Free The Bone Tree by Greg Iles

recklessness destroy him on the verge of success.
    At nearly fifty-four, he had never been closer to achieving his goals. Using unerring instincts and iron self-control, he had worked his way up through the ranks of the most powerful law enforcement organization in his home state. Now he stood within a heartbeat of commanding it. Once he cemented his control of the LSP, he would be as bulletproof as a criminal could be in America. Unlike Griffith Mackiever, who had vainly battled the forces of human nature throughout his tenure, Forrest had leveraged his pragmatic worldview into something unique. By combining his cousin Billy’s statewide meth operation with the manpower surviving from his father’s Double Eagle days, and then enlisting an army of avaricious politicians and hungry police officers for protection, Forrest had built a criminal network of unrivaled reach and power in the South.
    His philosophy was based on principles understood by every cop in the world: no matter what the law did to discourage them, people were going to use drugs, gamble, and fuck whores (both male and female). Any sane government would have legalized all three practices decades ago and co-opted the criminals. But thankfully, the remnants of America’s religious ethics prevented that from happening, which left the field wide open for a man of vision. Long ago, Forrest had realized that he was that man.
    The only problem was that Hurricane Katrina had shown him just how picayune his vision had been. The ravaged city left behind by the receding floodwaters was a vacuum that attracted the true predators of twenty-first-century America—the real estate developers and bankers. Multimillionaires like Brody Royal had been waiting for a catastrophe like Katrina for decades. For the storm and the flood had accomplished what no human activity could: it had flushed the poor blacks out of the city, like a biblical purge. Royal and his friends intended that those blacks should never return. In place of the dilapidated housing projects and single-story rental houses that had blighted the city, they saw upscale housing and corporate offices with mouthwatering proximity to downtown and the French Quarter. The men who planned this remaking of the Crescent City reckoned their profits in tens of millions, not the paltry numbers to which Forrest was accustomed. And thanks to Brody Royal, they had settled on Forrest as one of the lieutenants who could help bring their vision to fruition.
    Moving in this world was surreal to him. This morning he’d been at a brunch with politicians, insurance executives, and hedge-fund managers, and he’d known without asking that not one of them had set foot in Vietnam, unless it was as a tourist with a designer backpack and a Black Card. Yet they were predators, just as he was. Instead of crystal methamphetamine and whores, they dealt in political influence, rigged construction contracts, secret real estate deals, and inside stock trades. And right now—thanks to an accident of weather—they needed him. It was these men who had quietly informed the governor that they would like to see a change in leadership at state police HQ. But tacit support from the capitol was not enough. First, Forrest had to move Colonel Mackiever out of the seat at the top of the pyramid.
    It wasn’t like the old man hadn’t asked for it. Mackiever had beentrying to nail Forrest for months now, and if the superintendent made common cause with the FBI, they just might be able to find enough evidence to tie Forrest to the Double Eagles’ meth operation and bring him down. Everything that had happened in Concordia Parish over the past three days would make that job a hell of a lot easier. Agent John Kaiser had already used extraordinary measures to bring up 1960s-vintage bones from a sinkhole beside the Mississippi River, and he’d used the Patriot Act to take possession of the corpse of Glenn Morehouse, the Double Eagle whom Sonny and Snake had