Crescent City Murder

by Alec Peche

  An hour later, she felt like she was up to date on the winery side of the business. She sent each of her teammates a case of the recent vintage. It was her way of saying thanks especially as they occasionally did work for her for which they were not compensated. She noticed another email in her box from a colleague in the Kern County coroner's office. Someone had died in their county, but there wasn't a reason to perform an autopsy other than the family wanted it, so the coroner had referred the family to Jill. It was an FYI email in case she received a call. After the complicated case of New Orleans, she would almost welcome a routine autopsy from someone who died under no suspicious circumstances. Either she would get the call today for the autopsy, or tomorrow they would transfer the deceased to a local mortuary to free up space.

  Jill then had a thought for Detectives Briggs and Heyer. While the case seemed to be under the wing of the FBI, she thought she owed the two detectives the latest information on the case. The land involved was not under their jurisdiction. The man that had tried to kill Jill on her own land wasn't in their jurisdiction either; he was returning to NOLA to serve his sentence. Still she didn't like leaving people out of the loop and so sent them an email of the recent happenings on her property and the data her team had collected. Briggs surprised her with a request to call at her convenience. Jill picked up the phone and dialed the number.

  "Hello, this is Jill Quint."

  "I figured it might be you, as no one else would be calling me from California. I was about to call you," Briggs said

  "What's up? Something new on your end?"

  "Just an unusual occurrence. The Black Oak plantation belonging to Senator Harris had a fire last night."

  "Oh my! Did she perish in the fire?"

  "The fire department is still going through that section of the house, but they found no human remains so far."

  "Was it hot enough to cause her cremation?"

  “No, it wasn't extensively damaged and it's on the river so there was plenty of water to put out the fire. No one has been able to make contact with the senator today. Her home is not in our parish so we're not assisting with locating her, but we're being kept abreast of developments.”

  Jill relayed the information on Sean Sharp and the thought that the FBI was closing in on the senator.

  “I don't understand the justice system, but I believe that the FBI was about to request the senator's presence for questioning this week. It feels like she has spies everywhere, so perhaps she decided it was time to leave the United States.”

  “Maybe. The officers investigating the fire have said there were no witnesses and her plantation is lightly staffed so no one would have seen activity around the house. She did have an alarm system and the local police are getting a warrant to look at the data in that system, so we'll know more later today.”

  “Interesting. Her main home was a plantation in North New Orleans?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there a dock connecting the plantation to the river?”

  “I think so. Most of those old plantations have such a connection.”

  “Does she have a boat registered to her?”

  “I don't know, but I get where you're going. You're suggesting we use the Coast Guard's boat tracking system.”

  “If we knew that she left by boat, then she might be traceable on the river. Of course, once she reaches the Gulf of Mexico, all bets are off unless she hugs the coastline and her radio signal is picked up by the same system.”

  “We'll look into those angles. Talk to you later.”

  Jill hoped the two officers would have success trying to use the Coast Guard system to see if she was on the river. There were so many variables on that angle, that the chances of it working were probably slim.

  Jill relaxed her back and her brain thinking as far as she was concerned she was done with the case; there was no new information for her to locate, and at least at the moment, no one was trying to harm her. The case was a thousand miles away and it was up to the justice department to close the case. She took a deep breath and relaxed.

  Chapter 33

  Stephanie Harris had been in Andorra for a week. She was settled into her new apartment if not to her life. At any given moment she was mourning the loss of her beloved plantation, her U.S. Citizenship, and the title, 'The Honorable Ms. Harris'. Given her criminal activity, she would never be allowed to run in an election and thus be called 'The Honorable' again. It had taken her a little over a week to reach Spain after she fled the U.S. She'd been constantly looking over her shoulder the entire time, thinking she wouldn't get away, but she did. Either she had enough of a head start, or they'd been unable to track her beyond Texas as she turned south and headed toward Tampico.

  She hadn't looked any stories up on the internet for a variety of reasons; first and foremost she wanted to get away without detection and that meant using no cell phone other than one she purchased at each harbor and threw away at the next, but more important no check of her email or the internet.

  Now that she was in Andorra, there was no way to trace her beyond Barcelona. As she paid cash for the car that she drove to her new country, she pulled on a wig and a decorative scarf that she'd packed in her luggage. She also had a set of fake license plates that she initially put on the car until she was fifty miles outside of Barcelona. At that point she removed them and the original plates were revealed, so she felt secure in her escape. By now as a public figure, her absence would have been noted and if the police weren't looking for her out of worry, they were looking for her as a suspected felon. But, she'd been in her new home a week and all was quiet.

  Now she dared to look at the U.S. news. She chose the New Orleans Times-Picayune as she would be one of thousands of readers viewing their contents from an internet cafe in a foreign country. She entered her name into their search function and waited for news to be searched for her. She skimmed the news.

