Crescent City Murder

by Alec Peche

  Not if I can help it, she thought and she reached for her cell phone.

  “Hello,” a single word with a Spanish inflection. No identification of who was on the other end of the phone.

  “This is Stephanie,” she said and then thought, how inane, he knew who was on the other end of the phone.

  “Yes?”

  “We have a problem.”

  “We will handle it.”

  “You've done a poor job of handling it so far. How many attempts have you made on this doctor and each is a failure?”

  “You just worry about growing your crops for us, and we'll worry about everything else. That is our arrangement for the past twenty years, no?”

  “I've done a superb job growing and expanding my production for you and now I'm left hanging in the wind, while you fail to uphold your end of the bargain. I have all the risk at the moment; my lands, my job, my reputation. You're not doing enough, nor are you quick enough to save this enterprise.”

  “Don't be hysterical Ms. Harris. Have we not kept your plantation safe for two decades? We have people in all the right places to make sure this inquiry goes no further.”

  “Know that if I go down, I'll take Garcia Enterprises with me.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “No, simply a consequence if you don't fix this problem in the next forty-eight hours or so.”

  Stephanie heard dead space from her phone and realized he'd hung up on her. Apparently, he didn't like her conversation. She'd been pacing the entire time during the call, and now she plopped down in her chair, closed her eyes and thought about what she could do to prevent the incoming tsunami. Who would get her information as to whether the authorities were close? Perhaps she should grab her passport and head for Andorra, a country with no extradition arrangement with the United States. She'd searched for a country to escape to a couple of years ago thinking the day might come when she would need to flee the United States. She even opened a bank account in the country. Andorra spoke a mixture of Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Catalan, and since she spoke Spanish and French, she thought she would fit in.

  As she sat in her office chair she wondered if she should be packing now and heading to the border, or was she overreacting? Garcia Enterprises had killed the agricultural inspector and made numerous attempts on Jill Quint's life. There was no way to connect her to those egregious actions, that was all Garcia Enterprises. But if someone exposed her crops, she would face a media circus unlike anything she'd ever experienced before. She had been elected to the state government and had fought hard to keep marijuana illegal in Louisiana. When the public found out about her acres of pot, she'd probably go to jail for something.... at the very least she was farming an illegal crop and would probably get charged with political corruption for her stewardship of anti-marijuana laws.

  What should she do? In the past, she had faith in Garcia Enterprises, but not this time. She researched the woman on her trail. She was smart and tenacious and observant. She'd made waves already with the New Orleans Police Department and the FBI. Stephanie had contacts in both agencies and those contacts were uneasy with what they were hearing about her. They were so uneasy that they had stopped taking her calls. Yes it was time to go. She had money planted in banks around the world, but Black Oak Plantation was Stephanie's love and her heritage and that's what saddened her the most. When she got to her final destination in Andorra, she would monitor the news back home in Louisiana. She hoped to return home if it all blew over and didn't result in her indictment. She'd kept a suitcase filled with family mementos to take with her if she had to flee. Now, she spent the remainder of the day putting information on to flash drives and then destroyed the electronics. Stephanie kept a small boat at her dock on the river. It was seaworthy, as long as the weather was okay, and so she could spend several days making her escape to Mexico from which she would begin the journey to Andorra. She had a passport with Mexican citizenship that Garcia Enterprises had obtained for her five years ago when she'd had a better relationship with her contact. She paused to check the weather forecast and it looked fairly benign for the next week. Hopefully there wouldn't be high winds or waves as she was a poor sea traveler. She debated briefly about telling her contact with Garcia Enterprises about her decision to run, but she saw no upside to that. After dark, she'd head out on her boat down the Mississippi and be in the Gulf of Mexico by the next morning. Once there Stephanie had a list of small marinas to stop at for sleep and gas before she arrived in Tampico. She'd give her boat keys to someone in the town and wish them happy sailing before getting a ride to the airport for a flight to Cancun and from Cancun to Barcelona, Spain and then buy a car for the three hour drive to Andorra. Hopefully the United States justice system would fail to find her. She'd earned millions of dollars over the twenty year relationship with Garcia Enterprises and wouldn't have to work once she arrived in her new home, she was just incredibly sad to walk away from twenty generations of the Harris family caring for the plantation. It was sort of a self-service witness protection scenario, where one life ends and another begins.

  Stephanie paused later that night at her dock. All preparations had been made, her boat loaded with the few possessions she planned to take with her. She made arrangements to pay all staff wages owed them. She looked sadly at the plantation, knowing it might never look as grand again as she figured the government would seize her property and destroy the marijuana crops. She realized she'd been staring at the old grand house with tears running down her cheeks, missing it even as she stood there looking at it, knowing that she could just stay and weather the storm. But she was a coward and cowards ran rather than face the consequences of their bad behavior. With a swipe of her eyes and blowing her nose, Stephanie turned her back and climbed aboard the boat to freedom. She hoped her personal pity party would keep her alert until the sun rose the next day just about the time she reached the gulf and her first stopping point where she'd get gas, and a few hours of sleep. Stephanie soaked in the sights and sounds of Louisiana for the last time; humidity, bugs, odors of sewage, oil, or chemicals on the river. She passed the bright lights of New Orleans and entered an area of darkness, lit only by other vessels on the river which was busy with commercial traffic. She passed large cruise ships and barges, but very few boats of her relatively small size. She turned her back on the city and sought to call up images of her new home in Andorra feeling alone on the river and in her life.

