Mississippi Blood

  Dolores St. Denis studies me in silence for half a minute. Then she says, “I see.”

  “His father was almost certainly the other dark man you remember. He was the founder of the Double Eagle group. Frank Knox. He was killed in 1968, only a couple of years after your husband was murdered.”

  Dolores goes pale at this. “Really?” she whispers.

  If I had to guess, she is thinking about decades of nightmares she might have been spared had she known that the demon in them was dead. “Yes, ma’am,” I say again. “He died on the floor of my father’s medical office. His chest was crushed in an industrial accident.”

  Relief shines from Dolores’s eyes.

  “Would you be willing to look at some photographs?” I finally ask.

  She instantly draws back from me. “I’d rather not. Do you really think any of those men are still alive?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Which ones? Not the blond man.”

  I dread answering her, but I have no choice. “He might be, yes. He might be just the man we’re after.”

  She closes her eyes once more. “Oh, God. I knew it.”

  “What?” asks Serenity, leaning closer. “What is it?”

  “They were all bad . . . but in some way, he was the worst. Not the most brutal, but . . . the most twisted. It was him who turned me over, who—”

  “It’s all right,” I say quickly. “You don’t have to tell us that right now.”

  “I’d rather get it out. I never thought I would, you see. But now . . . maybe because of what you’ve told me, I feel I can.”

  “What did the blond man do?” Serenity asks softly.

  “He sodomized me. Several did, after that. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The blond one used a stick on me. A piece of bamboo. He said something about the Japanese doing the same thing in China. He called them ‘Japs,’ of course. I—”

  Dolores’s voice dies suddenly, as if her air has simply run out.

  “Are you all right?” asks Serenity, starting to her feet.

  “I thought I was going to die that night,” she whispers. “They tore me up so badly. That’s why I have no children. I couldn’t conceive after that.”

  “That had to be Snake Knox,” I say with conviction. “He’s the missing piece in that scene. Frank and his buddies took trophies off the Japanese during the war. Snake probably did the same in Korea. They were obsessed with that kind of thing.” And Snake used a bottle on Viola during the machine-shop rape . . .

  Serenity has reached out and taken hold of Dolores’s hand. “I’m right here with you,” she almost croons. “They can’t hurt you now.”

  “I need to find out if Snake Knox was wounded in Korea,” I think aloud. “Or if he had any sort of abdominal scars at that time.”

  “No, you don’t,” says Dolores.

  I look up in surprise. Did I go too far? “I’m sorry, Dolores. I’ve just been hunting this guy for so long. You don’t want me to pursue this?”

  She shakes her head. “You don’t need to worry about the scars. Because I saw his face.”

  This revelation hits me like a lightning flash. “You saw the blond man’s face?”

  “Yes. While the others were raping me, he and the older dark one shared a bottle of whiskey off to the side. They didn’t think I could see them, I guess. Or they weren’t planning on letting me live, maybe.”

  “May I show you some photographs?”

  Dolores takes a deep breath, then nods.

  I take out the folded page from the Examiner that I showed her mother-in-law in Athens Point. On it are headshots of most of the Knoxes, Glenn Morehouse, Sonny Thornfield, and several other Double Eagles. Dolores scans the page for about ten seconds, then reaches out and lays the nail of her right forefinger on the face of Snake Knox.

  “That’s him. That’s the blond man with the scars. He and the dark man killed my husband.”

  I close my eyes with enervating relief. “Jesus God.”

  “Thank you,” Serenity tells her. “You don’t know what you’ve done.”

  Getting slowly to my feet, I look down at Dolores. “I promise you this, Mrs. St. Denis. That man is going to die in Angola Prison.”

  She glances over at Serenity, then back at me. “Even without me testifying in court?”

  I force myself to take a deep breath, then sit back down in front of her. I came to this fork in the road a thousand times as a prosecutor. Nobody wants to sit in open court and point their finger at a violent killer.

  “Dolores—”

  “I can’t do it,” she says quickly. “I know what you want, and I wish I could help you. But I can’t sit in the same room with him. I can’t.”

