Wiley frowned at the rebuke, but turned to Jordie. “Okay, you’ve got our attention. Start talking.”

“You’ve seen Josh in what you referred to as freak-out mode.”

“He comes apart at the seams. Easily.”

“Correct. If he’s cornered by U.S. marshals and state troopers, who do you think he’ll best respond to? Armed officers? Or me?”

Wiley looked over at Shaw. “She has a point. She convinced him to take the prosecutor’s deal when neither Hick, nor I, nor his own lawyer made a dent. If anybody can persuade him to give himself up now, it’s her.”

Shaw didn’t comment, but his body language came through loud and clear. He was chewing his inner cheek, driving fast, his fingers clutching the steering wheel so tightly, they’d turned white. For letting his pistol get lifted, he was probably madder at himself than he was at her.

Wiley asked her, “So where do we find your brother?”

“I don’t know that we’ll find him, but I know where to look. You know the Christmas festival and boat parade they have on Bayou Gauche?”

“I know about it. Never been. Marsha says we should take the kids one year.”

“I’m glad you brought this up,” Shaw said. “Remind me to book my reservation.”

She ignored him. “After the…accident, our family no longer celebrated Christmas at home, so we went the first year they held the boat parade. My dad’s elderly aunt lived in Bayou Gauche. We picked her up at her house and took her to the waterfront with us.

“Josh worked at spoiling every family outing. That night he was particularly sullen. Bent on ruining everyone’s time. He said he’d have rather stayed away from the crowd. Why hadn’t we just left him at the aunt’s house? He could’ve watched the parade from there.”

She paused, studying first Shaw’s and then Wiley’s expressions. Both were skeptical, but neither spoke.

She plowed on. “To me her house seemed isolated. No neighbors to speak of. On the edge of a swamp. Its distance from town was deceptive, however, because the road to it winds around town. As the crow flies, it was much closer.

“When Josh said he should have been left behind, he pointed out to me that from the banks of the bayou where we were watching the parade, you could see the light poles from Great-Aunt’s boat dock. Just barely. But every once in a while you could catch the light from them twinkling through the trees.”

“Twinkling?” Shaw’s penetrating gaze was fixed on her in the rearview mirror. She avoided his scornful remark and stayed on Wiley.

He asked, “Is the old lady still alive?”

“She died not long after that. I hadn’t thought of her or that occasion in years, not until you mentioned Bayou Gauche.”

“What became of her house?”

“I have no idea. Dad wasn’t an heir, if that’s what you’re thinking. We never went there again.”

Wiley frowned. “What I’m thinking is that it’s—”

“A crock of crap,” Shaw said.

“—very incidental,” Wiley finished.

“Ordinarily, I would agree with you,” she said, addressing Wiley’s comment, not Shaw’s. “But Josh isn’t ordinary. He fixates on things. Never forgets anything. If he remarked on her house, even incidentally, when he was a boy, it’s still in his mind. Besides, he has no other connection to that town. What else would draw him back there even long enough to send a package?”

Shaw said, “It’s so farfetched, it’s—”

“It’s something!” she snapped. “Do you have anything better?”

Wiley raised a hand, signaling for a truce, and asked her if she had an address or any portion of one for the house.

“No.”

“That true, or are you just not sharing?”

“It’s true, but I wouldn’t share if I knew. You’d inform the marshals and everyone else, and they’d get there ahead of us. I want a chance to talk with Josh first.” She raised the pistol slightly. “I demand it.”

His annoyance plain, Wiley looked across at Shaw, who seemed to have run out of sardonic commentaries. Wiley came back to her. “Do you remember how to get to the house?”

“I was a child and didn’t pay attention to directions, things like that. But once we hit town, I think I can follow my nose.”

Wiley studied her for a moment, then said sternly, “You had better not be jerking us around, Ms. Bennett.”

“I’m not.”

“She’s not.” Shaw steered the car off the road so swiftly, Jordie and Wiley were slung aside in their seats. She managed to keep hold of the pistol as the car skidded to a sudden halt on the shoulder.

Shaw turned to her. “Don’t you think I’d notice that the pistol in my boot was missing?” Then he turned to Wiley, who was looking at him agape. “I just wanted to see what she’d do with it. Since she didn’t shoot us, I think she’s told us the truth.”

Josh didn’t know how Panella had learned about the house formerly owned by his great-aunt. After she died, it had stayed uninhabited for years and had become known by locals as the “haunted house.”

When he’d inquired about it, the realtor had been glad to finally unload it. He’d bought it under a fake name and had been scrupulous not to leave a paper trail leading back to his ownership. He had thought it was a refuge known only to him.

He supposed it no longer mattered, though, how Panella had discovered it. He had.

He’d come in the early-morning hours, not at night, when Josh would have expected him. He’d been sitting at the kitchen table fiddling with the box of toothpicks as he was wont to do when contemplating a problem, like what his next move should be, when suddenly the back door was thrust open and Panella had stormed in.

Josh had nearly wet himself.

“You double-crossing motherfucker. Did you really think you’d get away with this?”

It was a rhetorical question. Panella had hauled him out of his chair with such force, his teeth snapped together, catching his tongue between them. He tasted his own blood. Panella threw him against the wall and held him there, his left hand pressing Josh’s Adam’s apple, vowing that if Josh didn’t tell him what he needed to know, he would suffer hours of medieval-caliber torture before being allowed to die.

Now Josh’s gaze moved from the man’s unblinking eyes, to the pinkie ring that glittered from his left hand, and finally to the pistol held in his right.

Josh needed to pee, wanted to cry, wanted to tear out his hair in outrage, pitch a fit to end all fits. He’d been so close…so close to getting away. Now things weren’t looking too good for his future, immediate, or long range.

“That banker must be mistaken,” he said. “A password for Jordan Bennett? For Jordie? Why would she have a password to your account?”

Panella just stared. His expression never changed.

“Maybe it’s her company name. Extravaganza. That could be it. No, that’s probably too long. And passwords often require a combination of numerals and letters, don’t they? They’re usually case sensitive, too. Upper. Lower. Maybe her birthday? Her birthday backward? Our mother’s maiden name?”