All the Devil's Creatures (31 page)

Marisol looked him in the eye at last, but with a look that made him wish she hadn’t.

“No, I didn’t say much to set them straight. Really not interested in letting them know what I was doing out there when I don’t even know for sure myself.”

Geoff nodded and leaned back and touched his fingers to the healing wound on his skull. A scar, an indentation, the bristly hairs starting to grow in around it.

“Anyway, Monroe was working for someone, and we think we can prove it was Duchamp. He was after a piece of … an item I recovered from Eileen’s property, relevant somehow to my lawsuit about the Duchamp refinery.”

“What item?”

As Geoff opened his mouth to answer, Marisol jumped in. “We don’t know, but something bad.”

“Well,” Bobby said, rising. “Looks like y’all did some fine detective work. Enough to take to the sheriff, I reckon.”

•

Seastrunk seemed impressed, taking in their evidence against Duchamp with widening eyes and subtle nods. When they were through, an electric silence filled the office as the old man leaned back in his chair, hands steepled before his chin. Then he said, “Tell you what, I wouldn’t put a thing past that ol’ son-of-a-bitch. But Lord knows what he could be covering up that would lead to all this killing.”

“I saw something—held it,” Marisol said. “In New Orleans. It was … biological. Maybe related to human cloning. Organ harvesting …”

She looked at the sheriff head on, the hesitancy (
terror
) she had seemed to exhibit at Bobby’s apartment not in evidence. As if the sheriff’s stature had prodded her to summon her tough professionalism. As if she could allow herself no sign of wilting before authority. Geoff watched her and wondered how much will power her stolid demeanor entailed.

The sheriff said, “Y’all have any proof of this weird devil science?”

“Monroe took it, nearly killed me for it. Gave it to Duchamp, we’re pretty sure. But now … let’s just say it’s lost.”

“Well, I’m just about convinced.” Seastrunk leaned forward, pointing a gnarled finger at no one in particular. “But let me give you a counter-narrative. Monroe used to do odd jobs for Duchamp. But since the bastard’s been out of politics, his ex-fixer has become a lay about. Fell in with that trash, the Tatum twins. They killed that poor Bordelon girl one drunken night. Tatum boys get arrested. Jimmy Lee’s scared. Gets wind y’all are digging into the crime, so he follows you to New Orleans—”

“That’s crazy Sheriff,” Geoff said. “What about Eileen, Dr. Kim?”

“Random. A robbery. I haven’t heard of a lick of hard evidence y’all have tying Monroe to that.”

“Sir, it seems a bit far-fetched—”

“More far-fetched than a Duchamp running a secret cloning facility at that piss ant refinery, Bobby?” The sheriff looked to the three of them one by one. “And far-fetched or not, it’s plausible. And ol’ Hargrave will jump on that plausibility—”

“Then you’ve got to go straight to the FBI, the U.S. Attorney.”

“Nossir, Mr. Waltz. You seen the crowds outside? Now I’ve been keepin’ the peace pretty good. No way I’m going to hand this over to the Feds, make us in this town look like fools to the world.” Half rising from his seat, leaning on massive hands resting on the desk, raised his voice. “And don’t y’all think about going behind my back on this. They’re not going to get involved without me on board, not with the Tatums’ trial coming up, not after Carter vouched for me.” He paused, sat, returned his hands to his chin. “No. What I need is evidence. Hard proof that Duchamp’s compadre Hargrave cain’t ignore.”

They sat. The electricity, the feeling Geoff had sensed of a gathering momentum, had gone out of the room. Geoff met Bobby’s eyes and saw a shared disappointment. It seemed they both wanted Seastrunk to be a hero—to be bold, to take whatever risks necessary to bring about justice. Perhaps, Geoff thought, they had projected onto the old man something that had never been there.

But then Marisol said, “Wait. I might have it.” She retrieved something from her bag. “It’s a long shot, because it was scrubbed clean when I found it. But it came from Duchamp’s study.” She held up a clunky old cell phone.

