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“Did you all see a light inside?” she asked.
“A few minutes ago,” Clete said.
“Where?”
“On the first floor, maybe in the living room.”
“For just an instant I saw a light at ground level, like somebody had pulled back a curtain on a basement window,” she said. “Hear me out before we start busting down doors. I think Felicity Louviere is dead. Maybe the girls, too. With luck, Molly and Albert are still alive. This is what I think will happen when we go in: Surrette will kill everybody in his proximity, then himself. He’s a coward, and he’ll die a coward’s
death at the expense of everyone else.”
“What’s the alternative?” I asked.
“There isn’t one,” she said. “I just thought you might like to know what we’re looking at.”
We walked four abreast down the driveway while someone on a boat or an island in the middle of the lake continued to fire rockets into the sky, all of them bursting into giant tentacles of pink foam high above the vastness of the lake.
I spoke earlier of advice that I had received from others and always remembered. Now I heard a nameless voice repeating an admonition that I had pushed aside, a premise that almost all investigative law enforcement officers never forget. Crime is about money, sex, or power. If you have the money, you can buy the sex and power. So follow the money.
The other admonition I had forgotten was from my old friend the line sergeant: Don’t let them get behind you.
THE COMBINATION OF fear and fatigue and the bruises and cuts on her face had worked like a cancer on Molly’s spirit. No matter how hard she tried to hold her head erect, her eyes kept closing and her chin sinking to her chest. She could feel herself slipping away, as though she were dissolving inside warm water, the breakdown of her body becoming its own anodyne, as though a voice were whispering that it was no sin to let the soul depart from the body and be on its way.
Asa Surrette had gone back upstairs, leaving Jack Boyd and Terry in charge.
“Do you fellows know what a fall partner is?” Molly heard Albert say.
“Queer bait on the stroll in October?” Boyd said.
“The guy you get pinched with,” Terry said.
“Surrette never had a fall partner,” Albert said.
“Meaning he works alone?” Terry said. “What else is new?”
“He’s not that smart,” Albert said. “But when it’s over, he’s the only guy left standing. What’s that tell you?”
“I know where you’re going with that,” Terry said. “Look, go out with some dignity, old-timer. Don’t start turning dials on the wrong guy and treating other people like they’re simpletons.”
There was a popping sound, high in the sky. Terry climbed on a chair below the window that was taped over with a black leaf bag. He peeled the bag from the corner of the glass and peered out.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Boyd said.
“That noise. It’s people shooting off fireworks over the lake.”
“Tape up that window!” Boyd said.
“All right, don’t shit your pants. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Jack, but I think you’re out of your depth. You should stick to taking bribes.”
Surrette opened the upstairs door and came down the steps. “What’s going on down here? What were you doing on that chair?”
“People are shooting fireworks on the lake,” Terry said. “I’m a little tired of the way I’m being talked to, here. I’d like to finish this up and get paid and be on my way, if you don’t mind too much. I don’t like that stuff with the kids, either.”
Surrette approached, his formless suit loose on his body, his Roman sandals scudding on the concrete floor, a malevolent glow in his face. He took a coil of clothesline from his coat pocket. It seemed to drop like a white snake from his palm as he pressed it into Terry’s hand. “So show me what you can do,” he said.
“The broad and the old guy?”
“Yeah, you up to it?” Surrette said.
