Misisipi

by Michael Reilly

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I got off light.”

  “How so?”

  “My partner in Robbery, Pat Wiseman. Career DI, about the finest I ever knew. He caught flies offa the dump I took on everything. Got shipped over to Missing Persons at Port Authority. Three months later, he’s under the rubble of Tower Two. Probably still is.”

  Stencek looked at the blocked window and drained the mojito dry. “Maybe one day I’ll get up the stones to tell his widow I’m sorry.”

  “Maybe one day you can do that with your wife by your side, when you’re back home for good.”

  “Who knows? She’s not hooked up with anyone else, best I know. Just the five of em, one big happy family, while I’m down here babysitting you in the goddamn storm of the century. I get up maybe about every six months and see the boys. Spend the day with em at the Central Park Zoo or take em to Nike Town. I see Annie but we don’t speak. She makes sure she stays in the car when she drops them off and picks em up. I catch her eye, give her a smile, let her know I’m ok and I’m glad everyone else is ok. That’s it.”

  Silence filled the space between the two men. Scott broke it. “Please. Let me go,” he asked.

  “Ok.” Stencek shrugged his shoulders. “You’re free. Where you intend to go and how you plan on getting there, that’s between you and the weather.”

  “I’ll do whatever it takes to find Julianna.”

  Stencek picked up the satphone. “That was Larry. They have my man. I’m going up there now. It was nice knowing you, Scott.” He slipped the hundred note under his empty cup, got up, and headed for the door.

  “Who the hell is this guy?” Scott called after.

  “Just the reason your wife is here in the first place. But you’re not interested in that, right?”

  As he opened the door, Stencek caught the satellite image on the television.

  “Kids eh?” he mused. “They’ll kill you in the end.”

  As Stencek exited into the driving rain, Scott rose and hurried through the still-swinging door after him.

  At the wheel of the Navigator, Stencek found his way to Jackson Square and stopped under a building on the street corner. From a briefcase, he took a file folder and extracted a single sheet of paper, handing it to Scott. It was Becky’s photo of the balcony version of the broach.

  He lowered Scott’s window. “Look up,” he instructed.

  Scott peered through the sheeting rain to the corner of the building. The second floor balcony which ran right around the block had a wrought iron rail. Scott could clearly see the emblem of the broach repeatedly worked into the metal, especially the signature version on the corner directly above them. “The Pontalba Building?” he whispered, looking at the same image on the sheet.

  “Yeah.”

  “Julianna grew up here?”

  “No. She grew up a world away from here, the world of a guy with notions of this kind of class.”

  Stencek handed the complete folder to Scott. “This is everything I was given. I’m sure it’s not the full story. It’s enough to make me not wanna know the full story.”

  As Scott took the folder, Stencek saw the look of dead trepidation in his eyes.

  “You have 30 minutes til we get there. I figure you oughta know who we’re about to meet.”

  “Who are you working for?” Scott asked.

  “Who cares anymore?” Stencek closed the window and threaded the Navigator through the empty streets. As it climbed the elevated interstate, the winds rose to meet it and they punched and pummeled its heavy sides, testing it, intent on besting it before the night was done.

  Chapter 42

  The folder contained newspaper clippings, photographs, prints of microfiched police reports. It was the headline history of Stencek’s man: Henry Almonester.

  Two early charge sheets: cigarette thefts from Camp Polk, Louisiana in ’44; a murder rap in ’48 in Corinth, Mississippi. The former stuck, the latter slid.

  A list of known associates was dated 1979. It was cross-referenced with a list of known business interests, noting those legitimate and those not.

  Later reports—from the early-to-late 90’s—stood out for being in either French or Spanish; headed paper with addresses in Mexico, Haiti, Ecuador. Agents Privés, Detectives Privados and Personnes Disparues were prominent phrases.

  The mugshot from Corinth showed a skinny young man with a brooding unbothered regard for his predicament; piercing eyes beneath a widow’s peak of greasy black hair and a thin curved nose above a lopsided snarl and a boney pointed chin. Henry’s sharp face had all the charm of an axe blade and his expression for the camera declared that he liked that just fine.

