Charmed and Dangerous (17 page)

Damn, he needed to hit something. Soon.

“Yeah, well, if you’d really wanted her to ask you for help, maybe you shouldn’t have arrested her sister.”

“Fuck off. I was doing my job.”

Benoit laughed. “Right. And she took it so well, too. You know, that’s the first time I’ve ever seen armed cops dive for cover and hide from an unarmed person?”

“
I was doing my fucking
job.”

He’d had to arrest her sister, Lori Ann for a variety of
crimes, starting with full-on drunk driving and ending with theft, fraud, and check-kiting. He’d known Bobbie Faye was worried about her, he’d known Bobbie Faye was trying to handle the problem, but the arrest fell to his unit and frankly, he thought Bobbie Faye would appreciate that he was kind and gentle with Lori Ann when others wouldn’t have been. It had to be done. He knew it, he believed in it. Sure, Bobbie Faye would be upset, but she’d already stated that Lori Ann was a menace to society, so she’d understand. She’d be pissed, but she’d understand.

He hadn’t expected the head-spinning, Defcon one, stupendous meltdown that had been Bobbie Faye when she found out he’d been the arresting officer. It was not quite a year later and he still could feel the blisters from her fury.

Hadn’t she known what it meant that she was dating a cop? What the hell did she expect? He’d done the right thing. He stood by that. But accusations were hurled and words were said that neither could take back.

“You still writin’ checks for that ring every month?”

Cam hated the way Benoit knew him so damned well. The night Bobbie Faye had ended it, Cam had thrown the ring in the lake. She’d never seen it, had never known, and he was never going to tell her.

“Every month. And I’m gonna keep writing them for the next two years just to keep remembering what a stupid idea that was.”

“Maybe if it takes writing out a check to remind yourself you don’t want to feel the way you do, then—”

“Don’t even finish that thought.”

Benoit turned and leaned his back flat against the wall, one ankle crossed over the other, arms folded and his brown eyes closed.

“You can’t shoot her, you know.”

“Don’t bet on it.”

Bobbie Faye needed to formulate a strategy on how to handle the kidnappers, though she hadn’t a clue what it was she could actually
do
until she
had
the damned tiara and knew
where she was supposed to take it. She just might, possibly, need help.

She sure as hell couldn’t ask Cam for help.

She wondered if it had been her biggest mistake not to call him at the beginning. Of course, even though the kidnappers had said “no police,” it wasn’t like there were kidnappers out there who had ever said, “Oh, sure, honey, call the cops, we don’t mind.” So maybe she should have.

Still.

Cam was Cam. Unchanged. Freakishly stubborn. (She resolutely refused to think of any phrases in which “pot” and “kettle” might figure significantly.) He was livid with her, would never see that she’d been right, and if she’d called him, he would have wanted her to go in and do it his way. By-the-freaking-book. They didn’t have time for “by the book,” and she didn’t have time to argue with him.

It would have been one hell of an argument. He’d have turned into obnoxious, bossy cop, the one who knew every freaking thing, who had explained to her that he was a cop, first, a man, second; the one who lived, breathed, and dreamed rules and goddamned ethics. She’d like to tell him where he could plant both, then remembered she already had, rather explicitly, the day he’d arrested Lori Ann. And now . . . well, given the scope of the hunt for her, his hands would be tied—he’d be fired in a heartbeat if he helped her (especially without proof of her story). No, he’d arrest her and Roy’s chance would be gone as soon as the media reported she was in custody.

Bobbie Faye raced round and round these worries while she and Trevor trekked through the woods. Another mystifying development: a man who actually seemed to be helping, whoever the hell he was—and could he be trusted? Could he help her when she had to face the kidnappers? Was it even right to ask? Probably not.

She barely tuned into where they were going and frankly, it wouldn’t have helped much, anyway. It was just more trees, mud, and water. She kept smacking up against the puzzle of the tiara and no way to solve it when she saw
they’d reached a narrow, rutted lane. The fine dust beneath her boots roiled at the injustice of every disturbing step they made, then settled over the encroaching foliage in such fine, light layers that the grass and leaves beside the road looked like they’d been dusted with mocha icing. There was barely enough room for one car to pass, with the swamp lapping at the nonexistent shoulders of the lane. At least there were cypress trees growing thick as weeds to obscure the tiny road from overhead view. Bobbie Faye supposed that the rare times cars met one another, one had to back up to a wider spot to allow the other to pass, which prevented the road from becoming very popular. This was planned, she suspected, by the people who lived this far out of the beaten path; they preferred their privacy.

