The Empowered

by Craig Parshall

  We both knew the facts: She attended the ABA because she was a lawyer and, according to Turk Kavagian, was an overachiever with an advanced degree in some technology field and was probably incentivized to put a stop to child abduction due to the death of her own sister. And she was likely in the public sector of employment, someone whose full identity was classified, according to Morgan Canterelle.

  “Fine,” Heather said. “That’s all we have. So I ask once again—imagine how many federal employees there are in the District of Columbia.”

  “Actually I can,” I said. “I checked on it. There are more than two million employees on the federal payroll. A large percentage right here in the greater Washington area.”

  She shook her head. “I thought we were supposed to lay out a game plan.”

  “We will. As soon as we hone it down. Vector the grid.”

  Heather gave me a crooked smile. “Nice lingo. Now you’re just trying to impress me.”

  “How am I doing?”

  She laughed.

  “Actually,” I said, “I’m serious. When I had complex cases to defend, some white-collar crime with hundreds of transactions, I’d diagram the thing on a vector chart. This is much simpler. We’re trying to find out the federal agency where our woman is likely employed.”

  “Technology and law,” she said.

  “Which means maybe a person in the intelligence sector or law enforcement.”

  She said, “Huge categories.”

  “We can narrow it down. Turk Kavagian thought she might have attended MIT. There are a few federal agencies that seek out lawyers with technology training. Department of Justice is one of them. That also explains her inside knowledge about the death of an assistant US attorney like Jason Forester.”

  Heather turned to the iPad. She started there.

  After a few minutes she said, “Okay. DOJ’s got something called the High Technology Investigative Unit, HTIU. Right here in DC. And they have a child exploitation division. Cybercrime. Internet child pornography. A perfect fit for her, given the tragedy of her own sister and the nature of what we are pursuing. Maybe she was even aware that Forester was intending to talk to you when he died.”

  She checked the staff information for HTIU but gave out a long sigh. “Sorry, no Louisa Deidre Baldou listed.”

  “She could be lower down the pecking order,” I said. “They don’t list every federal employee in every DOJ division, just the higher-ups.” I told her to do a name search on sites with news articles dealing with legal cases or legal or tech conferences where she might have been mentioned or have been a speaker. But Heather came up dry.

  We also checked the FBI online, which of course had its own technology and forensics unit. And yes, it also had a cybercrime division that covered child pornography. I told Heather that our target person could be in either the DOJ or the FBI, but it might be neither, because she could also be working for the CIA or the NSA or even the Department of Defense’s technology sector.

  Heather looked tired and exasperated. “So, in which basket do we put all our eggs? Because we may only have enough time to pursue one.”

  She was right, of course. By Dick Valentine’s estimate, the boats, cars, or private airplanes could already be preparing to exit the country by the next day.

  That’s where it stood when I decided we should close it up for the night, which was close to three in the morning.

  Heather was insistent. “I’m not going to sleep until I know where we start tomorrow. My mind is already racing.”

  I told Heather that the Department of Justice was our best bet, and we would try to get an audience at the HTIU office somehow. After all, the DOJ is an exclusively legal office, filled with lawyers, more so than the FBI, and by every indication Louisa Deidre was a lawyer with intel that only a DOJ staffer would likely have. I also reminded Heather that we were hunting down a ghastly enterprise whose chief appeared to work domestically, inside the United States. Intelligence and military agencies, on the other hand—unlike the DOJ—don’t have domestic jurisdiction, and therefore she was less likely to be employed there.

  If my plan didn’t work out at the DOJ, I wasn’t sure how we would have the chance to head over to the FBI, our other option, and force a meeting or start another search for Louisa Deidre Baldou. We were running out of time to locate the monster in the system and interdict the flood of young female sex slaves about to leave our shores.

  When Heather said good night and disappeared to her room, she still had my iPad under her arm.

  Half an hour later I was already in bed and starting to doze off when I heard a frantic pounding on my hotel room door.

  It was Heather, with a stunned look on her face.

  When I let her in, she shoved the lit screen of my iPad in my face and shouted, “Three-quarters of a million hits on YouTube. In just the last few hours.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She pointed to the screen. Then I understood. Someone with a cell phone had shot a video in the Metro station. It showed my back as I hovered several feet over the rails at the Farragut West station. The video also caught, in the background, a two-second glimpse of the confrontation between the demon twin and my rescuer in Army fatigues.

  I smiled and nodded. “Glad they didn’t catch my face.”

  Heather handed me the iPad. “I don’t know what to say.”

  I said, “It’s more important to know what you believe.”

  61

  I don’t know whether I had dreamed it or whether it was one of those first thoughts that flash into your head just as you’re waking up.

  Whichever it was, I knew I had to call Turk Kavagian, the New Orleans PI. It was early morning, but I couldn’t afford to wait.