  An undated photo showed Henry as an older man, his now thinning silver hair oiled down. In a smart tux, he stooped between two seated women in their party finery. All three wore ball masks. Henry’s boasted an elongated protruding nose, almost phallic.

  There were other images of him, mostly snaps of a domestic intimacy which was out of place with the official paperwork, and Scott quickly grew glassy-eyed as he worked through an assortment of financial sheets, all dry attestation to the fact that crime did pay. But there was nothing of Julianna so he flicked absently on.

  And came to the dead children.

  An Orleans Parish death certificate recorded the first: a baby, Jean Almonester. The cause of death noted was pneumonia, the date as 16 August, 1981. The boy’s age was given as ten months. Scott flipped back a few pages. Henry Almonester was born in 1921, the child therefore sired when Henry was almost 60.

  The police report of the next deceased had a photo clipped to it. The typed report listed the particulars, the technical lingo impassive. Scott flipped the sheet over and, when the photograph met him, realized he hadn’t taken in the report’s description of the victim’s age. He reread it. She was eight years old.

  The black and white picture was blown up from a smaller original, giving it a grainy detached quality. The scene was all-too clear though. She’d been butchered in the large kitchen of a house. The blood on the dining table was as black as the dress she wore where she lay beneath the table. A halo of black spread out from under her fair hair fanned on the tiled floor. What Scott first mistook to be a dark necklace, he saw now was the open gash across her throat. In sick sympathy, bile rose in Scott’s own now and he willed it back down. The house was registered to Henry Almonester, whereabouts unknown.

  The Navigator was on the Twin-Span now, the elevated split-highway which floated miles across Lake Pontchartrain to the far shore. No land was visible, just the dark expanse of water beneath and the angry skies above. Stencek turned on the roof spots and their powerful beams lit the arrow-straight road ahead of them, revealing a seemingly endless gangplank across an opaque drowning purgatory. They were the only souls riding it tonight.

  Scott flipped the sheet.

  The last victim was the eldest.

  Lirienne Almonester died August 21, 1981, five days after her infant son. Her body was found in the male shower room of Orleans Parish Prison. Her back was broken. Her corpse was heavily marked by bruising in the anal and vaginal regions as well as ligature marks about her arms and legs. Of the 11 bite marks inflicted on her, three were deemed post-mortem. Her jaw had been broken by repeated blows. Semen traces taken by the coroner put a conservative estimate on the number of her assailants as 15.

  There was no evidence of defensive wounds on her and no skin samples were found under her nails.

  Heavy traces of heroin were present in her blood samples.

  Her ring finger had been ripped off. The report noted that two diamond bands, familiar to associates of Lirienne, were missing. The finger itself was found jammed into the sinkhole of the shower room urinal.

  But those were just words.

  In graphic closeup, a series of crime-scene photos showed where Lirienne had been discarded in the shower room. Her naked white body lay contorted on the ground. The twisted position of her leg
s, arms, head, the bruising, dirt, razing trauma to her skin, all robbed Lirienne Almonester of the impression that she had once been a living being. In death, she looked like a broken mannequin, a mockery of her humanity.

  Scott stared hard, trying to make sense of the impossible posture of her corpse. The thing no longer living lay on its back, its head lolled mercifully away from the lens. But the lower half of the torso was turned fully toward the camera, rested on its right hip, twisted as a mean child might do to another’s doll.

  One final image was a head shot taken where she lay on her slab in the morgue. There was bruising to the right side of her face. But that was nothing beside the feral destruction inflicted on the left side. It was almost entirely blackened by the slaps and punches enjoyed by one—or more—of her rapists. Her left cheekbone was broken, now a distinct crater in her once-beautiful face. Both her eyes were bloodied pulps in their sockets. Her broken jaw drooped loosely against her neck. Scott could see that her teeth were undamaged. He could see them clearly because part of her lower lip had been bitten off.

