City of Secrets

by O'Neil De Noux

  Cover Sculpture © 2011 Vincent De Noux

  CITY of SECRETS

  O’Neil De Noux

  © 2013 O’Neil De Noux

  FOR Streak

  who lived through the worst of it

  CITY of SECRETS is a work of fiction. The incidents and characters described herein are a product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the copyright holder.

  Author Web Site: http://www.oneildenoux.net

  Twitter: ONeilDeNoux

  Published by

  Big Kiss Productions

  New Orleans

  First Printing April 2013

  “City of secrets, where even the land beneath our feet is a lie.”

  from Eternal Return by James Sallis

  “Every city has its secrets, stories whispered in dark corners. I need to tell the secrets in these pages because I was the prime mover, the one responsible.”

  John Raven Beau

  January 8, 2006

  Katrina

  Pretty name for a deadly femme fatale.

  She blew in from the Bahamas, right across south Florida into the Gulf of Mexico and crept westward, veering to the northwest, running beneath the panhandle. She was so huge when she turned north, her fury was felt from the Texas-Louisiana border to Pensacola, Florida. She made landfall in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, south of New Orleans early Monday morning, August 29, 2005.

  Within six hours, the levees around the city collapsed or were topped by a huge tidal surge. Thirty breeches resulted in 84% of the metropolitan area flooding. With no electricity, the huge pumps that drained the city of rainwater remained shut down and the water stayed for weeks.

  Two months later, the water is gone, along with most of the people. The mud is dried and much of the city is coated in a gray, brown film of silt and dirt. Pockets of the city have electricity and natural gas. The French Quarter and other neighborhoods lining the river, the highest ground in the city, did not flood and a small number of humans have reclaimed the city founded by French explorers in 1718.

  The city lies prostrate, almost helpless as ruthless criminals move in to stake their turf. Murder returns to New Orleans and the killers collide with a man who hunts murderers with methodical, calculating precision, innate in one who has the blood of the great plains warriors in his veins.

  Part 1

  A Warrior Steels Himself

  There is no trick-or-treating Halloween night, two months AK – after Katrina. The New Orleans Marina at Lake Pontchartrain is dark, much of its aluminum roof blown away, sailboats and pleasure craft capsized or half sunk, the ones not at the bottom of the harbor. Bright moonlight struggles behind thick clouds and the air is heavy with humidity and the odor of decay and dirt. A single light glimmers yellow outside a houseboat at the far end of the pier.

  A man stands on the deck, a mug of coffee in his left hand. He’s in all black – canvas combat boots, tactical pants with seven pockets, a black tee-shirt with the word POLICE stenciled in gray across his chest. A handcuff case is nestled along the left side of his black canvas belt, two magazines fill a pouch behind the case. On his right hip, a stainless steel nine-millimeter Beretta rests in its carbon-fiber holster. Clipped to his belt, between holster and belt buckle is an NOPD star-and-crescent detective badge. In a scabbard along the small of his back lies a knife with a bone handle and a ten inch blade, a fire-hardened volcanic glass obsidian blade honed to a razor-sharp edge that can slice through the toughest buffalo hide. The blade is sharpened on one side only – the knife of a plains warrior.

  John Raven Beau is thirty-two, half-Cajun and half-Sioux, stands six-two, a lean man with thick, dark brown hair, deep-set light brown eyes, a thin nose and hooded brow that gives him a hawkish appearance. He sports a five-o’clock shadow on his square jaw. He sips his strong coffee-and-chicory and his mind speaks to the shadow warrior within. He does this often, a trait of his ancestors –

  A movement on the broken pier draws Beau’s sharp eyes as one of the cats he’s been feeding hunkers over the bowl of cat food he’d laid out. This cat is black. Beau takes another sip and freezes as three gunshots echo, in quick succession.

  That was close.

  Beau leaves the mug on the bait box and bounds off his houseboat, locks the gate and hustles carefully over the splintered pier.

