R. J. Ellory

by A Quiet Vendetta

  Verlaine shook his head. ‘You must give me something. If there is something you know you must tell me—’

  Feraud once again raised his hand. ‘I am not obligated to tell you anything,’ he said, his voice edged with irritation. ‘You will leave now, go back to the city and attend to your business. Do not come here again, and do not ask anything of me regarding this matter. This is not something I am part of, nor is it something I wish to become involved in.’

  Feraud turned and nodded at the man to his right. The man stepped forward, and without uttering a word made it clear that Verlaine should leave. Confused and disoriented, he was shown to the door, and once out on the veranda he started walking back the way he’d come, again feeling that eyes were burning right through him, his heart thudding in his chest, sweat glistening his forehead – a sensation that he had somehow walked into something that he might seriously regret.

  He reached his car and sat for a while until his heart slowed down. He started the engine, turned around, drove back the way he’d come for a good thirty minutes before he finally slowed and stopped. He got out and leaned against the wing of his car. He tried to think in something resembling a straight line, but he could not.

  Eventually he climbed back into the car, started the engine, and drove back to the city.

  The FBI were waiting for Verlaine when he reached the Precinct House. The dark gray sedan, the dark suits, dark ties, white shirts, clean shoes. There were two of them, neither of whom looked like they’d smiled since their teens. They knew his name before he reached them, and though they shook his hand and introduced themselves respectively as Agents Luckman and Gabillard there was no humor in their tone, nothing warm or amicable. Whatever this was it was business, straight and direct, and when they expressed their wish to speak with Verlaine ‘in confidence’ he understood that somehow he’d managed to step on the toes of something that he was regretting more and more as each minute passed.

  Inside his office it was cramped. Verlaine asked if they wanted coffee; Luckman and Gabillard declined.

  ‘So how can I help you?’ he asked them, looking from one to the other as if there really was no discernible difference in their faces.

  ‘A body was discovered,’ Agent Gabillard started. His face was smooth and untroubled. He looked singularly at ease despite the awkwardness of the situation. ‘In the trunk of a car last Saturday evening a body was discovered. An attempt was made through your Prints Division to identify the victim, and that is the reason we are here.’

  ‘The security tag,’ Verlaine stated.

  ‘The security tag,’ Luckman repeated. He turned and looked at Gabillard, who nodded in concurrence.

  ‘The identity of the victim cannot be divulged,’ Luckman went on, ‘save to say that he was in the employ of a significant political figure, and was here in New Orleans on official business.’

  ‘Official business?’ Verlaine asked.

  Gabillard nodded. ‘He was here in the capacity of security for someone.’

  ‘The significant political figure?’

  Luckman shook his head. ‘The daughter.’

  Verlaine’s eyes widened. ‘So this guy was babysitting some politician’s daughter down here?’

  Gabillard cracked his face with a smile that seemed to demand a considerable effort. ‘This is as much as we can tell you,’ he said. ‘And the only reason we are telling you is that you have a very credible and distinguished record here in New Orleans, and we trust you not to communicate anything regarding this matter beyond the confines of this office. The man you discovered in the trunk of the car was attending to a matter of personal security for the daughter of a significant political figure, and with his death the case becomes a matter of federal jurisdiction, and as such your attention to the killing and any subsequent investigation is no longer required.’

  ‘Federal?’ Verlaine asked. ‘She must have been kidnapped then, right? You guys wouldn’t get involved if it was simply a murder case.’

  ‘We can say nothing further,’ Luckman said. ‘All we ask of you at this time is to turn over any paperwork, case files, notes and reports that have been made thus far, and we will speak to your captain when he returns and clarify the position we are now in regarding this investigation.’

  Verlaine frowned. ‘So we just drop it? We drop the whole thing, just like that?

  ‘Just like that,’ Gabillard said.

  Verlaine shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t know whether to feel frustrated or relieved. ‘Well, okay. I don’t see there’s a great deal more we have to talk about then. Medical Examiner and County Coroner will have their reports. You can collect those from the respective offices, and as far as I am concerned I haven’t yet filed a report. Hadn’t even gotten the thing off the ground.’

