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, heavilysinged, 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.”
“I’ll go with you,” Rae said to Bob. “Bring that pole.”
“Ah, jeez.”
But Bob went, and even led the way. The trail looked like something that might have been used by deer, or even pigs. It was only a foot wide and, here and there, overgrown with sedges, which Bob carefully probed with the dowel before crossing. The place had a wet dirt odor, but when Bob broke through some round green plant stems the air was immediately suffused with the smell of green onions, or garlic. A tiger swallowtail flittered in and out of shafts of sunlight—now here, now gone, now here again.
They saw no snakes, but the trail went on, and so did they, cutting through downed trees and live ones, stepping around low spots filled with stagnant water, until Rae said, “Bob? Look.”
She pointed at an oval depression, six feet off the trail, in which the weeds were half the height of the surrounding foliage; they were younger, and a lighter shade of green. “What does that look like?”
“Looks like this one, over here,” Bob said, pointing to a similar-sized depression on the other side, well off the trail. Ten feet farther along the track, they saw another, but with taller brush growing over it.
“Let’s go have a tit-à-tit,” Bob said.
They went back out, told Tremanty that they hadn’t seen any snakes, but that they needed an opinion. Tremanty followed them back, stepping high, keeping a sharp eye out for slithers. Whenthey showed him the low spots, he looked at them and said, “Could be natural.”
“Nature often fools the eye,” Bob said. “Since that’s decided, let’s get out of here and down to New Orleans and get some crawfish. I’ll buy.”
“Goddamnit. Every time I go out with marshals, weird shit happens,” Tremanty said. He took a cell phone out of his pocket.
