Side by Side

by John Ramsey Miller

  Look for Inside Out and

  Upside Down, both featuring

  U.S. Marshal Winter Massey, and

  for The Last Family at your

  favorite bookseller’s.

  And read on for an exciting early

  look at the next thriller from

  John Ramsey Miller, Too Far Gone, coming soon from Dell.

  TOO FAR GONE

  by

  John Ramsey Miller

  TOO FAR GONE

  An Alexa Keen Novel by

  John Ramsey Miller

  1 New Orleans, Louisiana, 1976

  Crashing thunder woke the four-year-old.

  She lay still, taking deep breaths, huddling with the teddy bear as the storm’s fury assaulted her ears. Running bolts of lightning slashed the black sky.

  Wind blasted the rain hard against the window’s panes.

  The massive oak tree outside flailed its branches—like furious arms reaching out for the lace curtains.

  She clenched shut her eyes.

  “There’s nothing to fear,” her mother had said on other stormy nights. “You’re perfectly safe in your bed, Casey.”

  Each dazzling flash made the familiar objects in her room both strange and malevolent. The stuffed animals perched on the window box instantly became monstrous shadows against the shadowy wall.

  She listened for some sound to let her know if her parents were awake and perhaps moving around somewhere in the house. They will come tell me it’s all right.

  The bedroom door was cracked open, the hallway a dark and endless tunnel.

  “BAM!” A shutter on a nearby window, suddenly unhooked, slapped at the side of the house like an angry fist against a door. “BAM! BAM! BAM!”

  She pushed back the covers, slid off the mattress, and shot to the door, thinking of the safe, warm nest between her parents in their bed.

  Throwing open her door, she ran across the hallway to her parents’ bedroom, clutching the bear to her chest. They won’t be mad. She turned the knob and slowly crept into the bedroom, where lightning illuminated the crumpled bedding.

  They are not here!

  The bathroom was dark.

  They have to be downstairs.

  Casey hurried to find them. On the stairs, between the peals of thunder, she could hear loud noises below, like dogs barking, or seals at the zoo.

  One hand on the banister, the other clutching the soft animal to her, the child slid down the wide staircase one step at a time. The noises stopped before she reached the first floor and the sudden silence scared her more than the sounds.

  In the den, flashes formed into trapezoidal slivers by the windows lit the room eerily. The chair her father always sat in when he was in the room—it was vacant. Not in here.

  She padded off down the hallway toward the rear of the house. Mommy? Daddy?

  Casey saw a yellow band of light at the far end of the hallway under the swinging door to the kitchen and she ducked her head and ran for it. She imagined that something large was rushing at her in the darkness, something that would pounce at any second and sweep her up in its jaws like the lion on the television always did to the deer.

  “Mommy!” she yelled out. “Mommy!”

  Reaching, she pushed at it. Because it didn’t swing open but a tiny bit, her chest and her forehead struck it hard, and she whimpered at the pain. She fought to push it open, but it wouldn’t budge. In her panic she dropped the bear and slammed her hands against the wood, beating, beating, beating and hollering for her mother.

  Little by little, as whatever was making it stay shut moved a little at a time, it opened just a bit. The kitchen lights poured out into the hallway through the growing crack.

  Casey heard an odd sucking sound and a loud grunting.

  Something warm and wet touched her toes, and she looked down to see a pool spreading from under the door to her feet. Her bear was lying there on the floor, his black eyes staring up hard at her as the puddle swallowed his head and his arms.

  Casey pushed hard again.

  The door swung in suddenly and Casey pitched headlong into the brilliantly lit kitchen.

  She was lying facedown in the warm red liquid that was everywhere.

  She looked around and found herself staring into her mother’s face. It was not at all the right face. So many boo-boos. She knew her father was there too, but she wouldn’t look at him. She closed her eyes tightly and screamed and screamed.

  “STOP IT!” a voice boomed. “STOP IT RIGHT THIS MINUTE!”

