Floodgates (19 page)

Jodi watched Faye push that envelope a bit, first leaning on Leila’s desk, then actually resting her hand atop the stack of papers on the desk corner, just as she’d gotten Jodi’s attention earlier that day by laying that same hand flat atop the paperwork she was filing.

Nervous Leila never noticed. She just kept giving Jodi noncommittal answers.

It wasn’t that Leila betrayed her nerves overtly. Her voice never trembled. Its tone was pleasant but firm. Her hands were steady.

No, she hadn’t thought of anything else significant that Shelly had said or done during those tough days at Zephyr Field
, the woman had told Jodi as a hand reached up to touch her cheek.

No, she’d never, at any time, seen anyone at the office arguing with Shelly
, Leila had said as she brought her hands in front of her, palms inward, in an instinctively protective position.

No, she’d never heard Shelly mention being afraid of anyone or anything
, she’d asserted calmly, while she adjusted the position of the bright gold bangle bracelet encircling her wrist, again.

Yes, she’d be happy to let Jodi and her tagalong friend speak to Mr. Landry, but they had to remember that he was a busy person. She was sure he would have contacted the police, if he’d remembered anything that might be helpful.

With that, Leila sighed and turned to lead them into Charles’ office, stopping only to alert him by intercom that they were coming.

The woman simply bristled with body language that said she was lying. Or that she wasn’t giving them the whole truth. She had more tells than a bankrupted poker player. Her last evasive tic cost her, though.

By moving toward the door of Charles Landry’s office with the liar’s stereotypical facial expression, eyes locked straight ahead, she never saw Faye drag her hand across the desk, raking a single piece of paper into her other waiting hand.

***

Charles Landry was a better liar than his administrative assistant, or at least Jodi thought so. His hands were relaxed. His body position was open. His voice was blandly pleasant.

Too bad his speech patterns were skewing way more formal than the ordinary conversational style of a good ol’ boy from the Big Easy. Jodi had learned early in her career that liars always reveal themselves. Maybe they
wanted
to be revealed, although Jodi highly doubted that. In her experience, liars and criminals were convinced that the rest of the world owed them…everything.

“No, I do not recall ever seeing this,” he said, as he perused the neatly inscribed list of names that had been retrieved from Shelly’s pocket. He reached for the second list with its hurriedly scrawled handwriting, and said, “Nor this.”

“How about the names? Are any of them familiar to you? Other than your own name, I mean, and Matt’s. And Shelly’s.”

“Yes. That’s my last name. It’s also my brother’s and my father’s and my mother’s. All my aunts, uncles, and cousins, too. And lots of people that I’m not related to, as well. Would you like to talk to all of them?”

In Jodi’s peripheral vision, she saw Faye continuing her trick of hovering just outside the interrogant’s field of vision, forcing him to choose where to focus his eyes. Like Leila, Charles chose the woman with the badge, because he perceived her as the biggest threat. The man had no idea who he was dealing with.

Jodi waited patiently while Charles studied the two lists and made noncommittal noises. Then she took her leave of him, but Faye did something. She showed that she was done with silent observation.

“May I ask you a personal question?” she said, speaking softly so that Charles had to turn an ear in her direction in order to hear.

“You can ask,” he said. Wariness put an audible edge on his voice.

“Nina’s my friend, and I know she has been so glad to spend time with you again. She told me that she had no idea why you’d come back into her life so suddenly. Could I be so bold as to ask why you did? You don’t have to tell me, but Nina’s my friend and I…” Faye’s voice trailed off and she looked at him expectantly.

“I couldn’t…well, I…” Charles’ smooth manner was now thoroughly ruffled. Finally, he just blurted it out. “Nina’s not what I pictured for myself. I plan to head up this company, or one like it. I wanted a wife who could make cocktail party conversation, and Nina doesn’t even own any hairspray. But you know her. There’s not anyone like Nina. I just couldn’t stay away.”

He signaled to Leila that the interview was done. As she led them through the door, back into her own workspace, Charles turned toward his own desk. In that instant, Jodi felt Faye press a scrap of paper into her hand. She glanced at it and blessed the day that she hired Faye Longchamp to help her with this investigation.