Bobbie Faye had forgotten about Valcour’s Boat Landing until they stumbled upon it, where the road sloped to an end in a small bayou which eventually spilled into Lake Charles. To the side of the landing was a tiny store, a building no more than a shack, really, the wood siding so grayed with age and loose-jointed, it looked like a tired old man, too shrunken for his skin. At one time it had been a meeting spot for fur traders, and it still sported hooks for the pelts to hang from the slatted wood porch. Now, it was the last spot fishermen could buy extra bait, maybe grab a few drinks or snacks for the day before heading out to the lake.

Five dented, rusty pickup trucks with empty boat trailers lined the square of shale where the road sloped down to the water—a poor man’s boat landing. The building looked deserted and dark, sandwiched between cypress trees overflowing with gray Spanish moss.

“Maybe there’s a phone,” Trevor mused, and she watched how he scanned the area.

“You don’t think it’s too risky? With all of the news helicopters, anyone in there’s bound to know what’s going on.”

“I doubt very seriously they have cable out here, and there’s no satellite dish. We’ll pretend we’re a couple stopping by on our way to our fishing camp.”

“Yeah, with no boat, truck, fishing gear, tackle . . .”

“Just act casual.” He looked her over. “Okay, never mind. No one’s going to look at you and buy ‘casual.’ Just act like a pissed off wife whose idiot husband knocked you out of the boat and into the lake.”

“Do I get to smack you upside the head?”

“Don’t push your luck,” he warned as they stepped onto the tiny porch.

Please advise all businesses within the state of Louisiana that they now must include a “Bobbie Faye contingency” in all safety training.

—memo from the National Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to the Louisiana OSHA office

Cam needed to get ahead of her. Stop her. Find out what the hell was going on. How in the hell was he supposed to keep her safe with her running amok?

“When are we gonna have background on this guy?” he asked, nodding toward the interrogation room. “Financials?”

“An hour, maybe two. All Crowe would say was she had a lead as to why he may have wanted to rob the bank, but it wasn’t too reliable and she was checking it out.”

“She say what it was?”

“Nope. You know her. She’s not gonna say ’til she knows for sure.”

The Captain leaned into the hallway, motioning for both men to step back into the observation portion of the interrogation room. He closed the door behind the detectives.

Through the window, Cam could see Dellago, still seated next to the Professor, swelling with annoyance at their delays. He seemed to be doubling in size while the Professor seemed to be shrinking. If they waited too long, Cam
wondered if the Professor would disappear into himself, leaving only the orange jail jumpsuit behind.

“I wanted to wait ’til after your initial questioning to tell you this,” the Captain started, “and I didn’t want this broadcast over the radio. It’s critical we keep this quiet.”

Cam knew he’d paled from the frown of concern on the Captain’s face. The Captain was going to tell him Bobbie Faye had been killed. He knew it through every cell to the marrow of his bones. He reminded himself that he didn’t care, that it no longer mattered, that he wasn’t going to have to try to remember how to breathe in and breathe out once the words were out of the Captain’s mouth.

He leaned against the door frame (it was not for support, he reasoned, because he leaned all of the damned time), and he looked into the Captain’s eyes, but did not see sorrow or sympathy. Instead, he saw frustration and nerves at work, particularly evident in the way the Captain had taken out a quarter and quietly rotated it through his fingers. The joke around the station was that if he got the quarter out, you should probably be worried. If he got it out and bounced it from palm to palm, you were probably fired. If, instead, he got it out and just held it, someone had died. Cam exhaled when he saw the quarter twirling instead.

“I’ve checked with our resources on Cormier’s rap sheet. It’s as long as my alimony.” The Captain had been paying alimony for twenty-five years. His ex refused to remarry. “All I can tell you,” he looked up at Cam pointedly, “is that we are to assist in bringing in this Trevor Cormier alive and unhurt. No matter what.”

“What about Bobbie Faye?”

“She’s not the top priority here.”