  Gabillard and Luckman nodded in unison. ‘We appreciate your co-operation,’ Gabillard said, and rose from his chair.

  They shook hands again, and Verlaine directed them to the front exit of the building. He stood on the steps ahead of the Precinct House, watching the generic gray sedan pull away and disappear down the street, and then he turned and walked back to his office.

  He wondered why he’d said nothing of the message he’d received, of his visit with Feraud. Perhaps nothing more than the desire to hold onto something, to keep something of this as his own.

  John Verlaine stood for a time, thinking nothing at all, and then he remembered the words Feraud had said, and the gravity with which they had been pronounced: Turn and walk away from this quickly and quietly . . . This is not something you should go looking for, you understand?

  Verlaine understood little of anything at all. This morning he’d woken with a murder case, and now he had nothing. He did not resent the FBI’s involvement; he’d been around long enough to know that every once in a while a case could be taken right out of his hands. This was New Orleans, heart of Louisiana, and one thing he knew for sure, as sure as anything in his life: there would never be a shortage of work.

  THREE

  Robert Luckman and Frank Gabillard had been partners for seven years. Working out of the New Orleans Federal Bureau of Investigation Field Office on Arsenault Street, they believed that between them they had seen it all. Under the aegis of the United States Justice Department they investigated federal offences – espionage, sabotage, kidnapping, bank robbery, drug trafficking, terrorism, civil rights violations and fraud against the government. They also received alerts when security-tagged print identification requests were made by any law enforcement agency in Louisiana. Patched through FBI Co-ordination Headquarters in Baton Rouge, the ID request was flagged and a report was immediately logged with the local Field Office. Security tags were registered against any official given security clearance within the law enforcement or intelligence community: Police, National Guard, all branches of the military, FBI, CIA, National Security Agency, Department of Justice, any arm of the Attorney General’s Office, Office of Naval Intelligence, NASA et al. The report was then pursued by the assigned FBI field operatives, and if the case in some way touched their territory they held the right to assume complete control of all files, records, documents, and any subsequent investigation that might be required. They also possessed the authority to clear the ID request and allow the local police to deal with the matter.

  In this instance this was not the case.

  On the afternoon of Wednesday 20 August, a nineteen-year-old girl called Catherine Ducane left her home in Shreveport, Louisiana. She was not alone. A fifty-one-year-old man called Gerard McCahill had accompanied her, driving the car, attending to her requirements, ensuring that the visit to her mother in New Orleans went without a hitch. Her father, Charles Ducane, had stood on the steps of his vast mansion and waved her goodbye, and once the car had disappeared from view he had returned inside to attend to his business. He did not expect to see his daughter again for a week. He was perhaps a little surprised not to have received a call to say she had arrived safely, but he knew his daught
er and his ex-wife sufficiently well to understand that once they were together there would be little time for anything but shopping and fashionable lunches. By the time Saturday rolled around, Charles Ducane was embroiled in a legal complication that devoured every ounce of attention he could summon, for Charles Ducane was an important man, a figurehead in the community, an opinion leader and a voice with which to be reckoned. Charles Mason Ducane was Governor of the State of Louisiana, now in the third of his four-year term, at one time a husband, forever a father, Charles Ducane was always a busy man. Catherine was his only child, and through much of the year she stayed with him in Shreveport. There was little love lost between Charles and Catherine’s mother, Eve – so much so that Ducane wasn’t surprised to learn that Eve had not even called him when Catherine failed to show. But Ducane understood family as well as any man, and also appreciated that the bitterness and resentment that existed between himself and Eve did not also exist in his daughter’s world. Her mother was her mother, and what kind of a man would he have been to deny the girl her right to continue that relationship?

  The man who’d accompanied his daughter was an ex-cop, before that an ex-Marine, and even before that an Eagle Scout of America. Gerard McCahill was as good as they came, and the times he had driven Catherine Ducane down to New Orleans on such trips numbered close to three dozen.

  This trip, however, was different.