It was a simple to-do list on a piece of paper that said
From the desk of Leila Caron
across the top. The clear round handwriting on that paper was utterly familiar.

Leila Caron had written one of their two lists.

Chapter Twenty-four

Faye’s face was expressionless, but Jodi could read her body language as well as she could read a liar’s. She was smugly proud of handing Jodi something she could use to pry a little truth out of Leila.

“Ms. Caron,” Jodi said, holding out a copy of Shelly’s sloppily written list, “does this look familiar to you?”

The mouth said no, but the eyes said Leila wished she knew whether this lie was safe to tell.

“How about this one?”

Leila hesitated, then raised her eyes to the bulletin board hanging three feet from Jodi’s left shoulder. Jodi glanced that way and saw three pieces of paper covered with neat round handwriting identical to that on the list in her hand. Leila saw the glance, and she was a good enough gambler to know when to fold her hand.

“Yes, I’ve seen that before. It’s my handwriting.”

“Do you remember making this list?”

“I’m an administrative assistant. I take notes and shuffle people’s paper for them. I make lists like that one every day. I can’t possibly remember them all.”

Jodi knew that the woman was feeling cornered, if she was willing to acknowledge the menial labor that was central to her job. She decided to press her a little. “But do you remember
this
list?”

“No. I don’t.”

Well, at least Leila had given her a straight answer, even if her body language screamed out that it wasn’t true.

“Did you ever make a list like this for Shelly Broussard?”

“Shelly worked for Charles. Charles is my boss. Of course, I gave her notes and lists of things that he wanted her to do. I did that for all his employees.”

This was true. But Jodi was well aware that most of that kind of work was done on computer now. She didn’t know why the fact that this note was hand-written seemed notable, but it did.

“Why would you make a list of names like this? Hypothetically, I mean.”

“Umm…”

Leila was thinking too long. Instead of throwing out a few random reasons for listing nine surnames, she was reviewing her alternatives and taking the time to mentally throw out the one that was true.

“Maybe it was a list of potential clients that Charles wanted her to call. Or subcontractors. Yeah, they could be subcontractors.”

Jodi was so dead certain that Leila was lying that this was actually useful information, in a backhanded way. There was no way in hell that these names referred to clients or subcontractors.

“Well, if you remember anything about any of the people on this particular list, or if you think of something that reminds you why you wrote it in the first place, you’ve got my card. Have a good day.”

Jodi turned to Faye and nodded that it was time to go. The look on Faye’s face, even more smug than before, caught her attention.

Jodi’s eyes followed the line of Faye’s slim arm downward to the desk, where she was again resting her hand. This time, however, the hand was not lying flat. Three fingers and a thumb were curled into her palm, leaving an index finger pointing…at what?

Jodi’s own body language nearly slipped when she followed that index finger to its target. Faye was pointing at Leila’s desk plate, which Jodi had seen before. It announced to the world at large that she was an Administrative Asst. It also broadcast to the world that her professional name was Leila Martin Caron.

Leila was not married. Jodi presumed that she never had been, but she’d have to check. She wagered that “Martin” was Leila’s middle name and that it had been her mother’s maiden name. She and her ilk did not let go of their family relationships easily. It was the most natural thing in Leila’s world for her to continue letting the world know who her “people” were, even though her mother had presumably been married to Mr. Caron for decades.

And Martin was one of the names on Shelly’s lists.

***

Leila waited for the woman cop and her poorly dressed, dark-skinned flunky to leave the room. Then she counted to sixty before opening her office door and peeking out. They were gone.

She turned around and surveyed her desk from this angle. The two women had been looking at something. What had they seen and why had it caught the silent archaeologist’s eye? Why had it been so noteworthy that she had lurked right there, in that spot to the right of the desk, until the detective looked her way?

Faye Longchamp had been pointing at something with that hand motion that she’d thought was so damn subtle. What in the hell was it?