  Casey quit screaming. Turning, she saw two bare feet inches from her face and let her eyes follow the legs to the hem of a dress. Casey sat bolt upright and looked up into the eyes of a witch wearing a wet dress. The witch’s blond and crimson hair stuck out from her head like twisted garden vines. The unfamiliar face, smeared with red, smiled down at her. Two of her front teeth were missing. She knelt and put the cook’s meat-chopping thing down on the floor.

  Casey couldn’t move. She stared at the bloody hands that reached out for her and she squeezed her eyes shut tight as the witch embraced her, pressing Casey’s cheek, now wet with tears she didn’t even know she was shedding, against her heaving chest.

  “What a good baby girl you are to come find me,” the husky voice told her. “I was just getting ready to come get you.”

  2 Thirty years later

  Using her Mag-Lite to prevent tripping over fallen tree limbs in the dark, Special FBI Agent Alexa Keen followed the long string of crime-scene tape that had been placed by responding officers to form a trail to a Day-Glo–bordered trapezoid. At the end of the tape she entered the crime scene. The corpse appeared to be wrapped tightly in a rust-colored blanket—a covering Alexa realized was composed of tens of thousands of fire ants. As she squatted for a better look, the dead man’s lids suddenly opened and he stared out at her through eyes of wet obsidian. His mouth formed a silent, screaming circle.

  Alexa jerked awake in the darkness and lay still, piecing the shards of reality together. The hotel. New Orleans. Law enforcement seminar. Friday. A real siren outside had clawed its way through the gossamer walls of her dream about a dead man she had seen only in photographs until his naked corpse had been discovered in the Tennessee woods two days after his family had paid a half-million-dollar ransom. Charles Tarlton had been one of her first cases—the first involving the murder of an abducted individual—and it played in the theater of her dreams with some frequency. As Alexa’s nightmares went, this one was hardly a two—a ten was being awakened by labored wheezing and lying frozen in terror as a pair of clammy hands explored her prepubescent body.

  The bedside clock had the time at five past twelve. Alexa slid her hand beneath the pillow beside her to feel the pommel grip of her Delta Dart, an eight-inch-long triangular-bladed weapon made of glass-reinforced nylon. It was always there in case she was ever again surprised by anyone climbing into her bed. The inexpensive dart’s edges were as dull as the point was sharp, and was strictly a stabbing weapon. Used correctly, it penetrated like a high-powered-rifle bullet. And Alexa Keen knew how to use it.

  Except for her removing her shoes, Alexa was still dressed in the clothes she’d worn to dinner with two other special agents she’d never met before they checked into the Marriott. She always slept in her clothes when she was away from her own bed. She lay awake for several more minutes with her eyes closed—her mind shifting gears and speeding through a world of troubling thoughts. The most disturbing were of her sister, who was sitting in a military safe house, waiting to testify at a string of court-martial proceedings.

  Beyond that stack of mind manure, Alexa’s mind started going through the cases she’d worked that had ended badly, wondering what she missed, how she should have done things differently. Everybody made mistakes, but when Alexa Keen made one, the consequences could be devastating and deadly.

  Alexa’s life was one long stress test. She thrived on edge living—consuming gallons of coffee and running headlong through
nights and days without meaningful sleep. She loved the atmospheric highs that success brought and she slogged her way out of the pit that failures brought. The job was her life. She read inside politics expertly, for doing so was a necessary evil: it often meant the difference between being relevant and sitting behind a desk in Fargo. She walked the walk—navigating the spiderweb red-tape bureaucracy—and talked Bureau-speak. This was the life she had freely chosen, and the other badges were almost the only family she had left. Alexa’s was a family headed by inflexible, often paranoid, and generally disapproving parent figures who were slow to reward and eager to punish—and a family where sibling rivalry was unrelenting and pitiless.

  Alexa rose from the bed and crossed to the window. Opening the heavy curtains, she peered down through the rain-streaked glass at a wide-awake city. Twenty floors below, an ambulance attendant slammed the door of the vehicle whose siren had awakened her and she listened to its scream as it made its way toward Charity Hospital, which had the closest and best emergency room in the city. And New Orleans did its dead-level best to make sure it remained the busiest room in town.

