Bolger paused, then looked away, his jaw tightening. Turning back to face Doyle, he said bitterly, “Rexroth came down to wring his hands over every one of these cases. And he’d look appalled, and concerned, but his act just didn’t play with me. There was something phony about it and about him.
“After I’d tussled with this and chewed on it, I finally called the FBI. I didn’t want to go to the state police, or the local authorities, because I was afraid Rexroth would get word of it. Through his media business, he’s got connections everywhere.
“If I was wrong, I didn’t want to lose my job over it. If I was right, I didn’t want to expose myself to risk, if you know what I mean. A person who will murder horses will murder men as well.
“But I’m pretty damn sure I wasn’t wrong,” Bolger said with emphasis. He smiled at his sister and her children as he and Doyle approached them. “Just a minute or two more, then I’ll buy you lunch,” he called to them.
Doyle, arms folded across his chest, cast an appraising glance at Bolger. “What about a pattern-is there any kind of pattern involved here, other than the fact these horses had dropped off sharply in value?”
“The only so-called pattern I could come up with was that I was not at Willowdale when the last two horses, Prince Fennimore and Signorina Goldini, died. When Prince Fennimore died I was at a horse sale Rexroth insisted I attend down in Florida. When the mare died, I’d gone with one of our crews to bring a shipment of two-year-olds up to the racing stable at Heartland Downs.”
Doyle digested this for a minute. Then he said, “Okay, this could be looked at in a couple of ways. One, Rexroth thinks you’re on to him and wanted to keep you out of the way so there was no chance that you’d discover the horse killers in action.
“Of course, there’s also possibility number two. That you’re involved in masterminding these killings and conveniently scheduled absences for yourself when they were to take place.”
Bolger stopped walking. Gripping Doyle’s arm, and powerfully squeezing it, he exclaimed, “If that’s a joke, my friend, it’s sure not funny. And if it’s not…well, what the hell, man. You think that if I was involved in this terrible business I’d be the one calling your FBI and asking for help?” he said angrily.
Doyle shook off Bolger’s hand. “Only kidding, buddy,” he said. “I get your point. And, yeah, I believe you.”
As much as I believe anybody these days, Doyle added to himself.
Chapter 9
After picking up their rented Taurus at the New Orleans Airport, Karen Engel and Damon Tirabassi began the nearly four-hour drive north and then west on Hwy. 10 to the heart of Louisiana’s Cajun country. This area was home to the quarter-million descendants of French-speaking, Roman Catholic settlers who fled there after having been thrown out of Nova Scotia in the mid-eighteenth century for refusing to pledge their allegiance to Britain’s Protestant king. They were an independent lot then, and not much had changed about that strain of their character since.
Acadiana, as this area is known, stretches from Lafayette on the east to Lake Charles on the west and is home to some of the most fun-loving, colorful citizens and memorable food that the United States has to offer.
Damon drove as Karen worked to adjust the air-conditioning. Outside the car, the morning air was thick with humidity. Oak trees seemed to shimmer and sag in the bright sunlight, and moss-covered cypresses looked similarly lethargic. The terrain varied between prairie and swamp, its common bond an enveloping layer of heat.
The two FBI agents had flown south from their Chicago base after a long phone conversation with Clayton Fugette, an agent in the Bureau’s New Orleans office. Fugette said he had received a tip from what he termed a “normally reliable informant-or as reliable as the damned snitches ever get to be”-that the horse killer, or killers, sought by Engel and Tirabassi was “from down around here, over by Lafayette. That’s in Cajun country. My man said the horse killer is supposedly an ex-jockey who went bad. Said the guy was now making a real good living killing horses for rich people for the insurance money.
“I think you should take a trip over there,” Fugette advised. “I don’t have anybody to spare right now myself. You’ve never been there, right? Well, it’s a whole different world. Bonne chance, mes amis,” he added with a chuckle before hanging up.
As Damon drove rapidly up the interstate, Karen reached into her briefcase and took out a file. “According to the postal records, there must be nearly as many Mortvedts around Lafayette as there are catfish in the bayou.”
Damon nodded. “Yeah, it might take some time. But we’ll find the right family, or somebody who can tell us about this guy,” he said, his mouth tightening. Karen had little doubt that this would be true, for Damon was widely known in the Bureau as being one of its most tenacious agents. Before Karen was assigned to the Chicago office and teamed with him, she had heard numerous admiring references to the man they called Tirabassi the Terrier because suspects were unable to shake him off.
Damon was a native of Chicago’s Little Italy, a tightly knit neighborhood on the near west side of the Loop. He had developed an anti-crime attitude as a young boy, its source the fact that his father’s tiny sandwich shop was forced to pay “tribute” to the arrogant, “made” guys who strutted around Taylor Street like, as Damon used to sneer, “little Mussolinis.” He developed a powerful contempt for these small-time hoods who preyed on their fellow Italian-Americans, secure in the knowledge that they would not be “ratted out” to the law.
That contempt never left him through the years when Damon earned a business degree at the nearby University of Chicago-Illinois, then a law degree on scholarship at Northwestern University. At age forty, Damon had now been an FBI agent for twelve years. He was happily married, with three sons, all of whose youth soccer teams he helped to coach.
Two years earlier, after they had progressed through the early months of their partnership, Damon had finally felt at ease enough with Karen to begin kidding her that the reason they would work well together was that she had “been brought up with enough Dagos to know what to expect.”
It was true that Karen had had several good friends among the sizable Italian-American community in her home town of Kenosha, Wisconsin. She had certainly stood out from most of them physically, with her Swedish-American complexion and her size: at five feet ten inches and one hundred forty-five pounds, she had the athletic build and the ability to earn a volleyball scholarship at the University of Wisconsin, from which she’d graduated with a degree in criminal justice. She’d also taken her law degree there, and it was at the UW law school that she’d met and married Dan Litzow.
That ranked as her only real mistake made in Madison, she once told Damon; she and Litzow had divorced after three years. At thirty-three, Karen entertained few thoughts of marrying again. She dated occasionally, but for the most part found herself satisfied with making her work the overwhelming priority of her life.
Karen smiled to herself as she glanced sideways at her super-serious partner. Damon’s only real flaw, as far as she was concerned, was his major lack of a sense of humor. He wasn’t dour, but rarely did Damon permit himself even a chuckle, even when smack dab in the middle of situations that cried out for laughter. Karen remembered Damon’s all-business attitude when the two of them had apprehended a missing Chicago grain exchange dealer hiding in the canvas-covered jacuzzi of his hunting lodge in the northern Wisconsin woods. Once they’d pulled the cover back off the steaming jacuzzi, the finance felon had leaped to his feet from the roiling water, hands in the air, wearing only a Green Bay Packers ball cap. “Don’t shoot, I’ll pay it all back,” he had said loudly. Karen could hardly retain her grip on her revolver as she took in this ludicrous scene.