Leila turned her thoughts off and just let her eyes drift over the desk. The paperweight was harmless, though she was so rattled that she believed she could just slam it into the detective’s head, if given half a chance. The scissors gave out no incriminating information, though they too could serve well as a weapon to ensure that Detective Bienvenu would leave her the hell alone. Ditto for the letter opener.

The papers were all harmless. They’d all been generated within the past month, for innocuous reasons. They had no pertinence to the matter at hand. Well, the handwritten ones in the detective’s grasp did, but she’d already admitted the obvious fact that one of those damnable lists was written in her own handwriting. It was unfortunate that she’d had to give up even that shred of information, but not catastrophic. As long as no one ever found out what those lists
were
…

The memories welled up, and so did the adrenaline. Leila closed her eyes and willed away the trembling and the quick, shallow breaths. Post-traumatic stress disorder was for the weak, no matter what her psychologist tried to tell her. After a moment devoted to blanking out memories, Leila opened her eyes again, and she saw it.

It was only a nameplate, and it had been sitting on her desk unnoticed for seven years.

Leila Martin Caron.

The sight of those three names infuriated her. Of its own volition, her hand reached out and snatched up the offending nameplate. Without conscious control, she slung her arm back and overhanded the evidence at her office wall.

The nameplate left a tiny scar in the fashionable taupe paint as it caromed off the wall and slammed to the tile floor, ruined. No matter. Leila was an administrative assistant, which meant that she kept charge of the office supply catalogs. She could simply order herself another nameplate, one that didn’t broadcast her mother’s maiden name. No one would be the wiser.

***

Faye sat with Joe and Jodi, huddling over yet another batch of po-boys, while they studied Shelly’s two lists of names with magnifying glasses. Faye was trying a new variety of po-boy—sliced ham, anointed with barbecue sauce. It tasted great, but it was saltier than the Gulf of Mexico. It was so salty that she was pretty sure she could feel a stroke coming on. She drank half a glass of water without setting down the glass, hoping to dilute all that sodium.

“I got a sample of Shelly’s handwriting from her aunt,” Jodi announced. “She didn’t write either of these lists.”

“Shit,” Faye said, and Joe twitched one shoulder. He hated it when she cursed. “So we have no idea who wrote the scribbly list.”

“The ‘scribbly’ list, as you call it, was written with a pencil,” Jodi said. “And I’d say the person was under lot of stress.”

“Because the writing’s messy?” Faye asked.

“Well, yeah, but I was also looking at how hard the person was pressing into the paper.”

Joe pointed to the last name on the list. “Look there. You can even see the pencil getting blunter, the further you look down the page.” Picking up the other sheet, he said, “This one’s in pen, but the person was bearing down pretty hard, too. See here? The pen nearly punched through the paper in a couple of spots.”

“So you’d say that both writers were under stress? I wonder what a graphologist would say.”

“I don’t think the neat writing means that this other person was calmer or easier in their mind,” Joe said, cocking his head to one side as he brought the paper almost to his nose. “I think the writing’s neat because the person writing was feeling really…” He considered the paper again. “…really
careful
.”

Faye made a mental note to tell Jodi that she should listen to Joe at times like this. He understood every animal that walked. Some of those animals walked around on two legs. And a few of those were dangerous.

“Let me back up and think about what we know about Shelly’s last days,” Jodi said. “She rode out the storm in a higher area west of town that stayed dry, probably with some of her co-workers. They found out about the rescue work at Zephyr Field, so they went there to help. And they got there…how?”

“By car, I figure,” Joe said. “When the rain stopped, you could probably drive just fine on a lot of the streets where it didn’t flood. You might have to take the long way around, though.”

“But not to the Lower Ninth Ward,” Faye said. “That would really have been the long way round. And going there would have taken you through…oh, fifteen feet of water. And we know she was alive for days at Zephyr Field, before she somehow got to the Lower Nine, so never mind.”

“Okay,” Jodi said. “So she went to Zephyr Field for several days, but we don’t know how many. A lot of people saw her there. She worked like a dog. She may have disappeared after taking a nap—“

“Not to butt in here,” Faye said, “but don’t forget that Bobby said that he heard Shelly yelling at somebody shortly before he lost track of her.”

