out for cups of coffee with the FBI? Meetin’ Agent Tremanty for a little tit-à-tit?”
“It’s pronounced tête-à-tête, not tit-à-tit, you ignorant Oakie,” Rae said. She always got tight on a job like this. Her M4 had a sling, and she was clinking the sling’s swivel against the handguard and it went dink-dink-dink as they talked.
“It’s pronounced tête-à-tête if you mean a face-to-face meeting,” Bob said. “It’s pronounced tit-à-tit if you mean . . .”
“Off my back, dumbass,” Rae interrupted. “Here we go.”
* * *
—
DEESE’S HOME was a low, rambling building clad with wide, unpainted pine weatherboards gone dark with the sun and wind. The house looked old, nineteenth-century, but wasn’t; it had been built in 1999 on a concrete slab, according to the parish assessor’s office.
A narrow porch stretched down the length of the structure, a foot above ground level, with a door opening off the middle of the porch. Two green metal patio chairs on the porch, their paint faded by sunlight and rain. The third marshal popped out of his truck and ran toward the back of the house, while Bob and Rae went straight in from the front, watching the windows for movement, their rifles already up, safeties off, fingers hovering over the triggers.
Rae crossed the porch and stood to one side of the door and pounded on it with her fist and shouted, “Mr. Deese! Mr. Deese!”
Bob was to one side, in the yard, watching windows, but with his rifle now pointed in the direction of the door. Rae pounded on the door again. “Deese! Deese!”
No reaction. Bob stepped back to the center, at the bottom of the porch steps. “Ready?”
“Anytime,” Rae said.
Bob cocked himself to kick the door, but then the door moved—and he went sideways and shouted, “Door!”
The door opened farther and a frightened, round-faced black woman stuck her head out. She said to Rae, who was pointing a gun at her, “Mr. Deese ain’t here.”
“Where is he?”
“Don’t know. He been gone.”
Bob said, “Please step back, ma’am.”
They followed the muzzles of their rifles into the house, which was dark and well cooled. They walked through to the back, shouted out at the other marshal, then opened the back door to let him in. Together, they cleared the place.
The black woman was named Carolanne Pouter and she worked three days a week cleaning house, doing Deese’s laundry and occasional grocery shopping, mowing the yard, and keeping a daily eye on the place when he was traveling.
“Did he tell you where he was going?” Bob asked.
“No, sir. He never does. But this time . . .” She eyed their marshal shirts. “This time, it ain’t like the other times. He was two days burning paper out back. He was coming and going and coming and going for three weeks, and then he loaded all his baggage into his pickup and he went on down the road. Took all his cowboy boots, too. Told me to lock up and gave me five hundred dollars to watch the house for six months. Which I been doin’, faithful.”
Tremanty had come inside, and now he asked, “Did Mr. Deese have an office in the house or a place where he did his paperwork?”
“Yes, sir, upstairs, next to the bedroom.”
Tremanty said to Bob, “Why don’t you get Miz Pouter to show you where he was burning paper. See what the situation is. I’ll check out the office.”
Rae followed Tremanty up the wooden staircase, and Tremanty said, “The whole place is pine. If he’s running, I’m surprised he didn’t torch it. It’d burn like a barn full of hay.”
Deese’s office space was small, only about ten by ten feet, with one window looking out toward the jungle in back. An inexpensive office desk, the kind you might buy from a big-box office supply store, sat next to two empty filing cabinets. There were no closets, no place to hide, so when the marshals had cleared the house, they’d spent no more than five seconds in the room.
Tremanty said, “He’s gone and we won’t find him in a hurry.”
“That’s some fine detectin’,” Rae said. “Since we only been here one minute.”
“I found a clue you missed,” Tremanty said. He was really handsome, and when Rae had first seen him she’d had to bite her lip. “On the desk.”
Rae stepped over to look. Sitting on the desk, on a sheet of white computer paper, was Deese’s ankle monitor, which had been severed with a pair of wire cutters. The paper had a straightforward note,