  Alexa Keen hadn’t yet found any place that felt like a comfort zone. She sometimes wondered if there was a nurturing place for her. She knew that home wasn’t a location, but most people sure seemed to be anchored to some geographic cradle. All through her life she had settled in superficially, learning the relevant streets in the cities she lived in, and developing preferences in stores and restaurants. In each city, there were people whose company she enjoyed. Her apartments were attractively decorated, but they might have been sets in a furniture showroom designed to give clients an idea of how a properly decorated place was supposed to look if you kept people out of it. The same framed art hung on the walls, the same sleek modern furniture always filled the space enclosed by the walls. No extraneous clutter. No plants to be watered. No pets to anchor her. Alexa’s telephone seldom rang and her mailbox collected only junk mail and bills. Her television set played strictly for information. Her sound system reflected her mood in shades of Billie Holiday, the Gypsy Kings, R.E.M., Green Day, the Beatles, or Elmore James.

  The pedestrians down on the sidewalk—most of them tourists, she was sure—were hardly more than marks. Their wallets held the blood that powered the city’s real heart—the French Quarter, and now the casinos. Alexa had visited the Crescent City only on FBI business. It wasn’t her nature to spend her vacation time in places like New Orleans, San Francisco, Las Vegas, or Miami. When she had time to fritter away—her forced vacations—she hiked obscure trails, floated down rivers, camped where few other people wanted to be. She liked the beach, but only in the winter. She loved best being alone on the side of a mountain under a giant blue sky, sipping creek-chilled wine while sitting in the cool grass reading. Alexa didn’t like New Orleans. Once, some years earlier, while fighting her way down Bourbon Street on Fat Tuesday, chasing after a man who had just shot a pair of deputy U.S. marshals, she had caught a glimpse of what Hell must look and feel like.

  During Mardi Gras, the Quarter was jam-packed with drunken hedonistic fools dancing to a tune of no-holds-barred wretched excess.

  She also didn’t find New Orleans particularly inviting in the space between Fat Tuesdays. She didn’t find the blend of grinding poverty, wholesale crime, decaying structures, the crumbling infrastructure, the third-world corruption, or the decadence at all attractive.

  Despite the fact that she was wide awake, the ringing telephone startled her. The red numerals on the clock said 12:22.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Special Agent Keen?” a male voice asked.

  “Speaking,” she responded.

  “This is Detective Michael Manseur,” he said. “I’m with N.O.P.D. Homicide.”

  “Winter Massey’s friend,” she said, smiling. Six months earlier, she and ex–Deputy U.S. Marshal Winter Massey, a close friend of hers from childhood, had worked together on a kidnapping case in North Carolina. In one of several conversations about an incident involving the murder of a friend’s niece, and Winter’s efforts to find her missing daughter before some hired killers and corrupt cops did, he had spoken very highly of Michael Manseur.

  “Well, I expect friend might be a stretch,” Manseur responded. “Acquaintance is closer to it. I have nothing but respect for Winter, that’s for sure. He is a remarkable and memorable individual.”

  “I spoke to him last week and he told me I should call you. I really did mean to.”

  “He called me three days ago to say I should call you while you were here at your seminar. He said we should get together. I intended to ask you to join my family for dinner while you’re in town, but I’ve been up to my belt loops in alligators.”

  “I’m leaving first thing in the morning,” she told him truthfully.

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” the policeman replied.

  What Alexa couldn’t imagine was why Manseur was calling her well after midnight. Maybe he’d been working in a windowless room and lost track of time. It had happened to her enough times.

  “Maybe the next time I’m in town . . .” she suggested.

  “David Landry, our missing persons detective, sat in on your talk today,” Manseur said. She liked his voice. He stretched his vowels out like taffy. The deep timbre and heavy accent were warm and comforting.

  “There were a lot of officers there. It was a big room.”

  “In his late twenties. Six two, one forty or thereabouts, blond, wears horn-rimmed glasses. Landry looks more like a professor than a cop.”

