Too Far Gone (18 page)

“Why on earth would I go to her home?”

Alexa would have loved to show him the Polaroid of him standing naked in Fugate's bedroom preening before her mirror.

“What patient?” It was Casey who asked, and not her uncle.

“I don't think we need to dwell on such unpleasantness at this particular juncture,” LePointe said stiffly.

“If you haven't spoken to her, I guess you didn't know that she was such a
dedicated
professional that she kept a mental patient locked away in her home?” Alexa asked him. “A mental patient who was supposed to be in ward fourteen at River Run.”

“Nurse Fugate was a career psychiatric nurse and a compassionate human being,” LePointe said. “And she's retired and capable of helping a patient.”

“A patient who vanished from ward fourteen about the time Nurse Fugate retired.”

“What are you talking about?” Casey asked, bewildered.

“The patient was Sibhon Danielson,” Alexa said. “And Fugate kept her in a padlocked bedroom with bars on the windows and a bolt on the outside of the door.”

There was an audible gasp from Casey, and despite the fact that he'd been doing a good job holding his feelings back till that point, LePointe's eyes flashed surprise for the briefest instant.

“Her?” Casey whispered, her eyes fevered. Openmouthed, she sat down in an armchair. “Dear God…”

“Oddly, it appears there's no record at River Run that she isn't still locked up.”

“You're sure?” Casey asked. “Oh my God! Lucille Burch was right.”

“Beyond any shadow of a doubt, Burch doesn't know it for certain, but someone must have told her about it. You didn't know that Sibby was living with Nurse Fugate, Dr. LePointe?”

“Of course not!” LePointe snapped. “How would I know that?”

“No reason, besides the fact that you've been writing Nurse Fugate prescriptions for anti-psychotic medications used for treating schizophrenia. Along with some heavy sedatives. You didn't prescribe them for Nurse Fugate's personal medical conditions, did you?”

“I assume, if what you say is accurate, the prescriptions were forged,” LePointe said. “I never prescribed anything for Dotty. I'd like to see them.”

“Nurse Fugate, you mean,” Alexa said. She wondered if he knew the pill bottles were gone. But what would that mean? Either Sibby had told him she'd taken them from the house, which seemed very unlikely, or someone else had told him.
But who?

“What?” he asked.

“You said you always called her Nurse Fugate, but just now you called her Dotty,” Alexa said.

“Sibhon Danielson was at River Run and you never told me?” Casey asked her uncle.

LePointe stood, and Alexa could tell he wanted to throw things at her—chase her out of the house swinging the poker that leaned against the fireplace. But he came around the desk and stood beside Casey's chair. “Agent Keen, you've upset my niece with your insinuations. Please leave us and get on about your business. My niece is not emotionally able to withstand this sort of pressure. I am warning you: you are stepping on very dangerous ground.”

Casey was sobbing. When her uncle put his hand on her shoulder, she shot from the chair and fixed him with an icy look of rage. “What is going on here? My God, Unko! What the hell is going on here?”

“I have no idea,” LePointe said. “I don't know anything about Sibhon Danielson. I'm as stunned as you are, my dear, but I've yet to see any proof that she is indeed out of the hospital, or was living with Nurse Fugate.” The smile Dr. LePointe intended to be reassuring would have looked at home on a Bell's palsy victim. “Let's not jump to conclusions and say things we'll regret.”

“That monster
murdered my parents
!” Casey yelled. She turned her eyes to Alexa. “Where is she now?”

“We have no idea.”

Alexa decided she had nothing to lose in pushing, to see what happened. “You don't know anything about Sibby Danielson, Doctor? Odd. If Sibby Danielson was an inmate at River Run for the twenty-six years where you were director of the facility, and were seeing patients on her ward, you must have known she was there.”

“Of course I knew she was there,” LePointe replied angrily. “So what? I never treated her. I wouldn't know the woman if she walked into this room.”

“According to the police files, I understood that she was your patient when she killed your brother and his wife,” Alexa said.