  'Damn that man!', she thought.

  One news story described a small fire that had broken out in the library wing. It had been extinguished quickly by the fire department who had received an anonymous tip about the fire. Her plantation had never in its two-century history had a fire. She'd bet it was her contact from Garcia Enterprises. Sure she had enemies in politics, but those enemies had had years to strike and she didn't believe in the coincidence of it happening on the day and time it did. It was the first time she'd snapped at her Garcia Enterprises contact. The article also mentioned that the police were looking for Senator Harris to follow up on the fire, and had been unable to reach her. So they knew she was missing, but apparently not where she had gone. There was no mention of her anywhere growing marijuana, but maybe the police hadn't found a reason to release that information. She leaned back in her chair and debated what to do next.

  It was one thing for her to flee her grand plantation, but she'd left it in good shape so that when the state took it over it could be used for a park or they could sell it and probably recompense all the taxes she'd never paid for her marijuana sales. Now someone had damaged that pristine property and she wanted to strike back. Stephanie wanted to look something up that was on a flash drive when she left the United States. When she passed through Mexico on her way to her present location, she purchased a tablet computer. Now she'd go home and review her summary of services with Garcia Enterprises.

  An hour later, she was reading a scanned copy of the document she'd been provided two decades ago. She'd done a search for information about Garcia Enterprises in Mexico. At first it had been very difficult as Garcia is one of the most common names.

  She also wondered if any of the information in the document was accurate. They had not signed a contract as that would've been foolish as it was an illegal operation, but she'd asked when originally approached for a written document describing what Garcia Enterprises would do for her and the details of her payment schedule.

  Over the years, activity on her land had changed, and she'd never been provided with the new docu
ment, nor had she asked. She'd been happy with the payments and had looked for more land to grow pot on. In the last five years, she'd come up with the scheme of reclaiming land that was underwater by packing it down with river sediment to make it arable land again. She found the plots of land, and her Garcia Enterprises contact had arranged the reclamation process. She got a percentage of the profits off of those lands - sort of a finder's fee.

  Now as she examined the document supplied by her contact, she noted no names by which she could identify him or the enterprise. She tapped her fingers on the table as she sat looking at the tablet and then she had another idea. She remembered that she'd installed a security system almost a decade ago. When it was first installed, she'd captured video of him arriving at her dock. He noted the placement of the camera and had dismantled it before he left her house that day telling her never to place a camera on her dock again. She complied with this request, but kept the original video. Now she searched her files for that video clip and found it a half an hour later. She decided then and there she was going to try to take him down from four-thousand miles away. She located Dr. Jill Quint's website and email address. Stephanie bet that tenacious woman would take down the nasty man who had dared to harm her beloved plantation. It might not be hers anymore, but no one else was allowed to damage it. She began typing her email.

  Dear Dr. Quint,

  This is Stephanie Harris. I fled the United States about two weeks ago when I sensed you were getting close. I chose a business partnership over twenty years ago to save my beloved family plantation. My parents died together in a car accident and I lacked the financial means to keep the property going. At the time I was approached by a man who said he represented Garcia Enterprises, a company from Mexico. Four months later, I found myself growing marijuana for export south down the Mississippi River to Mexico.

  The income from that crop, allowed me to pay for the upkeep of the plantation and more. I eventually served our government trying to do the best for the citizens of Louisiana. I plan to live my life quietly in another part of the world, but I couldn't resist checking the news from home. I discovered that there was fire damage to my plantation, and I am angered by that. Never in two-hundred years was there a fire. I'm sure my contact from Garcia Enterprises was behind the fire and now I want to bring down his drug empire for the damage he did to the plantation.

  I don't know his name, and even if he'd told me his name I wouldn't have believed him. I've attached a video from about ten years ago that clearly captures his face. Perhaps you can identify him.

  Not only did he move marijuana south, but he may have been moving other product through my plantation to the rest of the United States. I say 'may' because he frequently had boats unload large plastic bags on pallets. When I questioned what was in the bags, I was told it was fertilizer for the marijuana plants; specifically to increase the content of THC. Over the years, I believe too many of these bags were delivered just to fertilize my land if you get my drift, but I did nothing further to confirm my suspicions.

  Since you seem to have resources at your fingertips and contacts at all levels of law enforcement I forward you this video with the advice, that if you stake out my property - the Black Oak plantation, over the next two weeks, you'll be able to intervene and perhaps break up a large drug ring. It's the one parting gift I can give my country.

  I would like to hear the outcome of this email. I'll be watching the online classified ads for the next three months in the Times-Picayune. Please leave word for me there, so that I may rest with the knowledge that my plantation is no longer in danger.

  Stephanie read the email a few more times. When she perfected it to say what she wanted to say, she made a copy on a flash drive and went out to her car. Three hours later she was seated in another Internet café in Toulouse, France in full disguise. She was dressed as someone's eighty-year-old grandmother. She created a new email account, then sent the email to Jill Quint. Within five minutes, her stooped back was seen leaving the Café.

