12:10 P.M.
Don flinched at the sight of the police car parked in front of Carla’s house. He immediately turned off her street and meandered through the neighborhood. Why would the police be here? He knew Carla hadn’t escaped or been discovered. He had stopped to check on her, not fifteen minutes ago. She was still in the attic in the abandoned house and she was still completely out of it from the sedatives he had fed her last night. If his calculations were correct, she should be out for at least another six hours.
As far as he could tell, no one knew he was in the picture, so he couldn’t think of a reason why anything that had happened so far could be connected to him. And there was precious little in the house that he needed to worry about. He had been careful to put things back the way he found them in the dining area where he and Carla had spent their time together.
A forensic examination of the house would reveal that someone other than Carla had been there, but it would be a long time, if ever, before anyone could link that sort of evidence to him. No official samples of his hair or genetic material existed. His fingerprints were part of his profile at DEA, but he hadn’t left any prints behind—of that he was certain.
Perhaps the police car out front was just the local constable doing his due diligence on Matt’s missing person report. Don would circle back every so often until the car was gone. Then he would leave his own vehicle close enough to allow a speedy getaway and go the rest of the way on foot. If need be, he could always commandeer whatever vehicle Matt arrived in. Assuming Matt even showed up.
On his second drive-by, the police car was gone. On his third drive-by, with no other obvious busybodies in sight, Don assumed the coast was clear. He parked two blocks away, then walked briskly toward the entrance to the central alley behind Carla’s house. The collection of devices he had taken from Carla on his earlier visit rattled around inside his shoulder bag.
He checked his watch, then picked up his pace. Time was running short. He had wanted to be in position long before Gable arrived, but the presence of the police car had chewed away some of his margin of safety.
Just as he turned into the alley, an elderly woman emerged from a gate farther down and waddled slowly up the alley in Don’s direction. She wore a ratty flower-print house coat and dingy white terry cloth slippers that barely contained a pair of record-setting bunions. A bleary-eyed basset hound that looked older than the woman lollygagged alongside on a retractable leash, sniffing out a place to relieve itself.
Don didn’t have enough time to saunter past the woman and out the other end of the alley and then come back after she was gone. But he couldn’t afford to register on the old woman’s radar, either. He wanted to be invisible, so he acted as if he belonged there and strode confidently to the fence line at the back of Carla’s yard and used her key to unlock the gate. The woman showed no interest in him. She seemed concerned only with her dog, muttering impatiently to the animal—probably some practiced incantation intended to hasten the evacuation of its bowels.
Once inside the fence, Don went straight into the house, then shot a quick glance back at the alley through the window in the door. The old woman with the dog was nowhere in sight. A quick survey of the rooms told him the house was empty. He made sure all the windows were locked and that the front door was bolted and chained. Matt might have a key and, if he showed up, he might try to enter through the front. Don needed to funnel him toward the back door.
On his way back out, Don applied a strip of duct tape across the striker plate to keep the spring bolt from latching. The tape also provided enough bulk to barely hold the door shut. A gentle touch was all it took to push it open.
Don hurried down the back steps and across the yard. He gently slid open the door to the storage shed and ducked inside. The little window in the side wall of the shed offered a view of the gate and the sycamore tree at the back of the lot. He left the door open so he would also have a clear view of the back of the house, then he settled in behind a lawn mower. Even with the door open, it was sweltering inside the shed. He would have preferred to wait in the house, where it was cooler, but he couldn’t afford to get cornered in the event the nosy policeman returned or Matt showed up with company.
By making it impossible for Matt to communicate with Carla or to even determine whether it was actually her who was sending him the ominous emails, Don had left Matt no choice but to return to Bayou Sara if he wanted to reclaim what he believed Carla had taken from him.
He knew Matt would suspect a trap, and that Matt would want to study the situation before making a commitment—as he had done with his two-motel scheme in Baton Rouge. But he felt confident that Matt wouldn’t want to watch from in front of the house. Inquisitive neighbors or Carla herself might see him. The tree and the shed in the back were the only real options. But Matt would avoid the shed. It would be too difficult to abort the mission if he had to exit the shed, run across the open backyard, and then get through a locked gate. From the tree, however, Matt could simply drop over the fence into the alley, leaving any pursuers to wrestle with the locked gate.
Ever the thinker, though, Don acknowledged the gentle tug of anxiety. Sometimes people behaved in unexpected ways. Mason had been reliably habit-bound for years, keeping his nose in the numbers and his butt glued to his office chair. But then, very much against the odds, Mason unexpectedly broke his usual pattern and showed up in Baton Rouge. Don hoped he would not be similarly disappointed by Matt Gable.