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I could hear my breath rising in my throat again. “Go through that back door and look down into the room below the floor. That’s where I think my daughter was being held. It’s a torture chamber. I want you to go down below and put your hand on the stones. I want you to look in that toolbox on the table and tell me what’s on the tools.”
I felt myself moving toward him as though I had no willpower, as though a dark current were crawling from my brain down through my arm and hand into the grips of my .45. “Don’t just stare at me. You get your ass down those stairs.”
“Dave,” I heard Clete say softly behind me. “Maybe at least Huffinton stopped it.”
I didn’t move. My fingers were opening and closing on the grips of the .45.
/> “Time to dee-dee,” Clete said. “The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are keeping it simple tonight, big mon. We’re getting Alf back.”
“He’s not gonna talk to me like that,” Huffinton said.
“You shut up,” Clete said.
I felt my right hand relax, and I saw Huffinton’s face go in and out of focus then suck away from me in the wind, that quick, like an electronic blip disappearing on a screen. Then I was walking with Clete toward the truck, his arm as heavy as an elephant’s trunk across my shoulders.
WE HEADED EAST, back toward New Iberia, with no plan or specific destination, the speedometer needle nearing ninety. At Crowley we picked up an Acadia Parish sheriff’s escort in the form of two cruisers with their flashers rippling. I called Molly and told her what we had found. “They took Alafair there?” she said.
“I can’t be sure, but I think so. Has anybody called?”
“Helen Soileau, that’s it. Where are you going now?”
“Maybe back to the Abelards’ place. Is the cruiser parked outside?”
“It was ten minutes ago.”
“Go look.”
“It’s there.”
“Go look, Molly.”
She set down the receiver, then returned to the kitchen and scraped it up from the counter. “He’s parked by the curb, smoking a cigarette. Everything is fine here.”
“Call me if you hear from anybody. I’ll update you as soon as anything develops.”
“What did they do to her in that room, Dave?”
“There’s no way to know. Maybe nothing. Maybe they didn’t have time,” I said, forcing myself not to think about the toolbox.
The Acadia escort turned off at the Lafayette Parish line, and a Lafayette Parish deputy picked us up and stayed with us almost all the way to New Iberia.
“What do you want to do, Dave?” Clete asked.
“We go back to St. Mary. I want to find Abelard’s daughter. I don’t think she told me everything she knew.”
“Waste of time, in my view.”
“Why?”
“She’ll go down with the ship. You already know that.”
“Somebody knows where Weingart is. His literary agent, his business connections in Canada, his publisher. He’s got a plan, and somebody knows what it is. We need to get ahold of the sheriff in St. Mary and get in the Abelard house.”
“What for?”
“Correspondence, Rolodexes, records, how do I know?”
“I don’t think we have time for that, Dave.”