“Damn, I wish I knew something about that argument—who she was yelling at and why.” Jodi picked up the lists again. “Anyway, she left Zephyr Field at some point, but we don’t know when, why, or how. We don’t know whether she was alone. We don’t even know if she was alive. We just know that sometime since then, she turned up dead in the Lower Nine.”

“I’ll argue with you on one point,” Faye said. “I think we know why she left Zephyr Field. Think about it. She was looking for her parents. We know that she was agonizing over them for days. Trying to reach them by phone. Crying over her work. If she was alive when she left the rescue operation, then she was going after her parents.”

“Reckon she got there?” Joe asked. “We could look.”

“Hmm?” Jodi gave him a sharp look. “It would be good to know that, but I don’t know how we could possibly tell. Where would you look for that information?”

“We know they drowned in their attic,” he began. “If you were in a boat and you floated up to a flooded-out house where you thought somebody was trapped, what would you do?”

Jodi had asked him the question, but Joe looked at Faye like a law professor grilling a first-year student…and she knew why. It was because he knew precisely what she would do in that situation.

Her answer was instantaneous. “I’d try to go through the roof. And if I knew I might have to do that, I’d bring an ax with me.”

“We already said she probably hopped a ride in a rescue boat.” Jodi rubbed her forehead as if it hurt. “They would have had axes…”

Faye could see Jodi thinking. She could almost see the ideas as she conjured them up, weighed them, and cast them aside.

Joe gave Jodi the answer before she got to it. “If the rescuers—with or without Shelly—got to that house and wanted to see if her parents were still alive, they would have…what? Made an unholy noise by knocking on the walls and roof until somebody answered?” He knocked on the table to give the image a bit of reality. “Is that how they worked?”

Jodi nodded.

“Okay,” he said. “If nobody answered and they didn’t have a real good reason to think somebody might be alive inside, trapped, I’m guessing they moved on, because lots of people were out there waiting for help—”

Jodi nodded and Joe kept talking without missing a beat.

“—but if somebody answered when they knocked, they would have had to chop through the roof to get to them. I bet we can find out if that happened at Shelly’s parents’ house without leaving this room.” He nodded at the stack of aerial photographs Faye had stacked on the table where they sat. “Do you have their address?”

Jodi slapped the file folder in front of her. “I sure do.”

He looked at Faye. “You’ve pretty much memorized those photos. I watched you. Can you find their house by its address?”

“The Lakeview photos are overlaid with street maps. Yes. I can.”

Within minutes, the three of them were gathered around a detailed map of Lakeview taken days after the storm, looking at the roof of the very house where Shelly’s parents drowned. Some other houses in the neighborhood had clearly visible holes battered through their shingles, but not the Broussards’. Dark water surrounded them all.

Faye wondered why the photo made her stomach knot. She already knew that Aimee and Dan Broussard had died under that roof. The visual proof of it unsettled her, anyway.

“So the rescuers got there and, even if Shelly was with them, it was too late. They never even tried to get into the house. God rest their souls.” Jodi ran a gentle finger around the outlines of the undamaged roof. Then she drew it back and crossed herself.

“Shelly wasn’t with the rescuers when they got to her parents’ house.” Faye heard certainty in her voice, even though the words had come to her without conscious thought. “Of course, she wasn’t with them. She would have pried off those shingles with her teeth. She would have peeled back the plywood under them, splinter by splinter. Wouldn’t you, if it was your mama and daddy underneath those shingles?”

Jodi’s face lost its wistful look. “Yes. You’re right. The rescuers had to follow procedures—they had thousands of people to save. If nobody answered their calls or knocks, then they moved on. Shelly had two people to save. She’d have done everything in her power to get into that house.”

Faye nodded, more certain about this than she’d been about anything else related to the investigation. “If she’d gotten this far, you’d be able to see the hole she made in that roof from any photograph, whether it was taken by a plane, helicopter, or satellite. You’d be able to see it from space. Sometime between leaving Zephyr Field and arriving at this house, Shelly got off-track. And about the only way she could have gotten so off-track that she failed to go after her parents would be because she was dead.”