Again Casey's eyes widened with obvious disbelief. “Unko? Is that true?”

“She was no longer my patient when she did that!” LePointe roared. “She was upset because I had quit treating her. She was a psychotic mess and she was disturbed, and possibly she imagined that my brother was behind my refusal to treat her. Patient transference. She imagined we were married and Curry was standing between her and some ideal of happiness. She confronted my wife and created a scene at the country club. I tried to get her committed before! Casey, I did not know she was out of the hospital! Sibhon Danielson is an extremely dangerous woman. I don't know, but if she killed Dorothy, it was because poor Dorothy had taken it upon herself to help her, which the hospital was never able to do. Maybe Dorothy aided in her escape in some misguided sense of compassion or sense of duty. It's even possible they may have had some codependent relationship that Dorothy didn't want to have ended.”

“I'm sure they're pulling her records at the hospital about now to get a photograph and a physical description. Since we are here together, perhaps you could give me a current description, Dr. LePointe?”

“What? How would I know? I just told you I haven't so much as laid eyes on her in years. I never treated her at River Run, if that's where you're taking this, Agent Keen. I doubt you'll find anybody who will say differently.”

“I don't disbelieve that,” Alexa said truthfully. “But things can change.”

“Maybe I should call Lucille Burch and tell her that Gary's been abducted,” Casey said.

“No! The media will just make it into a sideshow!” LePointe snarled.

“They'll jump all over it,” Alexa agreed. “The possibility of a Sibby Danielson connection to Gary's disappearance will be one hell of a trigger, especially since they were already looking into Sibby's whereabouts. They'd had a tip that she'd been released from River Run,” she said for LePointe's benefit. “I assumed it was because it's an anniversary of the murders. I think we
should
use them to get word out on Gary.”

“About time,” Casey said.

LePointe's worried eyes shifted back and forth between Alexa and his niece. Alexa was sure he was seeing the horror of film crews camped outside his high gate, the unpleasant questions, scores of investigative reporters rooting around in his business like a pack of wild pigs.

“The police report said that Kenneth Decell rescued Casey from Sibby that night,” Alexa said. “Your private investigator, who conveniently was here when the postman delivered this letter.”

Alexa felt Casey's eyes on her, but she kept hers on LePointe, watching every facial tic and eye movement, every gesture.

“Is that some sort of accusation?” LePointe demanded. Clearly Dr. LePointe was a stranger to being accused of anything. “He helps me and the trusts with a variety of matters, and he has been searching for Gary West too. And yes, Sibhon injured him, so perhaps I have felt some degree of responsibility toward him. But he is a good and thorough investigator.”

“I'm not accusing anybody of anything,
yet.
I'm just stating what I believe to be the facts, and wondering how things may be connected.”

LePointe's eyes shifted as his mind glimpsed solid ground and stepped toward it. “Do I need to remind you that you are a guest, invited in by us, a consultant who is supposed to help
us
find Gary?”

“I am an FBI agent trying to assist the local authorities in finding Gary West, and in the course of that investigation I have uncovered information that may figure into the disappearance of Mr. West.”

“And how was it that you ended up at River Run interviewing Dr. Whitfield about Sibhon Danielson?”

Alexa pounced. “I didn't say that I had been at River Run or mention that I spoke to anyone there. How did you know that?”

Dr. LePointe's silence was deafening, so she went on.

“The media asked for the official police files pertaining to the homicides, which Detective Manseur pulled to see if there was something there that might be helpful. I thought the media investigating a rumor that Sibby Danielson had been released was too coincidental. I accompanied Detective Manseur to River Run. Nurse Fugate's name came up, and I discovered, in the course of trying to contact her to discuss Sibhon, that Nurse Fugate had been murdered and that in all likelihood Ms. Danielson had been staying in her home. All that I've been trying to do since early this morning is to find Mr. West, and I intend to do exactly that. Unfortunately, this letter's appearance and your pronouncement of its authenticity to Jackson Evans has cost us precious time. As of now, it appears to me that you may be trying to mislead the authorities and impede their investigation. Now I'm going to kick this into high gear, no matter how the media chooses to deal with it. It appears it may open some personal and professional unpleasantness for you, which I can honestly say doesn't bother me.”

