Chapter 20 #2
He thought for a moment, then replied in all sincerity, “If I were you, I wouldn’t.”
Her eyes searched his. After a time, she let go of the door handle and folded her arms across her middle. He didn’t need a degree in psychology to read that body language.
She said, “I’ll listen. Say what you will, but at the conclusion of your explanation, I still will not talk to you about one of my patients.”
“It’s not just any patient, Dylan. It’s Roland Malone. How much do you know about him beyond him sneaking into Auclair to visit you? It’s inconvenient and time-consuming, an hour and a half drive both ways. But he’s not going to do sessions virtually, because heaven forbid that you record them.
“How does he pay you? No, let me guess. It’s with a credit card for some obscure limited liability company that nobody’s ever heard of. Blink if I’m getting warm.”
She didn’t blink. She didn’t do anything. She kept her expression impassive and said nothing.
“All right, if you won’t tell me anything about him, I’ll tell you.” He paused to segue. “For starters, he works for a big-time drug dealer who peddles product out of South and Central America through Mexico.”
Finally: involuntary reactions. Her lips parted, her eyes opened wider.
He went on. “I’m not talking weed. I’m talking hard stuff, drugs that are either sold straight-up or laced into others.
Buyer-beware-or-turn-up-dead kind of drugs.
And this organization supplies them in such huge quantities they’re readily available, even to kids.
But that’s the least of Malone’s offenses. ”
He lifted the console cover and took from the compartment underneath a sheet of paper folded three times like a business letter. He unfolded it and reached up to switch on the map light above the rearview mirror.
“I had a DEA colleague, Randy Nelson. Thirty-four years old. Single, but engaged to be married. Good agent. Likable guy. Not movie star handsome but passably so. This is how he looked when John and I fished him out of Bayou Coeur.”
He held the sheet out toward her. Reluctantly, she took it, looked down at the medium closeup photo of the late agent. A police photographer had taken it minutes after Nelson’s body had been recovered.
Dylan raised a hand to her lips and looked up at Mitch in horror.
“Malone’s handiwork. He doesn’t hawk Oxy pills on street corners, Dylan.
This,” he said, tapping the picture with his index finger, “is his specialty. That picture of Nelson is over two years old. This week, Malone did the same thing to a seventeen-year-old female runaway and a dealer she’d been living with.
Like Nelson, they were killed somewhere else and their bodies dumped in the bayou.
You probably heard about that gruesome discovery on the news. ”
He took the paper from her listless hand, refolded it, replaced it in the console, and shut the lid. He turned off the light. A picture being worth a thousand words, he gave Dylan time to absorb what she’d seen and let her be the one to end the thick silence that ensued.
She gave a slight shake of her head. “You must be wrong. He owns a restaurant.”
“A classy one,” Mitch said. “Profitable. Which makes for an excellent front.”
“He’s owned it for years. It’s his life work.”
“That’s true. And I’ve observed—”
“From your position in the median, disguised as a homeless man?”
He didn’t acknowledge the question. “In the restaurant, Malone is hands-on. He greets his customers at the door and escorts them out. But how many restaurateurs do you know who have a chauffeur on call twenty-four seven? A chauffeur who packs heat, and not a popgun pistol, either. Serious weaponry.
“Malone put the guy in that position the day he got paroled after serving ten years for a long list of felonies, all drug trade related. Most of Ristorante Italiano’s staff have comparable résumés.”
While she processed what he’d told her, she turned her head and stared through the windshield, which was now streaked with rivulets of rain. Coming back to him, she asked, “If Roland is guilty of what you allege, why isn’t he in prison?”
“Lack of evidence, and that’s all I can say about it.”
“Oh, I see. You can’t divulge any information, but you expect me to be a fountain of it.”
“I’m the one with the badge.”
“And I’m the one with the doctorate,” she fired back. “Which prohibits a breach of confidentiality.”
They could pivot around that argument all night, and, regardless of what he’d told Dylan about his truck not being easily detectable, he could be wrong and was anxious to get it off the road.
Speaking more urgently, he said, “Malone has friends in high places. Compromised, corrupt friends in high places. New Orleans is a city well known for favors being swapped. I don’t want to make a move on him until I have something an honest and by-the-book prosecutor can and will sink his teeth into. ”
“That’s where I come in, I suppose. That’s why you orchestrated this charade.”
He just looked at her, not having to verbally verify that she was correct.
She shook her head again, this time with more decisiveness.
“I’ve listened, Mitch. But you’ve gone to a lot of trouble for nothing.
I would never share what a patient has confided to me.
” She extended her hand. “My phone, please.” He withheld it for several seconds before reluctantly laying it in her palm.
“Thank you.” She tried the door again. When it didn’t open, she sighed. “Please unlock the door.”
“Let me ask you one question.”
“Unlock—”
“It’s pouring out there.” He motioned at their surroundings made virtually invisible by darkness and heavy rain. “Even I’m not sure where this road goes. Do you know?”
“I’ll figure it out.”
“One question.”
She folded her arms again.
“Thanks.”
“Just ask the question.”
“Were you telling me the truth when you said that tonight was the first time you’d been to Malone’s restaurant?”
“Easy answer. Yes. My first time. Why is that important?”
“What prompted you to go tonight?”
“I didn’t agree to answering a second question.”
He raised his eyebrows. “This one is harder to answer?”
She stewed on that for a moment, then said, “Roland invited me.”
“Is that a first, too?”
“No. I had an open invitation.”
“Any particular reason why you decided tonight was an ideal time to take him up on it?”
“No. Well, yes.”
“Huh. Conflicting answers to one simple question. In police parlance, we call that hedging. Which means not exactly lying, but—”
“I know what hedging means.”
He snapped his fingers. “Right. You have a doctorate.”
Obviously irritated by that, she said, “Roland extended the open invitation many times. But he made the invitation for tonight more specific.”
“Emphatic?”
“Specific.”
“Why specific? Special occasion? Your birthday, maybe?”
“No special occasion.”
He propped his elbow on the steering wheel and stroked his lower lip with his thumb, not breaking their eye contact. When she began to become impatient, he said in a drawl, “Want to know why I think he made tonight specific? I think he heard about the new patient you acquired this week.”
“Who would have told him?”
He chuckled. “A career criminal like him has far-reaching tentacles. Any number of paid snitches could have alerted him to my first visit to your office.”
“A lot of law enforcement officers get therapy.”
“Yeah, but to Malone, I’m not just any cop. He doesn’t know that I keep tabs on him, but I know he keeps tabs on me. And now I’m seeing his therapist? Ooooh, trust me, that would have shaken him. So he invited you to dinner. Did he do a little fishing about your practice?”
“He asked some general questions. Nothing about you. Why would you be ‘not just any cop’ to him?”
“Number one, because of my undercover work with the DEA. That’s how he knows me. After I was out, he learned who I was. Number two, I’ve maintained that my wife’s death was staged to look like a suicide, when in fact she was murdered in retaliation for my work.
“Number three, as of this Monday, after two years of bereavement and alcohol dependency, I began opening up my heart about Angela’s tragic death to a therapist. Who also happens to be his therapist.”
He recognized the instant it dawned on her what he was getting at. “Are you saying that Roland killed Angela?”
“Yeah. That’s what I’m saying.”