  The prints flagged through Baton Rouge and passed to the FBI Field Office on Arsenault Street were those of McCahill, and even now that same fifty-one-year-old ex-cop, ex-Marine, ex-Eagle Scout was also serving his time as an ex-human being on the County Coroner’s metal slab. It was he who was now heartless, daubed in quinine sulphate, and wearing a paper tag on his toe upon which was inscribed the legend John Doe #3456–9.

  And Catherine Ducane, she of temperamental moods, of exquisitely expensive taste, she of awkward moments and determined stubbornness, was gone.

  Miss Ducane, nineteen years old, beautiful and intelligent and altogether spoiled, had been kidnapped.

  This was the situation that faced Robert Luckman and Frank Gabillard as they walked from the Medical Examiner’s Office with Jim Emerson’s reports, as they crossed town to find Michael Cipliano and tell him as little as they could. This was the situation they confronted when they made the necessary phone calls to have Gerard McCahill’s beaten-to-shit cadaver transported from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, where it would be inspected and examined by the FBI’s own Criminalistics and Forensics teams.

  This was Monday 25 August, and already the world was beginning to collapse.

  For these men, though New Orleans was their home, understood all too well that this was a city like no other. Dirty Creole kids in Nikes and grubby shorts, wise-mouths backflashing words that shouldn’t have come from the lips of those so young; the smell of a city cooking inside its own sweat; beyond the limits the sprawling outgrowths of Evangeline, domain of the Ferauds and their ilk; gang wars and drug busts and liquor stills, moonshiners brewing twenty-five-cents-a-bottle rotgut that would strip the paint off a car and eat holes in a pair of good shoes; smack addicts and hopheads and folks mainlining amphetamines like there was no time to look for tomorrow; the sounds and smells of all of this, and you just had to live inside it to even have an inkling of how it was. New Orleans was the Mardi Gras, it was finding serpents and crosses in the same cemetery on All Saints’ Day, the spirit of loa Damballah-wédo walking there beside you as you crossed the street; it was Easter Souvenance, the Festival of the Virgin of Miracles, the celebration of Saint James the Greater and Baron Samedi, it was inscribing the floor of sanctuaries with vévé to summon the ritual spirits. New Orleans the beautiful, the majestic, the passionate, the terrifying. And no matter the training programs, no matter criminal profiling and VICAP reports, no matter gun ranges and Quantico and sitting three exams a year, there was nothing that could take into consideration the mores and ethics of the society within which they lived. New Orleans was New Orleans, almost a country all its own.

  *

  Cipliano seemed relieved that Luckman and Gabillard were taking his John Doe away. They told him that an FBI vehicle would be arriving within the hour to collect the body.

  ‘Got a freakin’ leaper,’ he told them while chewing a toothpick. ‘Head like sidewalk pizza if you know what I mean.’

  They did not, and did not pretend that they did. People like Luckman and Gabillard dealt with serious business, not the inconsequential deaths of junkie suicides.

  They left quickly and inconspicuously, as inconspicuously as two dark-suited, white-shirted, clean-cut men could manage, and drove back to the Field Office on Arsenault to begin the unenviable task of profiling a kidnap of Governor Ducane’s daughter.

  They took their time reading the reports they had collected, and here they learned of such things as the severed vena cava through right and left ventricle at base, severed subclavian veins and arteries, jugular, carotid and pulmonary; of seventy percent minimum blood loss, of hammer-beatings, of lesions and abrasions, of freezing a man’s skin in order to scrape it away from the trunk of a stunning burgundy car with rivet scratches on the wing. They learned also of a constellation drawn across Gerard McCahill’s back, the constellation of Gemini, the twins Castor and Pollux, the third sign of the zodiac. They read these things, and once again silently marveled at the sheer madness of humanity.

  ‘Where to from here?’ Gabillard asked when they were done.

  ‘Kidnap procedure,’ Luckman said. ‘Take the fact that she’s a governor’s daughter out of the loop, that’s irrelevant right now, and we run a routine kidnap procedure.’

  ‘I don’t think that Ducane would be happy with that.’