  Chapter 31

  Ricardo Rodriguez had worked for Garcia Enterprises for nearly twenty-five years dealing with many contacts in the United States. He always had a sense of when a relationship was going south and he was feeling it now with Stephanie Harris. Their last phone call was the first time she'd ever been anything but the epitome of southern hospitality and that was a sure sign that things were going south in his experience. So he'd come back to her house late at night with the intent of doing it damage. It was his way of scaring his contacts into compliance. She loved that house and causing it damage was the best way to get her attention. He was responsible for all drug shipments to and from the lower Mississippi River and he had a large fentanyl and meth shipment boat that would be using her dock in two days. He needed her back under control and working for him. He started out wanting her land to grow pot. Now the margin on Chinese fentanyl was much better than that on marijuana and increasingly as more states legalized it, pot wasn’t profitable. With California soon legally growing its own, his colleague that covered the western U.S. was seeing his profits dramatically drop. He needed the good senator for her dock. He moved eighty percent of his product through her dock and he thought it unlikely that she understood that. When they spoke it was almost always about the cultivation of her pot crops, not questions about why he made so many deliveries to her dock. He’d told her he was delivering bags of fertilizer to his men that made her pot crops grow faster and have higher content of the active ingredient in them. Actually, they were large plastic bags of illicit drugs that his
men moved off her property and on to delivery trucks.

  He stared up at the plantation from the river and wondered if she was there that night. He knew the layout and planned to start a fire in an area he knew to be at the other end of the house from where the bedrooms were and as he planned to call the fire department as soon as he saw that the house had caught fire, she was sure to not burn up in it.

  Ten minutes later he paused with satisfaction looking back at the flames running up a corner of the building. He pulled out a burner phone and made the call to 9-1-1 reporting the fire without giving his name. As soon as he heard sirens he tossed the phone into the river and departed on his own boat. As he did, he noted that her private boat wasn’t in its usual slot which was unusual for this time of night. Maybe she had it in a dry dock for some work. That was pretty routine for boat owners.

  As he drifted out into the Mississippi, he headed upstream on the river side opposite the Black Oak Plantation where he had a good view of the emergency activity. He thought they had the fire out in under five minutes according to his view through a pair of binoculars. Good, he thought, just what he wanted. Damage to her precious plantation, but not significant. He had room to make it much worse if she didn’t cooperate quickly. Tomorrow, he'd send her a message in case she hadn’t figured out that the fire was his work.

  He thought back to her plea that he do something about Dr. Jill Quint. He hadn’t heard from his man that he’d sent to California in thirty-six hours. Either he suffered an accident and died or he was in the custody of police. He needed to find out which scenario it was. If he was in police custody, he would let sleeping dogs lie rather than compounding it by sending someone else to do the job. Jill Quint had no knowledge of Garcia Enterprises he was sure; Stephanie's concern was she would be found out for growing marijuana. He called his colleague in the west to have him get the information on what happened. His colleagues would have contacts that could find out a lot quicker than him.

  Chapter 32

  Jill woke up the next morning at Nathan's after an uneventful night. No alarms had gone off at his house or hers, nor had she got a call from Jack saying there were problems in Green Bay. Maybe the people after her had only one hitman or it was taking time to fly another person out to California in which case she could expect trouble by lunchtime. She would check in with the sheriff to see what else they had learned during the interview and maybe she could influence the FBI to provide Jo with some protection.

  Sitting at the kitchen with a cup of coffee, Jill opened her laptop looking for messages from Marie and Angela. It had sounded yesterday like they had found a process to collect evidence and just needed computer time to gather the information for Jill. Looking at her inbox she saw their messages. Bingo, she thought after reading their emails this should be enough information for the authorities to detain and question the senator.

  Jill reached for her cell phone to call agent Ortiz. She hoped she was still in the area.

  "Yes Jill?"

  Jill liked that the agent got to the point quickly not wasting her breath on social niceties.

  "Two of my team members did some wonderful work overnight that I'd like to share with you. Are you still in the area?"

  "I was on my way back to San Francisco, but I'm only about half an hour into the journey. I'll turn around and head to your house. Give me your address again so I can put it in my GPS."

  Jill did so and looked forward to the agent's arrival in thirty minutes or so. That gave her time to write Nathan a note, gather up her belongings and Trixie, and head home before the agent got there.

  She left her front gate open and entered the house to look at the security system making sure all of its components were live and working. She'd just finished the check, when she noted the agent's nondescript sedan enter her gate. She went over to her front porch, to welcome her inside.