“There's a great deal at stake,” LePointe said. “A very great deal. The foundations' reputations are paramount. If we are careful about what we say publicly, no—”

“I don't care about that!” Casey snapped. “I don't care about what anybody says or thinks, and why you do is a mystery. All anybody gives a flip about is how much money they can get from you. They couldn't care less about our illustrious reputation. Damn you! I'll give away every penny I own to anybody who will give Gary back to me. If he isn't back today, I'm going to drop to my knees and beg on television. And if he doesn't come home, I'll spend every cent I have to find those responsible and see them punished.”

“If Gary can be found, he will be,” Alexa said.

“Casey, show some backbone!” LePointe growled. “You will not do any such thing. You will not let anyone see you begging!”

Casey pointed her finger at her uncle. “I never realized what a horrible and disgusting person you truly are. I wish to God I could hate you. If I find out you or Decell had anything to do with Gary…I'll see you in prison.” That said, she rushed from the room.

After collecting the envelopes containing the evidence, Alexa followed Casey, who had taken Deana from the maid and was striding for the front door, while her uncle's booming voice—ordering her to come back this very moment—rang hollowly through the house.

         

41

The name his mother gave him was Elvis Cash Orbison Brown, but nobody had called him that since he was a kid, and so he thought of himself, as everybody else did, as Grub. He wasn't sure how old he was, but he reckoned it at nineteen or twenty years, give or take. He knew his birthday was in the winter, and since it could be Thanksgiving, he had decided on that day. Someone asked him for the exact day he was born, because they said Thanksgiving was always on the third Thursday in November. Grub was still trying to figure out why they'd laughed at him, though he believed it had something to do with him having his birthday on a big holiday.

By the time his mother passed—dying from a cottonmouth bite that she got while walking home along the bayou late one night from the Big Time Tavern—Grub had already been working odd jobs around Moody's Bait & Gas a good while, to earn the pocket change that his mother had taken from him as soon as he got home. Well, she stopped that when she died. He wasn't glad she died, because he'd liked the way she cooked for him and stuff, but it was the first opportunity he'd had to keep what he earned.

Once she had told him that she'd give him a dollar if he could jump over his own shadow, and when the men in the store had laughed at him about the Thanksgiving birth date, he had told them that very thing. It silenced them and they didn't laugh at him for a while. And Grub wondered if any of the men at the store could jump over their own shadows, because he had tried and tried till he was winded, but it was too hard. He could only jump all around it, so he'd given up.

He hadn't gone to school long because of how the other children held their noses and laughed at him and the teachers decided he wasn't able to learn the stupid crap they wanted to teach him. Even though they'd acted like they liked him, he'd known the teachers didn't. His mama didn't care one way or the other, but the few times she'd read the notes they'd sent home pinned to his clothes, she'd gone to the school drunk and raised almighty hell with them. After the last visit, they stopped talking to him, much less pinning notes on his shirt. His mama was most happy walking back and forth from the bar along Bayou Berant where she'd spent her time.

Although he wasn't book smart, Grub knew enough to hide when he saw Leland Ticholet pulling up to the dock. Leland didn't just get mad at you and forget it later. Leland had never given Grub any money, because he didn't look for help from anybody, and you didn't want to talk to him unless he talked to you first. Grub had broken that rule that morning trying to be friendly and make conversation, but it had gone wrong because Leland was a mean shit-head and he had given Grub offense. Leland didn't want any friends and, the way he acted, he wasn't about to get any either.