•

The Speaker paced and smoked and cursed at his lawyer. They debated the efficacy of issuing a press release. They debated whether and when to hold a press conference. Duchamp suggested a targeted interview, like the old days—he would call in to one of the right wing talk radio shows, make his case to a friendly host with a friendly audience, excoriate the elite liberal media that after all these years still worked at every turn to bring him down, laughing at him as if he were a stupid hick undeserving of the name of his forbearers. As if he had not surpassed those forbearers, rising to Speaker, perfecting his role as the leader of the opposition, chief foil to a young, inadequate president—the most powerful figure in a coequal branch of government. He obsessed over the thought circling through his head in some form every day since his forced resignation four years before:
Could have been President but for the goddamn media
.

Kathleen Duchamp had announced that her husband was no longer welcome in their Dallas home, that she was filing for divorce. The vague insinuations within her statement enraged him. It alluded to nefarious deeds that would come out in due time.

Beyond that, she remained silent, on the advice of her attorney.

His own lawyer now reminded him that the Washington establishment had already forgotten Robert W. Duchamp, that he could expect no help from those quarters, that the most he could hope for was a booking with a second rate regional shock jock. A counterproductive maneuver. An embarrassment even. As Duchamp fretted, the lawyer sat composed and well pressed and advised the Speaker that the wisest course was to issue a simple press release painting his wife as angry and unhinged, frustrated with their decline in stature since his resignation from Congress. Imply she’s sleeping around, that she’s hoping that by opening the first volley in the court of public opinion, she’s upping her chances for a healthy divorce settlement.

The Speaker fantasized of strangling Kathleen and wept in anger and then in grief at the loss of the woman he had often taken for granted but who he now realized had been a nurturing companion without whom he feared he could not function. He tossed a tumbler across the room and it shattered against the wall. Ice cubes and shards of glass flew. He dismissed the lawyer, his only confidant (for five hundred dollars an hour).

And even the lawyer did not know, had made clear that he did not want to know, the nature and the depth of the Speaker’s crimes.

Falling into an overstuffed armchair, Duchamp held his head in his hands. A divorce, his wife, that whatever Kathleen thought she knew she could share with the authorities—this did not cause Duchamp’s greatest terror. The Group, the Doctor, had turned on him. They could not let him live.

He lifted his head to peer about the casual den in the country home he and Kathleen built when he first decided he would run for Congress, at about the same time he started speaking in an exaggerated Hollywood Texas twang unnatural to his New England roots and ill-suited to his adopted home of red clay dirt and pine forests but sufficient to remake himself before the national media. From a distance, the house looked much older than its thirty years—Doric columns and a sweeping veranda like an antebellum plantation house, rare but not unknown in East Texas. But the brick was veneer and the details reflected the utilitarian cheapness of its era. Duchamp’s constituents accepted the phony accent and the phony house with a wink and a smirk as a ham-handed attempt to express commitment to the community where his father had expanded the family fortune while remaining smug and aloof. But when Duchamp became Speaker, the national media swallowed the rouse as if the Congressman were an organic expression of that place.

The bargains he had made to reach that point—the Speakership, the pinnacle of his career. Horrible bargains with this father’s friends, all designed to further the work ongoing at the lake. Duchamp shivered. Ungodly work. The project of a deranged scientist once in the Fuhrer’s employ, a project now nearing its culmination.

He could not stay in this place. He made a phone call.

•

Bobby checked Jimmy Lee Monroe’s phone out of the Sheriff’s Department evidence locker. The device was of a more recent vintage than the one Marisol swiped from Duchamp’s safe. Sleek—and crusted with blood. The coroner had cut it out of the pocket of the Jimmy Lee’s stained jeans, just an inch from where Marisol had stabbed the killer in the groin.

Marisol had her souped up laptop and her kit of gizmos. She wore latex gloves. She found the right adapter and plugged both phones into the computer. Then she got to work with the data recovery and encryption software. And soon she determined that Monroe’s phone had received photos of her and Geoff from Duchamp’s phone, had also received coded instructions to murder Dr. Eileen Kim.

A slam dunk. “The sheriff’ll have to bring in the asshole now,” Bobby said.

•

With the evening sun burning orange through the pines, they drove up to Duchamp’s faux-plantation house—Bobby in the lead with Geoff and Marisol as ride-alongs, two more deputies in another Sheriff’s Department car close behind. They did not blare sirens or flash lights. Seastrunk had made it clear: he would not tolerate a scene, would abide no ruckus. Media personnel still milled about the courthouse square; the sheriff did not want to risk any of them following the deputies, creating a frenzy at the scene of the former Congressman’s arrest.