  "So what do you have?" Special Agent Ortiz asked.

  "I have a list of fifteen Gulf Coast Louisiana plots of land that are growing marijuana. Many of those plots are designated as owned by the state because they're underwater which clearly they are not if they're growing marijuana. I also have a list of the corporations that own those plots of land. I'll leave your legal and accounting experts to follow the trail."

  Jill opened the spreadsheets attached to the emails that Marie and Angela had sent for the agent.

  "You remember Angela, the photographer, right?" Jill said beginning her explanation.

  "I do," replied Special Agent Ortiz.

  "I asked Angela if she could find through her photographic resources, pictures of the crops in Louisiana that are adjacent to the coast. I picked the coast because I thought that was where land that was deemed 'underwater' by the state was most likely located. There may be many additional crops grown inland."

  "Got it."

  "Once she found a source of images, then we use my software to match up the images to one of seven pictures relating to the age of the marijuana plant. Some plants are two inches tall and others are several feet and I needed to account for the different sizes and changes in the leaves as the plant grew."

  The Special Agent nodded her head understanding the explanation.

  "Once Angela identified the crops that appeared to be marijuana, she located the geocoordinates so they could be used to identify the owner. My other teammate, Marie, went to a location of the Internet that has her feeling slimy this morning. She was able to gain ownership records of those plots of land. So that's this spreadsheet," Jill said pointing to the screen.

  Special agent Ortiz looked at the screen and nodded.

  "These three properties at the bottom of her list are of special note. In doing research for this case, I read a lot of stuff about the erosion of the coast in Louisiana. With global warming, and the deterioration of the marshes, Louisiana as a state, is shrinking by sixteen square miles a year. Whole cities are being evacuated. One of the stories I read was about a Native American tribe called the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw that live in a city called Isle de Jean Charles. They've lived there since the early 1800s, but have lost so much land due to hurricane damage and rising sea waters, that the government is assisting them with moving elsewhere in Louisiana.

  “When a plot of land slips underwater, the ownership of that land goes to the state and the original landowner no longer pays taxes or has the deed. That's not to say that the state is monitoring those lands individually. So the three properties on this list either were declared underwater incorrectly, or someone did something to reclaim the land and use it to grow pot. I read that you can reclaim land by taking sediment from the Mississippi River and dumping on land that you wish to reclaim.”

  “Wow, I suppose that could be San Francisco someday if our oceans keep rising. So besides growing pot, the other problem is that they're stealing the land from the state in order to do so."

  "Yes, and this final attachment is what really irks me. This is Senator Harris's voting record in regards to pot - recreational, medical, sentencing in the justice system - she's done everything she could to prevent pot from entering Louisiana through legitimate sources like medical dispensaries, and they have one of the stiffest penalties if you're caught with an ounce of pot on you. So I have a problem with the hypocrisy of her actions farming the land versus her actions as a senator. My friend Jo, the financial whiz, looked at her from a financial performance perspective. Her comment was that the senator's actions serve to raise the cost of pot for illicit users and served to maximize her profits for growing weed."

  The Special Agent leaned back in the chair and contemplated everything that she just looked at on the computer.

  Jill added, "What I don't know and can't know is who she has paid off to look the other way on her pot fields. I can't believe I'm the first one to discover them. Certainly local law enforcement should've seen them. Of course one of the things she does to hide these crops, she grows a different plant around the outside of a pot acre like corn or sugarcane. She'll plant sev
eral rows of corn that serve to hide the marijuana."

  "Jill, would you email me your data? I'm going to need to talk it over with the Special Agent for New Orleans."

  "Not to be rude, but be careful as you don't know who is on the side of justice and who is on the side of the senator. That state has a long history of politicians being charged and convicted of criminal behavior."

  Special Agent Ortiz nodded and left Jill's house when she was assured that the data was in her inbox. On her way back to San Francisco, she'd call a few people in the offices of the FBI. Jill watched the special agent's car pass through her gate. She went back to her living room and asked herself the question - 'what now'? She readily admitted she knew nothing about the justice system, but she thought that the data that Angela and Marie had gathered was enough evidence to have something to charge the senator for.

  She went back to look at her inbox to see if anything was there from the Sheriff. He said he would inform her of the highlights of the interview. She didn't know if whoever had hired Sean Sharp was done chasing Jill, or if it was a case of the next man up.

  Searching the inbox, she saw the message from the Sheriff and opened it. Skimming the contents, Jill found no answers to the question of whether another hired gun would be after her. There was nothing more she could do about it, so she tried to focus on something else. After what felt like a month of ignoring her wine business, she decided to check on how the sales were doing with her latest vintage. It was her third year of bottling grapes from her land and the first two years had sold out in the local wine stores within two months of their arrival. She'd increased her production each year and so expected this year to be slower. Maybe it would take six months for her product to sell out, or maybe it wouldn't sell out at all if this vintage wasn't as good as the previous two.