  Too damn close.

  He cannot move quickly in the darkness until the moon peeks out from the clouds as he nears the front of the pier and rushes through the broken metal gate to jump the two-foot sea wall to the cement parking lot where eight cars rest, two on their roofs, one half atop the seawall, four partially buried in dried mud. He races to a shiny black Cadillac Escalade SUV, points the automatic door opener at it and the headlights flicker, the interior light flips on and the doors unlock.

  Three seconds later the Escalade zooms through the wide opening in the concrete barrier wall where two wide steel gates once stood and Beau takes a quick left, pushing buttons to open windows so he could hear any additional shots. He rolls around SS Angelia, a forty-foot yacht on its side blocking half the street, then dodges other sailboats on the road, has to slow down to weave through the debris along Lake Avenue – a refrigerator, two bicycles, ice-chests, part of a page fence. At Lakeshore Drive he stops and looks both ways, wondering which way to go. Something tells him left so he turns and runs the Escalade over a wider street with less debris, the grass levee on his right, a line of destroyed restaurants on his left.

  Easing along Lakeshore Drive, which runs next to the lake, he catches a whiff of smoke, looks to his left as he passes a hive of white sailboats tumbled atop one another, like carcasses of giant alien insects. He sees smoke now as he turns into the small parking area in front of the remains of the US Coast Guard lighthouse, a Victorian-looking building – two stories with a round portico, aluminum roofing painted red, mostly torn away. The glass surrounding the revolving spotlight is gone.

  Two small fires next to the building draws his attention and the headlights wash over a body lying between them. She’s in a dark red dress and lies on her back, arms spread wide. She’s barefoot. Beau stops the Escalade and quickly removes the key, leaving the lights on and steps into the darkness, Beretta in his right hand as he backs away from the SUV, taking a roundabout route to the body. He stares straight ahead, watching his peripheral vision, looking for any motion. He has to check her, see if there’s any flicker of life left.

  He reaches for her throat, then looks down. A dark bullet hole has ripped through her head just above her right eye, another one center-chest, her eyes glazed over in obvious death. He checks for a pulse anyway. She’s still warm. Beau moves back into the darkness, then to the side of the lighthouse to ease around it, listening, watching for any movement.

  Bastard set the fires on purpose so she’d be found.

  By the time he’s circled the lighthouse, he sees the door is broken and peeks in. The moon is bright now and he spots tumbled desks, chairs, computer screens. The floor is covered in semi-hard mud. He reaches a foot in, steps, pulls back and sees his footprint. There are no others. No one went in there. He turns around as a set of headlights come rushing up Lakeshore Drive. He eases into the lighthouse and watches a military Humvee turn into the parking lot, its spotlight moving from the Escalade to the body.

  “We’ve got a body, sir!”

  A national guardsman swings his machine gun atop the Humvee toward the body as the spotlight moves around and Beau backs away from the open doorway. He hears doors o
pen and sees the spotlight moving around.

  “It’s a woman!”

  Brilliant deduction.

  “Check to see if she’s dead.”

  New England accents.

  Beau cups his left hand next to his mouth and calls out, “Guardsmen! This is the police! Don’t shoot!”

  The light swings toward the doorway and Beau moves behind a desk.

  “You fuckin’ hear me?”

  “Affirmative. Come to the light!”

  Affirmative? Jesus. I got boy scouts.

  Beau re-holsters his weapon and moves back to the door, cups both hands now. “NOPD! Don’t fuckin’ shoot me!”

  He sticks his open hands out and raises them, follows them into the light.

  “See the badge?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Beau stops after two steps.

  “You wanna quit pointing that fuckin’ machine gun at me, son?”

  The young guardsman sitting behind the machine gun atop the Humvee calls back, “It’s a M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, a SAW .223 caliber, sir!”

  “Doesn’t matter what caliber it is if you accidently shoot a cop.”

  The guardsman turns the gun away, smiles nervously.