Cam’s every muscle tensed as he fought to maintain control. It made no sense . . . Zeke said he had orders to shut down Cormier, no matter what. The Captain said to bring him in without harming him, that he was the priority. Two diametrically opposed orders, which means something more covert lay under the surface. Which also meant, of course, that the Captain wasn’t at liberty to say.

Cam puzzled over the Captain’s oddly blank expression. He was rarely a blank slate, so that, in itself, was a clue that this was far worse than Cam had imagined. Sometimes the government used criminals, made deals, getting them to do the really dirty work no one wanted to have culpability for. Of course, officially, this never happened. Zeke said Cormier had merc’d out, hired out to do the black ops work no one else wanted. It was possible Cormier was blackmailing someone with evidence of their connection to a horrible assignment and that person was trying to take him out and someone else knew of it, and wanted him pulled in. It was also just as possible that Cormier was as bad as Zeke described and Zeke was right to be trying to take him out and Cormier had blackmailed or conned or paid off someone into trying to protect him. There were too many permutations to explain the conflicting orders.

So of course Bobbie Faye was in the middle of this mess. And he was supposed to keep Cormier safe?

“Captain, Cormier’s trailing through the swamp with Bobbie Faye. It’s a miracle he’s alive. It’s too much to hope for ‘unhurt.’ ”

“Well hell, Cam, there’s your answer,” Benoit said, grinning. “Another hour with Bobbie Faye and the man is going to be begging you to arrest him just to get away from her.”

The Captain and Benoit chuckled, but Cam kept working the problem backwards and forwards.

“We haven’t worked with Zeke Wright before. Did he check out?”

“Nothing off that I could tell,” the Captain said.

“Then I’ll need Benoit here to continue annoying ol’ Dellago in there. I need to get back to the field.”

The Captain nodded, leaving the two detectives.

Cam paced a moment, and Benoit waited. “Somebody thinks the Professor’s pretty damned important to be sending Dellago.”

“Yeah. Are you thinking ‘too’ important?”

“Last time we had one of those, they mysteriously died in their cell.”

“I’ll put him in a private lockup and put a guard on him. Vicari’s good. Mean as a snake, but good.”

They went separate directions, and a few minutes later, Cam was on the district’s second helicopter. But not before he’d stopped in to the dispatch office and pulled Jason aside.

Jason was somewhere around twenty-eight, though he barely looked twenty. He was good-looking enough to avoid the “total geek” handle, though he was a communications freak.

“You think you could poke around in the frequencies and listen in on the FBI helicopter?” Cam asked him, and Jason grinned.

“Man, she’s got you twisted in a knot, don’t she—” and then Jason seemed to notice the look Cam was giving him and not only backed up and put a chair between them, but started apologizing.

“Shut it,” Cam said. “I need to listen in to them without them knowing. Can we do that?”

“Officially? Nope. We don’t have the same sort of radios.”

“Unofficially?”

Jason beamed. “Well, there are a few ways. See, I could—”

“Don’t have time for the tech version, Jason. Just see if you can listen without them knowing.”

“No prob. Unless it’s encrypted. I’d have to be on my home computer to break their codes.”

“I’m going to slide right by that one and pretend I didn’t hear you say that you can break FBI codes on your home computer, Jason,” Cam said. “You might not want to discuss that with anyone else, either.”

“Good point.”

As Cam was leaving, he glanced back and noted Jason was peering around, making sure no one was watching him. Then he pulled out a different scanner as Cam hurried out of the door.

No. Just . . .
no
.

—Luke James, local mailman, on learning Bobbie Faye would now be on his mail route

Bobbie Faye pulled open the ancient, creaking screen door to the landing’s store and walked inside into the cooler shade of the room. The place smelled overwhelmingly like fresh peaches and boiled peanuts, a strange mix that seemed to battle in midair. The overhead fan barely pushed the air in and around the impressive stacks of supplies. Items were piled floor to ceiling in every nook and cranny and even right by the door.

From the other side of a stack of saltines taller than her head, an old man’s voice chirped, “Help you, miss?” and Bobbie Faye yelped in surprise, spun, forgetting her purse was dangling, and knocked over the entire stack of saltine crackers, which fell into the pyramid of laundry detergent and that toppled into the fishing rods leaning against the wall, which fell dominolike into the cricket bin, knocking it open and setting half of the merchandise free.