green tea, strong as you can make it.”
The photographer looked down at her with a maternal frown. “It’s like looking in a damn mirror. A mirror with a ten-year time lag.”
As Jordan walked out, Caitlin remembered that the photographer had been trying to get pregnant for months, without result. Glass had confided this to her on the first day they met, in an unexpected moment of shared confidence. Jordan was Penn’s age, so the odds were against her. Caitlin, on the other hand, hadn’t even been trying, and she was already knocked up.
If she had the power, she would trade places with Jordan, at least as far as their obstetric situations. She had plenty of time to get pregnant again, but she might never have another career opportunity like this one. The “baby” in her belly was at this point only an agglomeration of cells that would not even begin to show for months. The Double Eagle story, on the other hand, had been fulminating within her like some protean thing, constantly changing shape, growing new faces and revealing hidden ones. Earlier tonight it had almost devoured her. For the next week, at least, she would have to focus on that larger inhabitant. For if she managed to deliver it to the world, in all its depraved ugliness, she would make possible the justice and healing for which Henry Sexton had given his life. And more than that . . . she would have nothing left to prove. Not to her father . . .
Not to anybody.
CHAPTER 13
FORREST KNOX TOOK a remote control unit from his pocket and opened the gate of the Valhalla Exotic Hunting Reserve. Driving north from Baton Rouge always invigorated him, leaving behind the gas flares of the petrochemical plants of Cancer Alley and the haunted fields of the Angola Prison Farm, and climbing into the green hills and hollows of southwest Mississippi, the hunter’s paradise. The great river itself lay scarcely a mile away now, beyond a few wooded ridges and the swamp where the river flowed eons ago.
The serpentine access road to the hunting camp wound through acres of second-growth hardwood forest filled with wildlife surveillance cameras and food plots for the game animals. After a descent through broken terrain, the road flattened out on a plateau overlooking the rich bottomland between the westernmost ridge and the Mississippi River. At the edge of this plateau stood the main lodge. Ozan’s state police cruiser was already parked in the oyster shell turnaround on its back side. Forrest parked beside him, then hurried up the steps and into the lodge.
He found Ozan in the great room, a vast space lined with the heads of exotic game taken from around the world, though several species had been transplanted here and bred behind the camp’s eleven-foot fences. The Redbone sat in a leather club chair, a shot glass of bourbon beside him. Forrest couldn’t remember seeing the man so anxious in all the time he’d known him.
“You want a drink?” Ozan asked, moving to get up.
“Later.” Forrest sat on the sofa opposite Ozan and put his boots up on an ottoman. “We need to make some fast decisions.”
“I’ve got the Black Team online. Everybody but Pichot. He’s in Florida, but he’s heading back as soon as he can get a flight.”
“Good. Because Brody put us in a real corner tonight. It’s a relief that Henry Sexton’s dead, but we have to assume he passed on what he knew to the Masters girl. And we have to assume Morehouse told Henry everything he knew.”
“Shit.”
“And Brody’s death is going to rattle the hell out of the money boys in New Orleans.”
Ozan’s lips parted in silence: this consequence had not yet occurred to him.
“If I’d known all this would happen,” Forrest thought aloud, “I might have waited to move on Mackiever, but the iron’s in the fire now.”
The Redbone took a sip of whiskey, then wiped his mouth. “If that girl is the problem, I can take care of that. I can be in Natchez in forty minutes. By noon tomorrow, she’ll have disappeared off the planet. Nobody’ll ever find her. It’ll be like she never existed.”
Forrest admired Ozan’s initiative, but the man was no strategist. “No, it won’t.”
“Sure it will. How many drug dealers have I fed to the alligators? I can do the same to Mayor Cage, and even the FBI man if it comes to that.”
“This is different. If high-profile people like that disappear, the story will just get bigger and bigger until it swallows us. If we killed the Natchez mayor, its newspaper publisher, or an FBI agent, we’d have a dozen new FBI agents in here the next day. Kill all three, and we’d have fifty. And they’d never stop hunting until they nailed us. No . . . the only people we can kill with impunity at this point are Dr. Cage and Ranger Garrity. The others are practically untouchable.”