“Your life didn’t depend on it this time.”
“That remains to be seen.”
She laughed. “What possible threat do I pose?”
“Malone.”
She took a breath to speak, but didn’t. She closed her mouth and visibly brought her rising temper under control again. She settled back but continued to regard him with suspicion. If he were to guess, he would think that in spite of herself, she was curious to know why he was interested in Malone.
He moderated his tone. “Give me a chance to explain why I tricked you. Please. Then if you still want to get out here in the middle of nowhere, I won’t stop you.”
“Why should I believe that?”
He thought for a moment, then replied in all sincerity, “If I were you, I wouldn’t.”
Her eyes searched his. After a time, she let go of the door handle and folded her arms across her middle. He didn’t need a degree in psychology to read that body language.
She said, “I’ll listen. Say what you will, but at the conclusion of your explanation, I still will not talk to you about one of my patients.”
“It’s not just any patient, Dylan. It’s Roland Malone. How much do you know about him beyond him sneaking into Auclair to visit you? It’s inconvenient and time-consuming, an hour and a half drive both ways. But he’s not going to do sessions virtually, because heaven forbid that you record them.
“How does he pay you? No, let me guess. It’s with a credit card for some obscure limited liability company that nobody’s ever heard of. Blink if I’m getting warm.”
She didn’t blink. She didn’t do anything. She kept her expression impassive and said nothing.
“All right, if you won’t tell me anything about him, I’ll tell you.” He paused to segue. “For starters, he works for a big-time drug dealer who peddles product out of South and Central America through Mexico.”
Finally: involuntary reactions. Her lips parted, her eyes opened wider.
He went on. “I’m not talking weed. I’m talking hard stuff, drugs that are either sold straight-up or laced into others. Buyer-beware-or-turn-up-dead kind of drugs. And this organization supplies them in such huge quantities they’re readily available, even to kids. But that’s the least of Malone’s offenses.”
He lifted the console cover and took from the compartment underneath a sheet of paper folded three times like a business letter. He unfolded it and reached up to switch on the map light above the rearview mirror.
“I had a DEA colleague, Randy Nelson. Thirty-four years old. Single, but engaged to be married. Good agent. Likableguy. Not movie star handsome but passably so. This is how he looked when John and I fished him out of Bayou Coeur.”
He held the sheet out toward her. Reluctantly, she took it, looked down at the medium closeup photo of the late agent. A police photographer had taken it minutes after Nelson’s body had been recovered.
Dylan raised a hand to her lips and looked up at Mitch in horror.
“Malone’s handiwork. He doesn’t hawk Oxy pills on street corners, Dylan. This,” he said, tapping the picture with his index finger, “is his specialty. That picture of Nelson is over two years old. This week, Malone did the same thing to a seventeen-year-old female runaway and a dealer she’d been living with. Like Nelson, they were killed somewhere else and their bodies dumped in the bayou. You probably heard about that gruesome discovery on the news.”
He took the paper from her listless hand, refolded it, replaced it in the console, and shut the lid. He turned off the light. A picture being worth a thousand words, he gave Dylan time to absorb what she’d seen and let her be the one to end the thick silence that ensued.
She gave a slight shake of her head. “You must be wrong. He owns a restaurant.”
“A classy one,” Mitch said. “Profitable. Which makes for an excellent front.”
“He’s owned it for years. It’s his life work.”
“That’s true. And I’ve observed—”
“From your position in the median, disguised as a homeless man?”
He didn’t acknowledge the question. “In the restaurant, Malone is hands-on. He greets his customers at the door andescorts them out. But how many restaurateurs do you know who have a chauffeur on call twenty-four seven? A chauffeur who packs heat, and not a popgun pistol, either. Serious weaponry.
“Malone put the guy in that position the day he got paroled after serving ten years for a long list of felonies, all drug trade related. Most of Ristorante Italiano’s staff have comparable résumés.”
While she processed what he’d told her, she turned her head and stared through the windshield, which was now streaked with rivulets of rain. Coming back to him, she asked, “If Roland is guilty of what you allege, why isn’t he in prison?”
