Half a dozen times Maureen had taken the liberty, during the day, of following Solomon’s black Jaguar in her Honda from his Central Business District offices to the job sites of Heath Design and Construction’s larger current projects: the housing development on the edge of the Quarter, the new jail and new hospital in Mid-City. Even on weekends, she never saw anyone else at the house. Solomon was a man who had his work and nothing else. At least, she believed, that was what he wanted anyone who might be paying attention to think about him.
She’d been to the house once. Not long before her suspension she’d worked a security detail at a cocktail party fund-raiser hosted by the family. She’d met Solomon, shook his hand. And she’d had a run-in under the live oaks of the park with his troublesome sociopath slumlord of a son, Caleb. She hadn’t actually made it inside the place, restricted that night to the mansion grounds like a guard dog.
She watched Solomon, but the Heath she wanted most was Caleb. He had fled the country following the death of his friend and Maureen’s coworker, NOPD officer Matthew Quinn. The cop in the river whom Dice had mentioned. A schoolmate of Caleb’s, Quinn had been in Solomon’s pocket since he’d gotten his badge. Six weeks before, in an effort to protect Caleb from being outed as a member of the Watchmen by a drug dealer and murderer they’d worked with named Bobby Scales, Quinn had snatched Scales from Orleans Parish Prison and drowned him in the Mississippi.
Problem was, Quinn had gone in the river, too, sucked by the wake of a passing freighter under the same currents that swallowed Scales. Maureen had been there at the riverside, had watched them both go under the frothing water, helpless.
Nobody knew when, or if, Caleb was coming back to New Orleans. A few people knew—and Maureen was one of them, Solomon had to be another—that Caleb had played a role in Quinn’s death. And had played a larger role in an attempt on Maureen’s life. Caleb Heath was the reason she had bullet holes in her bed. Caleb had given her address, which he had gotten from Quinn, to a van full of heavily armed Watchmen. She wanted to talk to him about that. Preferably in an interrogation room, handcuffs cutting into his bleeding wrists. And with a black eye inflating one side of his face.
She watched Solomon because he was the only man with the power to call Caleb home. Not that NOPD had tried. Maureen got the impression they were relieved he was out of reach. As far as she could tell, Solomon had no interest in bringing the boy home. Judging by what she had learned about their relationship, Maureen figured Solomon was only too happy to be rid of his youngest son. And there was quite possibly another reason Caleb had been sent halfway across the globe. The two men Madison Leary had killed knew each other, did things together. Those men knew Caleb Heath and did things with him, too. Things for which Caleb put up the money. It seemed Madison Leary had a list, and Caleb Heath was probably on it. Maybe even next. And Caleb knew it. Maureen was the one who had told him so.
Information about the rest of the Heaths hadn’t been hard to find around town. They were a prominent New Orleans family, and had been so since the days of Queen Sugar. For a generous tipper, and Maureen was surely that, stories passed readily across the top of any old-line bar in Uptown. One red-faced, white-haired barkeep at the Columns Hotel proved to be positively encyclopedic. Maureen knew she heard a lot of rumor and conjecture, and that much of what she was served came spiked with the moonshine of vitriol and resentment, or smoothed out with the sycophantic admiration granted the extremely wealthy, but she was good at distilling gaseous rumors into compounds of truth.
She’d learned a Mrs. Heath existed, and that the lady was a tall, stale whisper of a name around the city and a wife to Solomon in paperwork and bank account only. She’d been in Paris since Katrina. She, apparently, did not come home when called. Good for her, Maureen thought. She didn’t care much; a lost wife was of no use to her.
An older brother named Torben was the one charged with sheltering Caleb in Dubai, where Torben oversaw the Heath company’s international offices. Maureen had no idea if Torben knew why his black sheep brother had been dumped in his lap. The older brother had a twin sister, Holiday. She lived in the Emirates as well. What she did there, Maureen had no idea. Probably not much of anything. She lived in a Southern California–style expat compound on the sandy shores of the Persian Gulf. In the Heath family, the work gene, profitable as it was, had passed from Solomon to Torben and spread no further. Maureen had tangential interest in these other Heaths. She cared about Caleb. She only had eyes for him.