Pegasus Descending: A Dave Robicheaux Novel Read Online Free Page B

Could I see it?”
    She smiled. “Sure,” she said, and took her wallet from her purse. “Actually I have two of them. Are you looking for counterfeit money or something?”
    “We let the Feds worry about stuff like that,” I said, taking the bills from her hand. “Where’d you get these?”
    “At a casino in Biloxi,” she replied.
    “You mind if I write down the serial numbers?” I said. “While we’re at this, can you give me some identification?”
    She handed me a Florida driver’s license. “I’m living in Lafayette now. I’m not in trouble, am I?” she said. Her face was tilted up into mine, her eyes radiantly blue, sincere, not blinking.
    “Can you show me something with your Lafayette address on it? I’d also like a phone number in case we have to reach you.”
    “I don’t know what’s going on,” she said.
    “Sometimes a low-yield explosive device containing marker dye is placed among bundles of currency that are stolen from banks or armored cars. When the device goes off, the currency is stained so the robbers can’t use it.”
    “So maybe my hundreds are stolen?” she said, handing me a receipt for a twenty-three-hundred deposit on an apartment in Lafayette.
    “Probably not. Dye ends up on money all the time. Your name is Trish Klein?”
    “Yes, I just moved here from Miami.”
    “Ever hear of a guy named Dallas Klein?”
    Her eyes held on mine, her thoughts, whatever they were, impossible to read. “Why do you ask?” she said.
    “I knew a guy by that name who flew a chopper in Vietnam. He was from Miami.”
    “That was my father,” she said.
    I finished copying her address and phone number off her deposit receipt and handed it back to her. “It’s nice to meet you, Ms. Klein. Your dad was a stand-up guy,” I said.
    “You knew him in Vietnam?”
    “I knew him,” I said. I glanced past her shoulder at the video screen. “You’ve got four kings. Welcome to Louisiana.”
     
    O N THE WAY BACK to the office, I asked myself why I hadn’t told her I had been friends with her father in Miami. But maybe the memory was just too unpleasant to revisit, I thought. Maybe she had never learned that her father had been enticed into aiding and abetting the robbery of the armored car, if indeed that’s what happened. Why let the past injure the innocent? I told myself.
    No, that was not it. She had paused before she acknowledged her father. As any investigative law officer will tell you, when witnesses or suspects or even ordinary citizens hesitate before answering a question, it’s because they are deciding whether they should either conceal information or outright lie about it.
    It was almost 5 p.m. when I got back to the department. Wally, our dispatcher, told me there had been a homicide by gunshot wound on the bayou, amid a cluster of houses upstream from the sugar mill. I gave the serial numbers on the bills to a detective in our robbery unit and asked him to run them through our Internet connection to the U.S. Treasury Department. Then I tried to forget the image of Dallas Klein kneeling on a sidewalk, his fingers laced behind his head.
    The sheriff of Iberia Parish was Helen Soileau. She had begun her career in law enforcement as a meter maid with NOPD, then had patrolled the Desire district and Gird Town and worked Narcotics in the French Quarter. She wore jeans or slacks, carried herself like a male athlete, and possessed a strange kind of androgynous beauty. Her face could be sensuous and warm, almost seductive, but it could change while you were talking to her, as though not only two genders but two different people lived inside her. People who saw her in one photograph often did not recognize her in another.
    I not only admired Helen, I loved her. She was honest and loyal and never afraid. Anyone who showed disrespect regarding her sexuality did so only once.
    A couple of years back, a New Iberia lowlife by the name of Jimmy Dean Styles, who ran a dump called the Boom Boom