Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(5)

Rae crossed the porch and stood to one side of the door and pounded on it with her fist and shouted, “Mr. Deese! Mr. Deese!”

Bob was to one side, in the yard, watching windows, but with his rifle now pointed in the direction of the door. Rae pounded on the door again. “Deese! Deese!”

No reaction. Bob stepped back to the center, at the bottom of the porch steps. “Ready?”

“Anytime,” Rae said.

Bob cocked himself to kick the door, but then the door moved—and he went sideways and shouted, “Door!”

The door opened farther and a frightened, round-faced black woman stuck her head out. She said to Rae, who was pointing a gun at her, “Mr. Deese ain’t here.”

“Where is he?”

“Don’t know. He been gone.”

Bob said, “Please step back, ma’am.”

They followed the muzzles of their rifles into the house, which was dark and well cooled. They walked through to the back, shouted out at the other marshal, then opened the back door to let him in. Together, they cleared the place.

The black woman was named Carolanne Pouter and she worked three days a week cleaning house, doing Deese’s laundry and occasional grocery shopping, mowing the yard, and keeping a daily eye on the place when he was traveling.

“Did he tell you where he was going?” Bob asked.

“No, sir. He never does. But this time . . .” She eyed their marshal shirts. “This time, it ain’t like the other times. He was two days burning paper out back. He was coming and going and coming and going for three weeks, and then he loaded all his baggage into his pickup and he went on down the road. Took all his cowboy boots, too. Told me to lock up and gave me five hundred dollars to watch the house for six months. Which I been doin’, faithful.”

Tremanty had come inside, and now he asked, “Did Mr. Deese have an office in the house or a place where he did his paperwork?”

“Yes, sir, upstairs, next to the bedroom.”

Tremanty said to Bob, “Why don’t you get Miz Pouter to show you where he was burning paper. See what the situation is. I’ll check out the office.”

Rae followed Tremanty up the wooden staircase, and Tremanty said, “The whole place is pine. If he’s running, I’m surprised he didn’t torch it. It’d burn like a barn full of hay.”

Deese’s office space was small, only about ten by ten feet, with one window looking out toward the jungle in back. An inexpensive office desk, the kind you might buy from a big-box office supply store, sat next to two empty filing cabinets. There were no closets, no place to hide, so when the marshals had cleared the house, they’d spent no more than five seconds in the room.

Tremanty said, “He’s gone and we won’t find him in a hurry.”

“That’s some fine detectin’,” Rae said. “Since we only been here one minute.”

“I found a clue you missed,” Tremanty said. He was really handsome, and when Rae had first seen him she’d had to bite her lip. “On the desk.”

Rae stepped over to look. Sitting on the desk, on a sheet of white computer paper, was Deese’s ankle monitor, which had been severed with a pair of wire cutters. The paper had a straightforward note, apparently to Tremanty: “Fuck you.”

“That’s so rude,” Rae said.


OUTSIDE, Bob and the third marshal, with Pouter, were looking at a fifty-five-gallon drum that had been used as a burn barrel and was half full of powdered ash. A six-foot dowel rod, heavily singed, was lying on the ground next to the barrel. Bob used it to stir around in the ash and found nothing but more ash. Deese had not only burned a lot of paper, he’d carefully broken it up so there’d be no chance of reconstituting it; and there were no partially burnt pages. It was all gone.

They had turned back toward the house when Rae came out, followed by Tremanty. “Lot of ash,” Bob said. “Nothing we can save.”

“He’s cleaned the place out,” Rae said. She turned to Pouter. “Did Mr. Deese have a computer?”

“Yes, ma’am, and a printer, too. They were old, but they worked okay. They gone now.”

“We noticed,” Tremanty said.

He walked down to one back corner of the house, looking this way and that, and then down to the other corner, and when he rejoined the group he said to Bob, “There’s a walked-in trail goes back into the trees, right over there. Go back and take a look, see if there’s anything we need to see.”

“Ah, man, it’s a swamp . . .”

“So stay on the path.”

“Shouldn’t do that. There’re poison snakes back there,” Pouter said. “Mr. Clay said he seen moccasins bigger ’round than his leg. He told me, if I ever go back there, he’d fire me because he didn’t want to go hauling some dead black ass out of the woods. That was what he said. Except he didn’t say ‘black.’ You know what I mean.”

“I do,” Rae said.

“But he paid regular,” Pouter said.

“You hear that?” Bob asked Tremanty. “Snakes. Water moccasins the size of tree trunks.”

“Life sucks and then you die,” Tremanty said. “Besides, I’m wearing loafers, and if there are snakes back there I got nothing between my ankle and the snakes except a pair of Ralph Lauren dress socks.”