  Serenity nods with understanding, but I know she’s going to try to bring the woman around. “Dolores—”

  “Can’t you just use what I’ve told you?” she cuts in, her voice high and unsteady. “Like an anonymous tip?”

  “I’m afraid that won’t work in a murder case,” I explain.

  Dolores looks into her lap and begins to sob quietly. I look to Serenity for help, but even she doesn’t seem to know what to do. While we stare at each other, Dolores’s house phone begins to ring. The bell is soft, but Dolores’s head snaps up so fast that it scares me.

  “It’s okay,” I assure her. “Nobody knows we’re here.”

  “Maybe it’s Cleotha, checking on me.”

  “I’m sure it is. Why don’t you answer it?”

  She gets up, walks to an occasional table near the door, then picks up the phone and says, “Yes?”

  About five seconds pass. Then she says, “Hello? Hello . . . ?”

  As she hangs up, her face drains of color.

  “They said my name,” she says dully. “They said ‘Dolores Booker?’” Suddenly her eyes go wide. “They’ve found me. After all these years . . . oh, dear God. I should have never—oh, Lord. What do I do? Call the police?”

  My heart is pounding, but my brain is working fine. “I’d rather call the FBI. They have a field office in New Orleans, and I know a guy who can get a team here fast.”

  “‘Fast’ is a relative term,” Serenity says. “Their field office is out by Lake Pontchartrain, isn’t it? That’s what I remember from Katrina. We need help now.”

  Serenity is assuming that Snake or the VK have already got people coming to this house. Is she right? We can’t afford to hope otherwise. “Then let’s help ourselves. What’s the address of this house again?”

  Dolores is too frightened to answer, but Serenity says, “2304 Dufossat.”

  I pick up the phone and hit 911.

  “Nine-one-one emergency,” says the dispatcher.

  “There’s a home invasion in progress at 2305 Dufossat! I heard shots, right across the street! And there’s a man carrying a TV out of the house. Two more are carrying a generator. Hurry, please!”

  I slam down the phone. “It’s going to ring again, but we’re not going to answer. Dolores, this is a big house. Is there any way out that nobody would know about? Or think of?”

  “I can’t think!” she cries, holding her hands to her cheeks.

  “Breathe, Dolores. Think about how you leave the house.”

  You never know how someone will hold up under stress. Dolores St. Denis looks like she’s on a one-way trip to infantile helplessness. But just when I think I’m going to have to heave her over my shoulder and carry her out, she says, “I can’t let them take me.”

  “They’re not going to,” I assure her. “But we need a way out. A way nobody would expect.”

  She nods jerkily, like someone trying to convince themselves they’re still alive and capable of movement.

  “We’re with you,” Serenity tells her. “Think, Dolores. How do we get out?”

  “There’s a side door,” she whispers. “Right up against the hedge.”

  “Show us.”

  Chapter 21

  We exit Dolores’s house into near darkness from a side door
that opens onto a shrub-lined fence. With less than eighteen inches of clearance between the wall and the hedge, I pray that if anyone has already come for Dolores St. Denis, they’ll be unlikely to try this side of the mansion first.

  Without any discussion Serenity rushes past me and takes point, leading us toward the backyard, away from our rental car, which has probably already attracted attention out front. Tee has a pistol in her hand, a black semiauto that looks like a .40 caliber. Dolores is hyperventilating, but something keeps her moving—probably her memory of what she experienced in the Lusahatcha Swamp back in 1966.

  As we pass the back corner of the house, I find myself wishing I’d called Kaiser for help. He could put an FBI tactical team around this house capable of stopping a frontal assault by a crazed mob. The question—as Serenity realized—is how fast could he do it?

  Tee’s left hand whips up to stop us, but not quickly enough to prevent me from colliding with her back. When she turns, I see her frustration at dealing with untrained civilians.

  “Stay here,” she says.

  Before I can argue, she sprints to the stucco wall that borders the back of the property, leaps up and catches the top with her fingers, then pulls herself up and looks over it. After about twenty seconds, she slowly lowers herself, then runs back to where we await her.

