Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(11)

By then, he’d been unable to resist. He never would have known who his attacker was—the man had been wearing a ski mask—if his next-door neighbor hadn’t taken a picture of the attacker’s car, including the license plate. He’d also taken a bite out of the man’s leg, and the meat he’d spit out had matched the DNA of the meat still intact on Deese’s body. Tremanty had had a watch on anything Deese-related. Howell had been put under guard, in the hospital, and when he got out he was hustled into the Marshals Service Witness Protection Program.

“Never would have found this place if he’d gone to trial,” Bob said, tipping his head back to look up through the jungle to the skies. “If he’d been convicted, he might’ve gotten ten years, or fifteen, with the wrong judge. With Roger Smith’s influence, he might have gotten two, maybe none. But he would’ve gotten out. Now, since he ran . . . and we found this place . . . he’s looking at life, at a minimum. And the needle is a real possibility.”

Lucas looked around. “I’ve seen what I need. I want to look at Tremanty’s paper and maybe get a beer with him, if he’s the beer-drinking type.”

“He can be,” Rae said. “You’ve got to be careful, though. He’s pretty straight. He won’t want to hear about . . . unorthodox investigative techniques.”

On the way out, Bob suddenly blurted, “Snake!” and pointed at Lucas’s foot. Lucas levitated, and Rae and Bob fell out laughing.

Lucas said, “I won’t kick your asses right now. Revenge is best when it’s cold, and I’ve had time to think about it. Can you say ‘economy class’? Can you say ‘seventeen-inch seats’? ‘Motel 6’?”

“You wouldn’t fuckin’ do that,” Bob said. He looked at Rae. “Would he?”

Rae: “Who are you again?” And to Lucas: “Do I know him?”

“Best for you if you don’t,” Lucas said. He looked around his foot and back into the weeds and muttered, “Snakes . . .”





CHAPTER


THREE


Back in the house, Tremanty asked Lucas if he’d had a chance to look through the printouts that Bob had given him. “I can’t read in cars,” Lucas said. “I need to do that now.”

“There’s a spot upstairs,” Tremanty said. “Deese’s office. It’s cool, and there’s a decent chair in there.”

“Any guesses on how many bodies you’ll find?”

“I’m thinking ten, twelve. That’s only a guess,” Tremanty said. “What worries me is all the publicity we’ve been getting. By now, Deese knows for sure that we’ve found the bodies, so he’s gotta be digging himself in deep. He hasn’t had a lot of time to do that yet, but the longer it goes . . .”

“Does he have the resources to do that?” Lucas asked.

“I dunno. When we busted him, we went after his bank accounts and got eight thousand dollars. This is a guy who was probably spending that much every month on hookers and blow. So, he wasn’t keeping his income in his aboveground bank account.”

“If it was hookers and cocaine, over any long period of time . . . those guys tend to spend everything they have. They’re both addictions.”

“Yeah. Even if he had a stash, it might not have been too much. His housekeeper never saw any money around the house and she was all over it. It’s possible that he’s broke.”

“Okay. Let me read,” Lucas said. “Preferably in a place that’s snake-free.”

“Hey. Snakes are more afraid of you than you are of them. Not many rattlers survive an encounter with a human being, but it’s a rare thing when a rattlesnake kills a human,” Tremanty said.

“Right. I needed a pro-snake lecture. I’m gonna go read,” Lucas said.


HE SPENT the rest of the afternoon working through the paper with a highlighter pen, taking breaks for Diet Cokes supplied by Rae, to walk in the jungle and look into the pits while avoiding snakes, and once, as the day faded into evening, to chat again with Tremanty.

“We need to go somewhere quiet and talk,” Lucas said. “Maybe when you quit for the day?”

“There’s a bar a few miles out where people go when we finish,” Tremanty said. “It’s got booths that give you a little privacy.”

“Then let’s get Bob and Rae down there and talk.”

At six o’clock, everyone in the house gathered around Deese’s wide-screen television to watch the news. The talking head immediately passed the camera off to a dark-haired woman who began by saying, in her best hard-news voice, “We have learned exclusively that the bodies being dug up at the home of Clayton Deese are showing signs of cannibalism . . .”

Everyone in the room groaned, and a neatly dressed woman in a blue dress said to Tremanty, “There goes my night.”

Rae leaned toward Lucas and muttered, “FBI spokeswoman.”

“I’m two-thirds of the way through the paper,” Lucas said. “I’m going back upstairs.”


SUNSET WAS about eight o’clock, but the jungle started getting dim at seven, even dimmer in the muddy pits, and the recovery crews began pulling out. Six men and a woman who were doing the excavations took turns in Deese’s shower and were gone by eight. A dozen overnight guards began patrolling the site, under perimeter lights supplemented by laser trip wires.