  She remembered the man whom Detective Manseur was describing but didn’t acknowledge that. “Well, maybe we can get together next time. It was nice talking to you, Detective Manseur.”

  “That isn’t why I called you, Agent Keen. I’m thoughtless to a fault, but I sure wouldn’t bother you at this hour just to chitchat. I was wondering if I could impose on you a little bit.”

  “Please do.” Perhaps he had a pressing question on a case he thought she might have an answer to.

  “We’ve got ourselves a potential situation. I was hoping you could spare me a couple of hours.”

  “My flight leaves at seven-twenty this morning.”

  “I mean right now. This deal is what you do, and Winter says you’re one of the best at it.”

  “An abduction?” she said, straightening and letting the curtains drop shut, closing out the rainy night.

  “Might be. Going missing in New Orleans is hardly unusual. Ninety-nine times out of ten, the case solves itself pretty quick. I hope you might be able to help us assess the situation. Tell us what you think we’ve got. It’s a pretty delicate deal.”

  “You’re the commander of Homicide, aren’t you?”

  “That’s pretty much a temporary assignment.”

  “How does this situation concern Homicide?”

  “Missing Persons is technically a department under Homicide, since identifying the deceased folks we run across is a big part of our deal. I hoped I could get your opinion on this since you’re here and carry the reputation you do. That’s all.”

  “I see.” She was flattered.

  “And then we can tell Massey that we got together. Are you free to go to a location with me?”

  It isn’t just a question or two over the phone. “How soon?”

  “I’m in the lobby,” he told her. “Standing by the elevators. I’m wearing a green raincoat. You have one, you might want to bring it.”

  Michael Manseur’s voice had thoroughly misrepresented him. The voice was something along the lines of Tommy Lee Jones. The man waiting at the elevator bank looked more like a chronically unsuccessful door-to-door vacuum cleaner hawk than a detective. Even with the thickness of the soles of his scuffed brown wingtips, Manseur was no more than five seven and, except for the laurel of short pale hair anchored by small ears, he was bald. His round face was covered with skin a shade darker than porcelain and featured intelligent but sad eyes with dark bags beneat
h them, a razor-thin nose, and a smile like that of a child with a huge secret. The green trench coat had oily stains on the hem. The knot on his predominantly yellow tie had been loosened hours ago, and the left side of his stiff shirt collar was bent up like a hand waving.

  “Agent Keen?” he said.

  “Alexa,” she said, smiling. “Please call me Alexa.”

  “Certainly. Call me Michael,” he replied, nodding. He swept his arm to indicate the direction she should travel to get to his car, which turned out to be a white sedan waiting at the curb.

  Manseur opened the passenger door for Alexa, closed it gently, then hurried around to take his place behind the wheel. He checked the rearview, pulled out, and headed away from the Mississippi River, turning on the blue light centered on the dash to cut a path through the traffic as the sedan gathered speed.

  “Where are we going?” she asked him.

  “Uptown a little way,” he replied, as if that answered her question.

  Alexa sat back and watched New Orleans pass by.

  3

  Manseur drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as he sped along streets Alexa wasn’t familiar with. Policemen, firemen, and ambulance drivers were required to learn the streets of their cities and towns until they were human GPS devices. If cabbies and delivery people didn’t do the same, they were less effective at their jobs, but people didn’t usually die on account of it.

  Alexa’s understanding of the layout of New Orleans was at best sketchy. She knew that the streetcar ran from uptown, through the Garden District, and made a loop at Canal Street. She knew the Mississippi River curved around the city, which was why it was called the Crescent City. She knew that Lake Pontchartrain was north and that the twin-span bridge across it was the longest bridge in the world. She knew where the French Quarter, the Central Business District, the Federal court building, and FBI headquarters were located.

  She knew a lot of cities in the same general way, which was as much as she cared to know about any of them. Normally, she was with a team, and usually they had local agents or policemen to get them efficiently from place to place. And these days there were GPS devices in most Bureau cars and rentals.