  Henry Almonester’s wife was 16 when the animals ended her.

  Scott abandoned all pretence of keeping it in. He pushed the car door open and vomited into the wind. Stencek brought them to a jarring stop and Scott released his belt and tumbled out onto the wet road. He collapsed on all-fours and heaved until his gut twisted.

  Stencek came around and pulled him from the puddles.

  “Jesus, Mike! God in fucking Heaven!”

  “I’m sorry you had to see that.”

  Scott grabbed Stencek by the lapels. “Tell me nothing like that happened to Jules. Tell me they never touched her, please!”

  “No. No. I swear to you. It isn’t like that.” Stencek clasped Scott’s head. “She got away. She got saved.”

  “Did she know? Did she see?”

  “She knows enough to want to come back and settle it.”

  “Why? She was five years old in 1981. How could she possibly be connected to that… horrorshow?”

  “When we find her, you can ask her. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “And this Henry guy does?”

  “Why don’t we go see? C’mon, get back in. You’re soaked.”

  “Why are you helping me?”

  “What choice do I have? You just won’t fucking give up, will you?”

  “Is that the worst of it, in the file?”

  “If we don’t get moving, there’s gonna be two more stiffs to add. You ok?”

  Scott shook his head.

  “Good. I’d worry if you were,” Stencek declared.

  As the Navigator got moving again, Scott gathered the papers from the floor. He held up a sheet from the back of the set. “These are my cell records. This week even.”

  “Yeah. Sorry. I had to know if you’d been in contact with anyone.”

  “Did you know she drugged me? Charlie.”

  “Just be thankful I set the dosage.”

  “What did she tell you? Did she mention what we talked about?”

  “Actually no. Is there something you wanna share now?”

  “I thought you two… that she would have reported everything back.”

  “I’m not the boss of her. The Brits… they’re complex.”

  “What about Larry? What’s his problem?”

  “He’s got some kind of Marfans. You know, Old Abe Syndrome. No hiding it.”

  Scott grunted.

  “He’s kinda sensitive about it,” Stencek warned. “I wouldn’t tease him again if I were you.”

  “I don’t mean that. I know what Marfans is. I meant his head. What’s up with his head?”

  “Oh that? He’s a psychopath.”

  Scott settled back and watched the road ahead.

  Stencek looked across from the corner of his eye. “I wouldn’t tease him about that either,” he said.

  Chapter 43

  Monday August 29

  12:18 am CDT, Katrina -5 Hours

  The harsh beams of the roof spots threw a high wall of light ahead of the Navigator as they now sped along a narrow two-lane, headed south into the rural flatland of Slidell. Houses appeared and fled as quickly as the spots found and passed them, as though spooked by the light itself. Glimpsing their fragile wooden skins, Scott doubted many would see the morning intact. Every one looked thankfully abandoned. Skinny pines, densely bunched along both sides of the road, whipped in apoplectic rhythm to the storm’s tune. They rushed past the whitelight of the spots like a manic skeletal Carnival. The almost-horizontal rain, like a blizzard of confetti, completed the eerie effect.

  Stencek ploughed through a wide floodpool at the next intersection. He paused, considered the location of Larry’s signal on the satphone, and turned left.

  Ahead, the blistered frame of a rotting truss bridge loomed on the edge of the lights. Before they reached it, Stencek slowed as they came to a secondary road, a sandy track which curved out of sight behind another stretch of pines.

  “Camp Road, I reckon,” he said, leaving the smooth two-lane for the rough access road. The Navigator immediately began pitching in and out of potholes long-eaten into the tire ruts. They were easy to spot—water filled them entirely. The entire track itself wasn’t far behind joining their immersion.

  The source of the rising tide, the Pearl River, snaked around the headland and the road curved with it, winding past a loose row of houses built on the bank. The river’s surface bubbled and boiled under the weight of the downpour. Not one car remained at any of the half-dozen darkened homes. Boats and skiffs were pulled up onto their slips. A solid wall of pines flanked the other side of the track, masking whatever waited around the bend.

