Harry did dumb. “Huh? What you gonna do with –”

“Beat it.” I shot a thumb towards the door. “Go grab a coffee an’ I’ll call you when I need you.”

Harry mumbled, slouched his shoulders, and sullenly shuffled away. Wentworth had mentioned that Douthitt wasn’t bright. A guy in his mid thirties making minimum wage pushing food carts? I figured the human resources director was right.

When Harry left, I went to the door and looked right and left as if making sure it was just Mike and me, two amigos, members of the same tribe. I closed the door and grinned ear to ear.

“I didn’t see you at Arnold’s rally last night, Mike.”

Douthitt’s mouth fell open.

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ. I was there. You was there, too?”

“Arnold is God,” I said. “I never miss a chance to see him. It was fuckin’ incredible, right? Arnold roaring in behind that Harley escort, speaking from high up on that van, the fire burning below. An inspiration to white people everywhere. And wasn’t that band the hottest?” I did few headbanger bows while singing “Fuck the spics.”

Douthitt grinned. “Goddamn…you really were there.”

Douthitt had been there too, pretty much nixing him for the grab. But he’d said something about “not this time”. Had he meant the abduction? The advance work? I checked the door again, leaned close to Douthitt.

“Lotsa guys on the force are sympathizers, Mike. I’m the one in charge of going to the meetings, bringing back the news. My pipeline to Arnold used to be Donnie Kirkson, but now I’m tied direct to Boots.”

His eyes widened as much as his gaping, gold-filled mouth.

“Holy shit!” he bayed. “Boots Baker?”

I winced. “Shhhhh!”

“Sorry.”

I sat beside him like a counselor, put my hand on his shoulder. “What went down last night, Mike?”

“Nothing, brother. I was as surprised as everyone else when I got to work today and heard the kid had been grabbed.”

“But the first attempt to snatch the kid…you were in on that, right? The inside man?”

“I got a phone call asking where the kid was. That was all.”

“You don’t know who made the grab last night? You being straight with me?”

He put one hand out, palm down, the other beside his head, like he was swearing on a bible in court. “I swear I got no idea who did the snatch. Not this time. Musta been someone else tipping them off.”

I patted his shoulder like he’d been a good dog. “You got your directions, right, Mike? For if you got caught?”

He tapped his wallet. “I got a lawyer’s number.”

“Call him, pronto. You’re gonna be fine. You gave some directions into a phone, talking casually, right? For all you knew, it was a parent or guardian, right? Getting directions to see the kid?”

Douthitt grinned, thinking I was feeding him lines. He shot some idiot damn Nazi-aryan salute.

I said, “You’re cool, brother, a non-participatory involuntary participantosa. It’s legal shit that means you were involved, but you had no malice aforethought.”

I walked to the door, opened it, peered out. Harry looked at me from a dozen feet away, making sure no one disturbed the conversation in the break room. I turned back inside.

“Tell me something, Mike. Why didn’t you make the grab the first time?”

“They wanted me to, but I wasn’t taking no chance of going to the pen for kidnapping. They said, ‘If you can’t get the kid out, kill it.’ I said, ‘Now I’ve got a murder charge. No way.’ A few days went past, they called and said they’d prepared some guy to do the grab – Bailes. All I had to do –”

“Back up. ‘Prepared’? Your word or theirs?”

“That’s what they said: prepared, like food.”

Bailes being prepped with the lie that he had terminal cancer? Bailes had been prepared, all right; cooked like a goose.

Douthitt continued: “Bailes called, said, ‘Where’s the kid?’ I told him how to slip up the back stairs to the fourth floor, the PICU. The kid was third in a line of five.”

“No calls after Bailes failed?”

“Nothing. I swear.”

I gave Douthitt a long side-eyed glance, like I was gauging his worth for the truth.

“The caller let you in on why the kid had to go, Mike? They told you the story, right? It’s scary.”

A pure fishing expedition. I wondered if Douthitt’s handler had given him a reason for Noelle’s abduction, or if he was an ideological soldier, an automaton.

“Oh wow, man, yeah. I heard the kid was something a doctor made in a laboratory, like a Frankenstein nigger or something. It was a threat to the movement and had to be stomped out.”

Frankenstein. The drooling wreck Spider had used that word. And similar ones, ending with the exhortation to destroy Noelle.

“You were checking the kid that day you rammed the cart into me?”

He nodded. “When I saw two cops, I banged my cart into you for a little fun.” He held out his hand. “No hard feelings?”

I took it, making a mental note to wash my hand in disinfectant first chance I had. “None, brother. You gave directions and that was it. Like I said, Inparticipatory involitudinal nonparticipitude. Or, as we say in the biz, ‘Scott-free’.”

I winked, put a solemn mask over my face, opened the door. Harry came in, cuffs already in hand.

He said, “So, Mikey, you ready to take the walk?”

Douthitt smacked his lips on his palm and blew a smooch at Harry. “I’m a nonparticipational particulator,” he grinned. “So you can kiss my white ass, nigger.”

Three seconds later Douthitt was kissing the wall as Harry applied the cuffs. I wandered off to find some disinfecting hand soap.

Chapter 40

We booked Douthitt, gave him his phone call. I convinced Harry to wait and see who showed as counsel, since Douthitt’s lawyer was special-ordered. Most of these guys used bargain-basement attorneys who had grubby offices squeezed between the bail bondsmen by the courthouse.

Instead, the guy who showed up was a slender, bespectacled guy in his thirties with a tailored pinstripe suit and a creamy leather briefcase that probably cost more than thirty of the canvas satchels I used to tote around papers. Lawyer-boy was using a gold pen to scribe his name into the visitor’s log.

“I know that guy from somewhere,” I said.

“So do I,” Harry said. “Why?”

The image formed, Mr Briefcase standing silently by as a bald bulldog barked at me through a cloud of musk.

I said, “I’m pretty sure he was with Scaler’s lawyer, Carleton, the day we first interviewed Mrs Scaler.”

“Hey,” I called across the room to the guy. “What group of shysters you practice with?”

The guy looked up, pursed his lips. Ignored me. I nodded to Harry and we walked over, stood at his side. We were both taller.

“Carleton & Associates, right?” I bayed, slapping a heavy hand over the poor guy’s skinny shoulder. “Your firm handles all the Scaler enterprises? Why’s a white-shoe hotshot like your fine self even looking at a piece of shit like Michael Douthitt?”

The lawyer flinched at my touch. He looked like he wanted to ditch the fancy briefcase and pen and sprint to the street for safety. I wondered if he’d ever been inside a jail before.

“I’m trying to make partner,” the lawyer said, eyes pleading to be left alone. “I just do what I’m told.”

We headed back to the detectives’ room. Harry was agitated but trying to hold it together. We needed full investigative mode, and that meant emotionless. Emotion crippled logic, and only logic could blaze a path to the heart of this maze. Still, Harry was having a hard time keeping his heart from eclipsing his brain.

“Carson? What if she’s…”

He couldn’t finish. The unspoken was that Noelle might well be at the bottom of Mobile Bay, or in a hole at the edge of a festering swamp.