Page 28 of Hurricane Irene

“My decision?” Calder asked.

“You chose the abandoned concrete slabs,” Voss said. “You said the bayou would keep them away from police until the storm erased the problem.”

Calder crossed the room and muted the television. The silence sharpened the dry rattle of the air conditioner.

“We have signed policies. We have disclosures. We have homeowners who initialed every exclusion.”

“And training scripts telling agents to call those exclusions routine language,” Lenora repeated. “Bonuses for denied claims. Recorded calls. Complaints from three parishes using the same words.”

Voss looked at Calder. Calder looked at the stack of forms. For the first time that evening, neither man had anything clever to say.

Lenora laid the legal pad on the table.

“I made copies months ago. Names, dates, premiums, claims marked for automatic denial. If one of you blames me, the packet goes to the attorney general, the insurance commissioner, and a reporter in Baton Rouge.”

Calder’s expression changed by degrees.

“You said the office files were the only copies.”

“The agency files are here in Beaumont,” Lenora said. “Mine are somewhere safer. The women may have copies too, if they survived.”

Voss leaned back.

“Suppose they are alive. What then?”

“Then they tell investigators how we trained them,” Lenora said. “They tell them why they changed their minds. They tell them who ordered them taken to Louisiana.”

Calder returned to the window. Traffic moved normally along the dry streets below. A delivery truck stopped at the curb. Somewhere beyond the eastern horizon, the next rain band was still hours away.

“They signed employment agreements,” he said. “Confidentiality clauses. Arbitration. Everything was documented.”

“Paper does not make kidnapping legal,” Lenora said.

Voss looked down at his hands.

“And if they are dead?”

Calder answered too quickly.

“Then no one can contradict us.”

Lenora studied him.

“Bodies contradict people every day.”

At that same hour, nearly two hundred miles east, the men of LEGACY stood near the concrete slab where the first women were found. Beneath a sky that had not yet opened, they searched again. The six women had already been found. Their restraints, identification, and water-damaged papers were being photographed and sealed. No one in the Beaumont conference room knew.

On the conference-room television, a forecaster pointed to the darkening Gulf and warned that rainfall would begin overnight. Calder restored the sound, watched the map, and smiled as if weather still belonged to him.

“By the time anyone asks questions,” he said, “Louisiana will have bigger problems.”

In Louisiana, a deputy turned over an agency badge recovered on the banks not far from where the women were found. The Beaumont address remained clear beneath the mud.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Twenty-three minutes after Calder, Voss, and Lenora left Pelican Insurance, the roof door opened without an alarm.

Joseph entered first, broad shoulders turned sideways through the narrow access. Nathan followed with a compact camera held against his chest. Kiel carried a flat case and a pair of gloves. Travis came last and eased the locked door shut behind them until the latch settled with a soft metal click.