  Luckman shook his head. ‘Don’t give a rat’s ass what Ducane thinks or doesn’t think. Truth of the matter is that there’s a standard kidnap procedure and we have to follow it.’

  Gabillard nodded. ‘You wanna call it in to Baton Rouge?’

  ‘I call it in to Baton Rouge and they’ll take the case as well as the body.’

  ‘You got a problem with that?’

  Luckman shrugged. ‘I got no problem with it. You?’

  ‘I got no problem,’ Gabillard said. He reached forward and lifted the receiver. He called Baton Rouge and spoke to Agent Leland Fraschetti. Agent Fraschetti, a veteran of twenty-six years, a man with a head as hard as a baseball bat, asked that one of them accompany the body from New Orleans and bring all available documentation with them. That, Gabillard said, he would willingly do. He figured it would pretty much kill the day stone-dead; when he got back it would be closing time.

  Luckman chose to go with him. They drove back to Cipliano’s office and waited for the vehicle from Baton Rouge.

  Two miles away John Verlaine looked from his window and tried to erase the image of McCahill’s body, the strange glowing lines across the skin, the sensation of disturbance that these recent events had instilled in him. This is no work for a human being, he thought, and once again managed to convince himself that were he not there the work would not be done.

  It seemed to run its own relay: from Verlaine to Emerson, Emerson to Cipliano, Cipliano to Luckman and Gabillard, and when the body arrived in Baton Rouge, Luckman clutching the files and thinking of the game he would not now miss that evening, Leland Fraschetti was waiting there for them, his eyes wide with anticipation, ready to take his place in this bizarre concatenation of events. Leland Fraschetti was a dark-minded man, a cynic, a natural pessimist. A loner and a failed husband, he was a man who watched Jerry Springer just to remind himself that people – all people – were fundamentally crazy. Fraschetti was also a man who went by the letter of the law and, once Gabillard and Luckman had closed the office door behind them, he pored over the reports and summarized his findings, penning extensive notations regarding the errors the local police had made in their handling of the investigation thus far, and when he was done he e-mailed his proposal to the Field Office in Shreveport where
local agents would handle the governor’s demands to be updated constantly on the progress they were making. The truth was, bluntly, that they had nothing, though Leland Fraschetti, pessimist though he was, would have been the last to admit such a thing.

  By the early evening of Monday 25 August, twenty-seven local FBI agents from New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Shreveport were assigned to the standard kidnap protocol. Governor Ducane’s phones were tapped, his house was under twenty-four-hour watch; the Mercury Turnpike Cruiser was driven on a flatbed truck to Baton Rouge and housed in a secure lock-up where Criminalistics went over it time and again with infra-red spectrophotometers, ultra-violet, iodine and silver transfers. The plates were traced to the ’69 Chrysler Valiant, now rusted and broken and lying on its roof in a wrecker’s yard in Natchez, Mississippi, and thirty-eight vehicle storage units – including Jaquier’s Lock ’N’ Leave, Ardren & Bros. Rental Carports Inc., Vehicle Warehousing Corporation (Est. 1953), Safety In Numbers (Unique Combination Vehicle Storage) – were checked to see if any of their respective owners remembered the Cruiser residing there at any time in the past. No-one remembered anything. No-one, it seemed, wanted to remember anything, and by the time Tuesday the twenty-sixth rolled around, a frustrated Leland Fraschetti stood in the doorway of his office in the Baton Rouge FBI Coordination Headquarters and felt his heart sink. He had taken three Excedrin and still a migraine pounded through his skull and threatened to vent itself through his temples. He had unit chiefs calling from Shreveport and Washington DC, he had agents on double shifts and late hours, he had a task force mobilized that was costing something in the region of twenty-three thousand dollars a day, and still he had nothing to take to the High School Show ’n’ Tell. Criminalistics and Forensics had come back with almost the same report as had been prepared by Emerson and Cipliano, and there seemed to be no links between this case and anything from the past despite rushing a profile through Quantico. The thing sucked, sucked like a whirlpool, and Leland – he of the dark moods and lonely cynicism – was right in the vortex waiting to drown.