  Aways beyond the last house, a dead-end barrier of trees announced the end of the track. To the right, an almost-hidden smaller path—barely wide enough for the Navigator—offered the only way forward.

  Stencek negotiated the tight turn and crawled through the gap, emerging into a secluded area overlooking a bend in the river, a clearing entirely circled by the elbow of the river on one side, dense woodland on the other.

  “End of the road,” he announced.

  “Literally,” Scott added.

  A lone house, a gone-to-seed two-story dump, stood mid-and-center. In the glare of the spots, its duck-egg blue paintwork showed cracked and flakey, its siding moldy in the joints. On the rear porch, Larry straightened in the open doorway and watched the Navigator park beside a pimped white Nissan Skyline at the edge of the riverbank. Henry’s red Continental sat next to it.

  “Hand me the envelope out of the glovebox, would ya?” Stencek asked Scott. Scott felt the tell-tale bulge of a note-bundle as he did.

  As they dashed toward the shelter of the porch, a squat beachball-fat guy, swimming in an oversized Hornets shirt and baggy court shorts, charged out the door past Larry and down the steps with Keith in tow.

  “Mike! Godammit! What’s with you? You any idea the time?” the Hornets man yelled.

  “Sorry, Rondell. The buffet line at Commander’s Palace was backed up. I was hungry.” Stencek shrugged his shoulders.

  “Did’n y’all see the ‘Warning-Hurricane!’ signs posted on the way into town?”

  “They must have blown away before we got here.”

  “Oh, funny,” Rondell bleated. “Funny! Funny! Funny! Y’all gots my money?”

  Stencek tossed him the bundle. “You can count it if you want. In this gale, you’ll be picking C-Notes out of the water til Christmas.”

  “It all there?” Rondell asked anyway. Stencek glowered back.

  “K. K. Chill the fuck. Ay’s only asking. Is just all you gone be fish bait in six hours. I don’t do lay-a-away for dead men walking.”

  “Don’t spend it all in the first iHop,” said Stencek.

  “Funny, Mike, always funny. Z!” Rondell screamed. “We going!”

  From inside the house, a lanky awkward youth appeared on the porch, saw Larry, and faltered. As he passed timidly, Larry
did a feint lunge and spooked Z-Minus to tumbling down the steps onto his ass.

  “Please tell me he doesn’t get a third,” Stencek sighed.

  “Yeah, but you know that thing—one-for-you, one-for-me, two-for-you, one-two-for-me?” Rondell laughed raucously. “He fucking loves that game come payday. Too wild!”

  “Any problems when you got here?” Stencek asked.

  “Nope,” Rondell mumbled, “we be copa—, copateck—, co… Fuck, Mike! S’all been good. Why, you hear different?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then we done?”

  “You’re done.”

  “Just memba, y’all in Kansas no more.”

  “I’m touched by your concern.”

  “Yah. Bite me! I’m skatin outta this snake farm. Y’all has a nice life, was left of it.”

  Rondell and Z climbed into the Skyline. When the engine started, a futuristic gold light spilled from under its carriage and a Gangsta Rap cut jumped to life on the sound system.

  Keith stopped beside Stencek. Against the throbbing bass from the Skyline, Scott missed the snap exchange of what was said as Keith handed Stencek a slip of paper before racing to join his crew.

  Scott and Stencek watched the Skyline exit the clearing. The headlights and hip-hop faded behind the treeline in the direction of the main road and then they were gone.

  Stencek stopped Scott on the porch steps. “Give us a minute here, Larry.”

  Larry gave them a dead look and sauntered back into the house.

  “I don’t want you spazzing out on me in there, Scott. Think you can keep it together?”

  “Why, what’s going to happen?”

  “This is my office. My rules. You can stay out here and sulk. But if you’re coming in, I want absolutely no interference from you, gottit? Don’t speak. Don’t make a fucking sound. You don’t move a muscle that ain’t got my say-so first.”