Grub knew what Mr. Moody had told the game wardens a few days back was a big lie. He'd told them that he didn't know if Leland sold alligators, and nobody with good sense wanted to know bad enough to go near Leland's camp. Mr. Moody told them nobody he was aware of bought alligator meat or skins, but Grub knew Moody bought them—not only from Leland, but off of lots of other people, too, only not at the store. He did that at a shack he used for alligator business.

Leland stole things, and people didn't like it. In these parts a man with more smarts than a tire tool didn't go near another man's traps—nets, crab traps, the floating jugs that marked trotlines, or muskrat or nutria traps. Stealing from the residents out in the swamps was suicidal, unless you were Leland Ticholet. If people knew Leland stole from them, they didn't say it to him.

Grub wondered if the wardens knew what sort of crazy bastard they were messing around with asking after Leland. Grub didn't like Leland, but he didn't like the wardens even more.

Leland didn't have friends, but a week earlier, when he'd come over for some gas, which the new boat used a great deal of, he'd had with him a little soft-handed stranger who was wearing a shirt with the collar turned up like it was cold and a big straw hat with a wide brim and he'd had on sunglasses. Moody wondered if he was a fisherman Leland was guiding, which was what Leland claimed, but Grub didn't see any fishing pole rigs or bait either. The man acted like he might be a movie star trying not to be recognized. One time they had filmed part of a movie around the dock, and Grub heard that some of the actors were famous, but he didn't know much about movies or the people that were in them. They all wore odd hats and sunglasses and talked funny. Grub didn't watch television or go to movies because he couldn't sit still long unless there was a lot of shooting and chasing, and he tended to lose track of what they were all about.

Grub lived in a surplus school bus that Mr. Moody parked in the trees near the bait and gas store, for free so long as he did chores for his keep. Grub got to eat the sandwiches that Mrs. Moody made that didn't get sold. People in the boats sometimes gave him money for helping load and unload their boats. He also cleaned fish for a dime each. He kept all his money in coffee jars that he hid in really good places so nobody could steal them.

That new boat was a puzzle that nobody could figure out. Nobody knew where Leland got the boat from, and nobody dared to ask him anything they could help not to, because he might get crazy and growl in your face, throw you in the water, or break something. Mr. Moody said it was likely he stole it, because there wasn't any way he'd scraped up enough in one piece to get it, and nobody in their right mind would finance a maniac like Leland Ticholet even if God Himself cosigned the loan. Mr. Moody allowed as how God had better sense than to do something so stupid as that.

That morning, Grub watched Leland come racing in, pull up to the pier, tie the boat, jump up, get the pump handle, pull it to the gas tanks, and squat down while the tanks filled up. When Leland was done, he put the pump handle back, ran in, and paid Mr. Moody by signing his book for it, which went against what Mr. Moody owed him for the gator hides he didn't actually buy—just traded goods for them.

Grub waited until Leland was inside the store before he ran up the dock to the boat and looked inside it. There was something big wrapped up in a bedsheet. Grub figured it was a person, on account of the shoes sticking out at one end. It appeared to Grub that the sheet was moving, that whoever it was wrapped up in there was alive. If he'd had time he would have poked the bundle with something to see if it moved, but if Leland was to catch him poking at his sheet deal, he might get crazy.

Grub had quickly jumped up onto the graveled lot above the dock, scampered back to the store, and hidden behind the live-bait well. Leland came back out with a loaf of white bread under his arm and a cola in his hand, and pretty soon he was eating a handful of bread, and was hauling ass away from the dock at full speed, no matter the signs said
NO WAKE
. Leland wasn't big on minding signs—if he could even read them, which Grub doubted he could.

Grub figured that the little movie star with the sunglasses and the straw hat was likely who was rolled up in the sheet. Grub considered mentioning the man in the sheet to Moody, but the store owner didn't care about what people did as long as they didn't do things that could make trouble for him. Plus, if Leland was to find out that Grub was telling his business, like wrapping up people in things and driving them around the swamps, it might end up being him that was rolled up and lying in the bottom of that fancy new boat.

Grub couldn't swim, and didn't want to have to learn all the sudden either.