  “There’s an alley back there,” she whispers. “There’s a motorcycle parked in the alley, and there’s a guy on the motorcycle.”

  “VK?”

  “It ain’t Steve McQueen.”

  She must have watched The Great Escape with her uncle Catfish, I think crazily. I don’t relish getting into a gunfight, especially with Dolores in the middle of it. “Should we wait for the cops to respond to my home invasion call?”

  Serenity clearly doesn’t like this option. “I don’t hear any sirens yet,” she whispers. “I don’t want to sit here waiting for the NOPD. They might not show for half an hour.”

  “What, then?”

  “His kickstand isn’t down.” She bites her bottom lip, then gives me a hard look. “I can take him out.”

  “You mean kill him?”

  “No. Neutralize him.”

  Before I can give any opinion, Serenity unbuttons her blouse, then yanks out her shirttail. “If you hear me shoot, I had no choice. Okay?”

  “Jesus, Tee. Are you—”

  “Listen. When I yell ‘Now! Now!’ you bring Dolores through the back gate and get right on my heels. Got it?”

  “Yeah.”

  Serenity squeezes my hand, then turns and sprints far out to her right. This time when she reaches the wall, she climbs it and drops over to the other side.

  “Where’s she going?” Dolores asks. “Why aren’t we following her?”

  “We’re going to in a minute. Just wait. I don’t see the gate.”

  “There’s a Judas gate over there in the ivy, to the right. I have the code.”

  A little good news. Unable to stand waiting in the dark, I lead Dolores forward to the wall, then pull myself up and peek over.

  What I see astonishes me.

  Serenity is sashaying up to the biker like a drunken crack whore, cooing something that sounds like sex slang from the hood. It’s gibberish to me, but the biker seems to understand well enough. He sits up straighter on his Harley and waits for her to reach him. I can clearly see the VK patch on the arm of his jacket. When Serenity is close enough to touch, he reaches out and takes hold of her left breast.

  Tee lets him get a good feel.

  After he samples the merchandise for a few seconds, she unzips her jeans, digs her hand into her crotch, pulls out her Glock, and cracks him across the face with it. Before the biker can recover, Tee raises her right foot, jams it against the gas tank, and kicks out with all her strength. The Harley teeters, then crashes over on the VK man’s leg.

  “NOW! NOW! NOW!” Tee yells, waving her Glock at me.

  Dropping to the ground, I grab Dolores’s arm and run to the Judas gate to our right. With shaking fingers she punches in the code, and then we run into the alley where Serenity waits. Tee makes a point to keep us away from the trapped biker, but as we pass I see him yank his leg clear of the Harley.

  As Dolores and I run down the fence-lined alley toward a proper street, I hear the pop-pop-pop of a semiautomatic pistol. My heart stutters, and I pull Dolores to a halt. She doesn’t want to stop, so I hold her in place with one hand and aim my pistol back toward the way we came with my other.

  The seconds between that moment and seeing Serenity come tearing down the alley are some of the scariest of my life. But ten seconds after Tee reaches us, we emerge on Soniat Street, look both ways, then race south to Baronne. When we reach the corner, we veer right on Robert Street and sprint south again, to the broad thoroughfare of St. Charles Avenue.

  “Call a cab,” Serenity snaps, pulling Dolores into a shadowy doorway. “Won’t be any cruising down here. If you don’t get one in two minutes, we’ll jump the next streetcar.”

  “No streetcars,” I say breathlessly. “All the lines are still down. Did you shoot that guy?”

  The whites of her eyes flash in the dark. “I just scared him. Let’s move, or there’ll be more shooting to come.”

  In the end, we took a cab.

  We had to hide awhile waiting for it to arrive, but forty minutes later we were airborne again, flying north toward Natchez. I sat up front with Danny McDavitt, while Tee sat in back with Dolores. I called ahead and told Tim to have at least three men and the Yukon waiting at the Natchez landing strip. I wasn’t sure how the VK had traced us to Dolores’s house, and I didn’t want to take any chances. I very much wanted to call John Kaiser and tell him who we had with us, but something told me that if I did, Dolores would deny everything she’d told us.

