No Limits Read Free Page B

caught by the sadness twisting his son’s face.
    He shouldn’t have been. He shouldn’t even have noticed. Not emotion or sentiment or anything soft. And yet…“Go home, Terrill. Shower. Sleep. Then come by my office before you head for Abbevil e in the morning.”
    “What the hell for?”
    “I’ve got a man in Houston’s done work for me in the past. We’ll get him over here looking for Lisa,” Bear said, knowing he was going to end this night in bed with a roll of antacids.
    Terrill’s head came up. “You didn’t want anything to do with a P.I. yesterday.”
    The boy’s petulance was plucking at Bear’s last nerve, and he deserved it for making the suggestion—a show of support at odds with what he was feeling. “Yesterday I was waiting for the girl to get back from whatever shopping trip she forgot to tel l you she was taking.”
    “You’re kidding, right?” Terrill’s question was rhetorical and dripped with sarcasm. “If anything, she would’ve gone back to the library. And she would have called.”
    “Maybe so.” Bear had never imagined his daughter-in-law’s genealogy research would turn into a time bomb. The ticking had become a relentless pain in his head. “But bringing in a P.I. before now would’ve been jumping the gun. You’re law enforcement. You know how this works. Lisa being family doesn’t change procedure.”
    “It damn well should,” Terrill said, back to rubbing at his eyes. “Waiting lets the trail grow cold.”
    “My man specializes in cold trails. He’ll sniff out any clues we’ve missed.”
    “We haven’t missed a thing. There’s nothing. She was here. And then she wasn’t.”
    “Meaning, if she left of her own accord, someone somewhere has seen her or her car.”
    How many times were they going to have to cover this ground?
    “And if she didn’t? Leave of her own accord?”
    “Then someone somewhere would stil l have seen her or her car. All we have to do is find that someone.”
    “Needle in a haystack.”
    Bear wasn’t about to disagree. But then, Vermilion Parish and Bayou Allain in particular were neither one population rich. “It’s time to start thinking beyond what we know to what we don’t, Terril .”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    It had to be the beers talking. His son was a deputy sheriff. He was not a deputy buffoon. “Do you know anyone who might want to get to Lisa? Anyone from her past?
    Anyone she might have talked to while doing her research?”
    “No one,” he said, shaking his head. “Jesus Christ, Bear. We’ve already been through this.”
    “We haven’t been through enough,” Bear told his son. “If we had, we wouldn’t be looking for only the second person known to disappear from Bayou Allain.”

Four
    K ingdom Trahan sat bellied up to the bar, two fingers hooked around the neck of his beer bottle, his eyes shifting from the mirror on the wall to Red, the owner and barkeep who was busy pointing out to the eighteen-year-old trying to pass himself off as twentyone how easy it was to spot a fake I.D. King remembered eighteen all too wel l . It wasn’t a year he looked back on fondly, and the several that followed hadn’t been any better, spent as they were in Angola, where he’d been confined in Louisiana’s state pen.
    At the end of his time served and along with his freedom, he’d come away with skil l s that went beyond sorting laundry and stamping out license plates. One was a heightened sixth sense. Another amounted to a pair of eyes in the back of his head. And both were working overtime tonight.
    He didn’t know what it was in the air, but there was a buzz prickling at his nape that had nothing to do with his beer. He could see Terrill 1 and Terril 2 in the older Landry’s usual booth. Terrill 2 had just come off duty, the parish’s finest, protecting and serving as long as doing so didn’t get in Terrill 1’s way.
    It wasn’t so much a case of like father like son, the off-spring turning out to