  Beau turns to the three standing next to the body, all in their green and black camouflage, two with M-4 automatic rifles pointing skyward thankfully. All three have side arms holstered on their hips. Damn, they’re young. One guardsman, the only one near Beau’s age, is a sergeant.

  “I’m Det. Beau, NOPD, Homicide.”

  “Staff-sergeant Phillips, Rhode Island National Guard.” The man stands six feet, even thinner than Beau, with a long face and pronounced jaw, wide set eyes. His accent is New England, but not as strong as the ones from Massachusetts Beau heard talking at the airport.

  Another guardsman comes over. This one’s a medic, a white armband with a red cross. He has an OD green stethoscope dangling from his neck, plugs it in his ears and presses the suction cup against the victim’s neck. The girl looks to be twenty, maybe. When she was alive, she was very pretty.

  The medic rises, nods to Phillips and heads back to the Humvee.

  “Y’all see anything coming in?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Y’all take a look around.” Beau steps away from the body, focuses on the ground now with the bright light from the spotlight.

  No one moves, looking at the sergeant for orders.

  No use looking for footprints in the dirt. Beau had taken a circular route to the body not to leave many, his easily identified marks from his new boots lay beyond the body, while the boots of the guardsmen had trampled over any other footprints around the body.

  “Y’all see any shell casings?”

  That they understand and everyone looks at the ground now. Phillips comes close and Beau repeats his request for them to look around.

  “What for?”

  “Snipers. Vehicles.”

  “Is that an order?”

  Beau lets out a long sigh.

  Soldiers.

  “All right sergeant, this is a New Orleans murder and I’m a homicide detective. I’m in charge of the whole fuckin’ thing.” He lowers his voice, “Y’all need to help me.”

  Phillips sends three men to walk the area, tells the machine gunner to scan the area with a second spotlight.

  “Tell your men to stick together. This isn’t a war patrol. In police work you never let your partner outta sight. You don’t want him ambushed while you can’t do anything about it.”

  Less likely to shoot each other, as well.

  Phillips stays with Beau who spots both shell casings about five yards from the body, one half-buried in the dried mud by a boot print.

  “You have a paper bag in the Hummer?” Beau asks the medic, whose wearing surgical gloves. He pulls out a plastic bag. Beau tells him, “Just touch the edges.”

  Who knows? Maybe the state crime lab can lift prints from the casings. NOPD had no crime lab for the time being, had little, if anything for the time being. Beau works out of the airport where these guardsman were most likely stationed, while other NOPD officers assemble to be housed in cruise ships along the river. The only district station open is the Fourth, Algiers, across the river.

  The medic and another guardsman come out with a black body bag as the ones who’d canvassed come back to the Humvee.

  Beau asks Phillips, “Y’all just happened to be in the area?” He knows guard hummers are patrolling the city.

  “Yes. How’d you get here so fast?”

  Beau nods over his shoulder. “My houseboat’s at the marina.”

  “It didn’t get sunk in the hurricane?”

  “It was in dry dock for repairs. Just got it back in the water.”

  The medic is careful with the body, keeping her dress down as he and another lift her into a black body bag.

  Nice. Polite. But she’s gone. She’s not there anymore.

  Before they zip up the bag, Beau asks, “Roll her over.”

  “Huh?”

  “Need to know if the bullets are still in her.”

  The back of her head is a bloody mess, hair streaked with brain tissue and bone fragments along the base of the skull, but there is no exit wound in the torso. Beau looks at the ground where she lay and it is packed hard in dried mud, flat, no bullet hole. The killer didn’t stand over her to shoot her face. Beau moves back to the building and checks the wall carefully. The bullet isn’t embedded there. It had ripped through her skull and flew toward the street, the parking lot or the levee, could be lying a hundred yards away.

  There is no dignity in death. Soon as they get her to the morgue, she’ll been stripped by strangers and cut open, organs dissected, a bald pathologist fishing for the bullet to explain in his autopsy report the cause of death. The manner of death would be listed on the death certificate – homicide.