  It would be the last time she was captured on video, for on the way home, she was killed by a wrong-way driver on the Auto-route 66. Her car was involved with a high speed head-on collision that left both drivers dead.

  Chapter 34

  Jill was back into the routine of running a winery. She'd done all the work of preparing her vineyard for winter and was evaluating whether to add a second grape to her vineyard. She was focused on a grape called Nero d'Avola. It was a red wine grape from southern Sicily that grew in a climate similar to the central valley of California where Jill lived. She liked red wine and thought she could be technically good at creating vintages with the grape. Her only concern was it was a strange pairing of sweet white Moscato and a fruity red. She really needed to add a few varietals to her winery and given that the plantings took five years to come into production, she really needed to be sure about her production. She could buy grape juice for any varietal and experiment with blending to see what she could achieve. She had two months before she needed to plant the grapevines, so she set about buying grape juice to experiment with what she could achieve. In addition to the Nero d'Avola grape, she purchased Barbera, Viognier, and Trousseau. She always liked Port and wanted to experiment with making the wine. Each of the grapes that she was purchasing liked a hot, dry climate to grow in and thus were suitable to her land and give her a mixture of red and white wines.

  She spent time studying the various grapes as well as purchasing some ready-made wines to see if she thought she could improve upon them. She would discuss her choices with Nathan as it was his skill set to advise her on the branding and marketing of the various wines. Did she have a collection of wines that made sense as a group and would attract consumers? She sighed and finished with her business planning for the vineyard for the coming year.

  She'd ignored her email for a while to concentrate on her business plan, but now it was time to see if there were any messages relevant to Jill Quint, forensic pathologist and private investigator. She scanned her inbox which was often filled with spam these days. People that needed her services as a pathologist always telephoned, so she wasn't worried about missing a client by ignoring her email. As she scanned down the list, she initially missed the email, but as she was going down and checking the left side box to delete a message without reading it, she saw it and opened it.

  It was a startling email from Stephanie Harris. She read the words several times to assure herself of its contents and to think about her next steps. Ms. Harris was correct that Jill had contacts in law enforcement and that she would do something with the information in the email. First though, she was amazed at the woman's hypocrisy. On one hand she wanted to serve her country by breaking up a drug ring and yet she'd supported said drug ring for two decades. Jill was outraged by the woman's behavior.

  After a pause to reflect on the strange morals of some of her fellow humans, Jill opened the attached video clip and played it. The woman was correct in that this was a good picture of the man. She opened her identity software to see if she could identify the man in the picture. The software came back with a name, in fact, seven names for the man's face. He was identified as Ricardo Rodriguez with an additional six aliases. He was on Interpol's most wanted list as well as the DEA. Her opinion of the dishonorable senator sank lower. This slime ball was her business partner for two decades? Unbelievable that she didn't know what was going on; the senator managed to wear a big set of blinders.

  So who should she tell this news to – the FBI or the NOPD? Since the plantation was outside of the city of New Orleans, it would fail to come under the jurisdiction of the New Orleans police or its county sheriff. Really, it was a DEA thing but she had no contacts there and she'd waste time legitimizing herself as a source. Beyond the email, and she had no way to verify that it was really from the senator, she supposed if she sent it to a computer expert, they might tell her an IP address which would correlate to a city that the email came from, but it wouldn't verify who ac
tually wrote the email.

  She decided she would spend a few hours building a dossier of sorts on this Mr. Rodriguez. If he had been coming and going from the plantation's property for two decades, Jill bet there was evidence of his movement in New Orleans. Especially since he visited her dock at times separate from his deliveries of 'fertilizer'. She doubted he could be flying in and out of the New Orleans Airport to transact business since he was on so many 'most wanted' lists. The river made a perfect way to enter and exit the United States, but it took time to sail from the Gulf of Mexico to the senator's plantation. It took even longer to move from Mexico to the head of the Mississippi. So either this wasn't his mode of transportation or he had a lot of time on his hands.

  She returned to study airport security reading a few articles on it and it appeared that passport control connected to criminal databases and so that should have stopped his entry. However, the government was aware of aliases presumably because he used them. So what was to stop him from just using another alias to cross the border? She knew the TSA didn't use Henrik's software yet, so could she use a public cam at the airport to see if Mr. Rodriguez was passing through?

  There were a series of public traffic cams on roads throughout the state and she looked at several of them, but the resolution wasn't good enough to identify drivers. There were other public cameras around New Orleans, but if you didn't live or work in the French Quarter, was it likely that you visited there several times a week? It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. She was going to contact someone with access to the security cameras at the airport. That seemed to be her only option of reducing the haystack to a single bale. She picked up her phone and hit eleven buttons.