  I thought that once the lights of the city had vanished beneath us, Dolores might calm down, but she didn’t. She was certain that the only way the VK could have found us was by torturing it out of Mrs. Booker in Athens Point. I finally eased her mind by persuading Danny to fly low over Doloroso, where I knew a cell tower stood on the high hill there. Dolores called her mother-in-law, and she nearly collapsed when Mrs. Booker told her she was fine and had received no visits from anyone.

  “They couldn’t have followed this airplane down to New Orleans,” I told Tee quietly. “They must have found out we visited Mrs. Booker and traced her calls to Dolores afterwards.”

  When Dolores finally leaned against the cabin wall and closed her eyes, I discovered I’d received a text from Drew Elliott. It read: 99% sure now Peggy did not have a stroke. Likely complex migraine. We got lucky, Penn. Keeping her 24 hours for observation, abundance of caution. She doesn’t want Tom knowing anything about it. Talk to you soon.

  I sighed heavily, closed my eyes, and settled lower in my seat.

  Ten minutes later, Danny landed us on the same grass strip from which we had taken off four and a half hours earlier. Tim and his team stood waiting beside the armored Yukon, and they took great care to be sure that Dolores felt safe during the transfer to the vehicle.

  Once we reached my house, I showed Dolores to the last upstairs guest room. I offered to move her to my mother’s room, which was now empty, but Dolores wouldn’t hear of it. I offered her food, but this she declined also. She did accept some green tea, and then she asked if I might have any Xanax or Valium. I pilfered a couple from my mother’s stash, gave them to Dolores, then left the poor woman alone with her nerves.

  Downstairs, Annie and Mia insisted on hearing a blow-by-blow account of our trip. They were munching on hot popcorn, and Serenity was gobbling it down faster than either of them. I edited out the worst of Dolores’s traumatic memories, but they could tell that Serenity and I had both been rattled by our experience. While Tee gave them an almost comedic version of our escape from the Garden District, I called Carl Sims and asked if he could check on Cleotha Booker for us. When I described the situation, Carl told me he’d feel better parking his cruiser in f
ront of her house for the night. I thanked him, then pointed upstairs and held out my sweaty shirt to let the girls know I’d be taking a shower. Serenity kept talking, but a split second before I passed through the door, she looked over Annie’s head and gave me an almost imperceptible nod. Annie was laughing out loud as I climbed the stairs, and I said a silent thank-you to Tee for shielding her from the reality of our New Orleans experience.

  As the steaming water washes away the sweat of our trip to the hurricane-ravaged city, I think again about calling John Kaiser. But doing that at this juncture would risk destroying Dolores’s faith in me, and that I cannot do. Now that she’s been reassured that Mrs. Booker is okay, Serenity and I will have time to work on her. The only problem is that Dad’s trial proper begins tomorrow.

  As I rinse the shampoo from my hair, I see Serenity once more, sashaying into that alley like a strung-out prostitute and kicking over the VK biker’s Harley. From the safety of my bathroom it seems funny as hell, and I laugh aloud. After the water begins to cool, I get out and quickly dry off, then pull on some warm-ups and a T-shirt. I’m about to head down to check on the girls when a soft knock sounds at my door.

  “Yeah? Mia? Annie?”

  The door opens, and Serenity steps into my room.

  “Cool to talk in here?” she asks.

  “Sure. Are Mia and Annie okay?”

  Tee shuts the door behind her. “I told them I needed a shower, too.”

  Which means Annie could knock on my door at any time. “How do you feel about Dolores’s condition?” I ask.

  “She’s scared to death. I think I’d better stay here with her tomorrow. During the trial, I mean. Otherwise she might bolt.”

  “Agreed.”

  Serenity sits on the chair beside my dresser. Then she drops her head between her knees, sighs heavily, and rubs her scalp hard. After twenty seconds of this, she straightens up, shakes out her hair, then smiles strangely.

  “That was wild, wasn’t it?” she says.

  I laugh once more. “I don’t think that biker will ever forget you.”

  “I’m just glad I didn’t have to shoot him!”