  When Turk picked up at the other end, I heard the dull roar of a crowded restaurant in the background. Turk was at Mother’s eating some kind of local breakfast fare that he tried to describe to me, something with crawfish and okra. He asked what he could do for me.

  “It’s regarding our conversation about Delbert Baldou and that niece of his who he raised like a daughter. Louisa Deidre.”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “Did she use Delbert’s last name, Baldou?”

  At the other end, Turk thought about it for a while. “She may have. Makes sense.”

  “Was her biological father’s last name Baldou?”

  “Nah. It wasn’t that.”

  “Really. What was it?”

  “Gaudet. See, her father was only Delbert Baldou’s half brother because they had different fathers. Louisa Deidre was a Gaudet.”

  “So her birth name would be Louisa Deidre Gaudet?”

  “You’ve got it.”

  “Turk, once again, you’ve been great.”

  “Hey, that one was easy,” he said.

  “For you maybe, but not for me. Thanks again.”

  I rounded up Heather, who was sleepy-eyed, and handed her a big coffee laced with espresso along with a little bag that had a sugary piece of bakery inside. Then I told her we had to be on the move.

  “I was thinking,” she started out in between slurps of her coffee. “Didn’t Vance Zaduck warn you about talking to people at the DOJ?”

  “Only if someone from DOJ reached out to me first.”

  “Anyway,” she said, “didn’t that guy, Gil Spencer, also tell you to be careful . . . not to barge into the DOJ and start spilling your story?”

  “Right.”

  “Okay. Two warnings. So tell me again: why are we heading there?”

  “Because this is not about spilling my story. It’s about Louisa Deidre Gaudet’s story.”

  We parked the car in a garage and walked along the south facade of the Department of Justice building.

  Near the entrance, I halted in front of a bronze statue that was darkened with age. The kind of little statue easily missed by passing traffic and hurried pedestrians. I nodded to it. “Nathan Hale. Hanged by the British when he was caught doin
g reconnaissance for General George Washington’s army.” I added, “He was just about your age.”

  She smirked. “And on that pleasant note . . .”

  “But it does raise a question,” I said. “About what we’re willing to live for. And willing to die for.”

  She tightened her face. “Not sure. But I know one thing. I don’t want any more young girls victimized, and maybe butchered, by some crazy voodoo cult running an Internet porn service.”

  “Well then,” I said, “let’s both of us walk into the DOJ and shake things up.”

  There was hesitation on her face. Her eyes were wide, her mouth drawn. She said, “Uh . . . you sure you want me with you?”

  “Positive.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Just checking.”

  We entered and went through the security check in the crowded lobby and handed over our IDs. At the desk the officer asked, “How can I help you?”

  “We’re here to see someone in your HTIU office.”

  “Both of you?”

  “Yes, she’s my research assistant.”

  “And you are . . . ?”

  “Trevor Black. Legal investigator.”

  “Who exactly are you here to see?”

  “Louisa Deidre Gaudet.”

  The official at the desk blinked slowly. No smile. “Say again?”

  I repeated the name.

  Then a flash of recognition on the security officer’s face. “Oh, you mean LD Gaudet?”

  I was inching closer to the goal line.

  “Yes,” I said energetically. “That’s right. LD.”

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “Not exactly. But she’ll know what this is about.”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t allow you inside without an appointment.”

  Heather gave me a side-glance. I was preparing to leap over the high jump in front of me. “Well, you see, this is a follow-up from my assistant’s meeting with LD in New Orleans recently. And it’s an emergency. LD considers it a matter of extreme urgency. I know that as a fact. She’s the one who tasked me to work on this project.”

  The officer stared at me and tapped a finger on the desk. She pulled out a list, looked it over, then reached for the phone and typed in a short number. I was guessing that it was LD’s extension. The officer lowered her voice to murmur something and listened to the response. Then, very audibly, she repeated my name and listened again to the voice on the other end.

  When she put the phone down, she looked me over one more time. Then she double-checked our IDs and typed out two paper tags with our names on them and little metal clips on the tops.

  “Make sure you keep them on your person,” she said, handing our name tags to us.

  In the elevator, when the doors closed, Heather whispered, “Do you have a plan?”

  “It’s a bit sketchy.”

  “Okay, but at least a script in your head for what you’re going to say?”

  “Not exactly. More like an impression.”

  Her eyes widened. “I’d love to hear it.”

  “Hope for the hopeless. Encouragement for someone trapped in the past. Healing for the brokenhearted.”

  Heather raised an eyebrow. “That sounds more like a sermon.”

  I didn’t respond because just then the elevator stopped, the doors opened, and we walked into the busy corridor of the High Technology Investigative Unit.