So the sheriff held back. Waiting at the office. Not drawing attention to himself or the operation. Detached.

And none of them doubted the Duchamp would come quietly. A sophisticated man, he knew resistance would only make matters worse for himself.

“Y’all wait here,” Bobby said, leaving Geoff and Marisol in the car as the trio of deputies approached the house. It did not take them long to figure out the place stood vacant.

Marisol and Geoff left the vehicle and walked up to Bobby, who said: “He’s fled.” And as Geoff stood looking around without aim, fingering his head scar, and Bobby began to order a search of the premises, Marisol hurried over to the six-car garage.

“These tracks aren’t more than an hour old. Looks like a big SUV.”

“He drives a Hummer.”

“Put it on the wire.”

“Hold on,” Bobby said, scratching his head. “He also keeps a plane, a private jet …”

“Where?”

“Municipal airport, edge of town.”

Judging by her posture at that moment, standing in high boots on a narrow strip of red clay between manicured lawn and Duchamp’s driveway, the sun’s final red blast framing her before the silhouetted trees, Geoff could not doubt that his private eye was back in the game.

“I got a guy from ATF who went TSA and owes me a favor I can call in,” she said. “And then we’d better shake a leg.”

•

Sheriff Seastrunk sat alone in his office, picking out an old Jimmy Rogers tune on his guitar to work off the nervous energy. He leapt to the phone when it rang.

Bobby: “The Speaker’s run.”

“Shit and goddamn.”

“I got a hunch he’s headed for his hangar at the airport. The detective, Solis, got a buddy at Homeland Security to ground all flights out of there—”

“Lord have mercy.”

“But it’ll only hold for half an hour. And we’re clear across the county from there—”

“Nearly an hour’s drive, through town.” He paused, knowing he could be there in twenty minutes. Knowing that he could not by phone order the dingbats at the airport, maybe a two man staff, to detain the Speaker, to keep his plane on the ground. They all worked for Duchamp in some form or another.

“I’m on my way.”

•

Duchamp skidded to a halt outside the hangar and leapt from his Hummer and grew enraged at sight of his pilot dawdling beside the gangway to his Learjet, idling on the sole runway.

“Why the hell aren’t you in that cockpit? We gotta
move
, son.”

The pilot dropped his cigarette and stomped it out and shrugged and said, “All flights grounded.”

The rage turned to terror in an instant. They had him. An assassin in transit, probably. He took a second to wonder why they hadn’t just sabotaged the plane. But then he acted, pulling out his pistol, an old police-issue revolver, and leveling it at the pilot. “Now you get up there and fly that bird.”

Raising his hands, the pilot said, “Now hold on, Speaker—”

A siren’s blare, a screech of tires, and the sheriff’s bull-horn amplified voice: “Robert Duchamp, drop your weapon.”

Duchamp did not and could not know whether the pathetic Seastrunk was in on the fix, had gone to work for the Group. He lowered the gun and turned to the plane and ran up the stairs, saying, “To hell with it, I’ll fly the thing myself.”

•

Sheriff Seastrunk muttered
shit
and sprinted to the jet and bounded up the stairs and was out of breath by the time he reached the top, just as the plane was pulling away with Duchamp leaning from the pilot’s seat to close the cockpit door. He tapped some reservoir of strength he had not used in decades to leap into the plane, forcing his way in with his shoulder. His momentum carried him into Duchamp’s arms and they struggled and stumbled in the cramped space and then crashed through the door to the cabin in a heap, Seastrunk on top. The jet had stopped its taxi before it had moved hardly a foot.

Duchamp forced the sheriff off with a painful kick to the ribs and said, “Dammit John, you’ve got to let me go.”

The two men sat hunched and facing each other in the cabin’s narrow aisle, panting and glowering like prizefighters between rounds. Registering the hot, crazed fear in his old nemesis’ eyes, Seastrunk moved to raise his weapon. “Now what’s gotten into you, Robert?”

“Nuh-uh. Drop that gun.” Duchamp beat him to the draw, leveling his revolver and standing over the sheriff. “Get up.”

The sheriff did so, arms raised, his pistol thunking to the floor. “Come on, Robert, be reasonable.”