  One of the small fires has gone out. A guardsman puts out the other with a fire extinguisher.

  “I’ll follow you to the morgue.” Beau heads back to the Escalade.

  •

  A little under eleven miles from the New Orleans Marina, Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport lies just below I-10 in the small Jefferson Parish city of Kenner. The ambient light from the airport illuminates a large area, reminding Beau of that scene of Devil’s Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Between the marina and airport there are a few lights from a couple fire stations, businesses struggling to return. None in Orleans Parish, but in Jefferson Parish, where the flooding wasn’t as all-encompassing, some business are coming back, those who can get merchandise and employees.

  New Orleans looks like a post-apocalyptic science-fiction movie. Two friends back at the marina, the only people there besides Beau, had given him a book to read. A Boy and his Dog by Harlan Ellison, about the world after a nuclear holocaust. He’d just started it and the main character seemed awfully interested in finding one thing in the wasteland – a female. Vic has a partner, his dog. Good reading of a people worse off.

  They take the airport access road down to Airline Highway to parallel the airport. The parking lots around the airport are filled with cars, SUVs, motor homes and huge tents crowded with evacuees from the city. Police cars and fire engines from so many states stand parked between the highway and the hangers, one designated as a morgue.

  Beau parks the Escalade behind the Humvee as the guardsmen pull out the body bag to carry it through the open hanger doors into a well-lit operating area, three stainless steel autopsy tables beneath high intensity lamps hanging from the high ceiling. An army pathologist comes out of the screened-off living areas of small beds, tables and footlockers. Wrapping a plastic apron around himself, the tall pathologist moves to the nearest table as the body bag is deposited. Two medics with similar aprons scramble over and, like the doctor, pull on surgical gloves.

  Dr. Richard Nelson, from somewhere in Indiana, handled a number of previous autopsies Beau witnessed. A man of few words, which he
carefully speaks into the microphone clipped to his uniform blouse, mini-recorder in a front pocket, Nelson supplies homicide detectives the information needed in their investigations. A Louisiana state trooper from the LSP Crime Lab, in his dark blue uniform and carrying a digital camera, comes over to take photos of the post mortem exam and autopsy.

  The medics pull the body from the plastic bag and cut away the dress while Nelson and Beau carefully watch, checking for anything of value. There is no name, typically, on the dress’s label. It came from the Gap, a jump-dress, whatever that means. It buttons down the front to the waist and no buttons are missing. The victim wears a pink brassiere from JC Penny and white Hanes brand panties with a blue stripe along the waist band. The dress is a size three, the bra a 32 B-cup, the panties size 5. Each item is placed in a separate brown paper bag.

  So are the shell casings from the crime scene. The two nine-millimeter casings are different brands of ammunition, typical of criminals who do not go into gun shops to buy boxes of ammo. They get it on the street.

  “Speer brand,” Nelson describes the first casing to his recorder. “Second is Remington brand.”

  Beau carries Speer nine-millimeter rounds, however his are hollow-points, meant to spread on contact, rip up organs, stay in the body.

  The cadaver lies naked on the cold steel table as it is turned over for the doctor’s examination then back face-up before the medics rinse it off, the water draining through a strainer, its contents collected in another paper bag before Nelson begins with a description of the body of a well-nourished white female approximately twenty years old.

  “Take a pictures of this,” Nelson instructs the photographer.

  Beau moves in for a better look at the emblem on the victim’s right forearm – a brown bird.

  “Tattoo?” Beau asks.

  Nelson shakes his head. “Inked on. From a Sharpie marks-a-lot. Something like that.”

  Beau takes notes and remains close even when the large ‘Y’ incision is cut across the top of her breasts to her breastbone and down to a few inches above her mat of dark pubic hair and the that initial stink of a body laid open permeates the air. At least the hanger is air conditioned.