  62

  We had been told that a tech assistant to LD Gaudet would greet us at the elevator on the HTIU floor. When the elevator door opened and we stepped out, we were passed in both directions by hustling staffers in shirtsleeves and pantsuits with their federal ID tags swinging from their necks, but none of them looked our way.

  I stopped one of them and asked directions, and we were directed to LD’s office, two halls down. We stopped where we saw the little white name card inside a metal frame on the wall next to the door:

  LD Gaudet

  Assistant Computer Forensic Specialist

  Heather raised the notepad she clutched in her hand. “Do you want me to take notes?”

  “Not unless I tell you. I don’t want to spook her. The legal pad was mainly to give us a business look in the lobby.”

  I knocked on the door. No response. I put my knuckles to the door a second time, this time louder, and heard a noise inside. And then the sound of footsteps until the door swung open.

  The woman with untidy brown hair who opened the door didn’t greet us but walked straight back toward her simple metal desk. There were two large, ultrathin computer monitors on the desktop and two more monitors on the credenza behind the desk.

  She kept her back to us, looking out the window, which had an unimpressive view of the walls and windows of an adjacent office building behind the Department of Justice.

  Heather and I stood silently in the middle of the room and waited for Louisa Deidre, aka LD Gaudet, to begin speaking.

  The silence went on for at least a minute, and I could sense that Heather was stressing out next to me, so I reached over and gave her little finger a squeeze. Then LD Gaudet wheeled around and started to talk.

  “Well, hello, Heather. They told me that you were coming up without an appointment.”

  Her leadoff was all I needed to know, addressing Heather rather than me. LD Gaudet was buying time, trying to sort out her options. Wondering what her next move would be. Worrying about her future in light of her unorthodox actions. Understandable.

  I waited for Heather to respond. For a split second I wondered what would happen if Heather didn’t recognize her. And whether I had made a tactical mistake in assuming the lawyer at the ABA who had been responsible for arranging Heather’s trip to Bayou Bon Coeur was the same one who had been my anonymous caller.

  But all that evaporated as the conversation continued.

  “Hello, LD,” Heather said. “Or is it Deidre?”

  A quick, strained smile from LD. “For some reason my classmates in middle school always made fun of Louisa. So I started using my middle name instead. You know kids, how mean they can be. Never as malicious or damaging as grown-ups, though. It was Deidre from then on, until law school. And then I started using LD.”

  I joined the conversation. “Are you surprised?”

  “By what?” LD replied.

  “That I found you.”

  She eased herself down behind her desk. “Part of me was actually hoping for it.”

  “And the other part?”

  “You were a big-shot New York lawyer once upon a time. You should know the answer to that.”

  “I think I do. That’s why I want you to know you have nothing to fear from me.”

  “Oh, really? So this isn’t some kind of shakedown?”

  “Of course not. I’d do nothing to harm you, LD. The fact is I didn’t need to get an anonymous, digitally distorted phone call from you to convince me that there was something rotten going on behind the scenes. Or, for whatever reason, that I am the one who has to find the answers.”

  “And have you found them?”

  “That’s why I’m here. To finish the puzzle. I’m into task completion.”

  She gave a strained smile. “We have something in common. So then, let’s get down into the weeds. Why are you here, specifically?”

  “I need you to tell me everything you know about someone. Probably a respectable-looking federal law enforcement official, but down deep, a monster. This person may be into a voodoo cult called Palo Mayombe and moonlighting as the mastermind of a perverse Internet child exploitation syndicate called Kuritsa Foks Videoryad.”

  “You’ve been doing your homework.”

  “Thank you. What can you tell me?”

  “Considering that I have a top secret security clearance, am bound by federal law to keep confidential information confidential, and signed a lengthy agreement with the Department of Justice when I was hired, what do you really expect me to tell you?”

  “Just the truth. I think you owe me tha
t, after first seeding Detective Dick Valentine about the Jason Forester death, knowing he would pass it on to me. And then trying to motivate me to finish the job, all the while keeping yourself at arm’s length.”

  LD straightened in her chair.

  “But more than that,” I said, “you owe it to somebody else. You risked your professional career here at DOJ to make sure I was incentivized to help stop this human tragedy. And then you nudged me a little in the right direction, all because this investigation is critically important to you. Professionally, of course. But even more important, personally. Honoring the memory of your slain sister, Lucinda. So, because of all that, LD, this is important to me too.”

  I could see a softening in LD’s face.

  I said, “You need to tell me the truth because you are the person who deserves it: to see this scourge stopped, because it hit home in your own family. Maybe even if it’s just telling your story to a wreck of a guy like me, who’s lost some things too. But nothing like what you’ve lost. The ruination visited on your family. Sort of similar to the ruination that Katrina brought to that Six Flags theme park and to all New Orleans for that matter. One minute, life as usual. Next minute, disaster.”

  LD’s face was struggling for composure. Her chin was wobbling. “How could you have known?” she said, her voice cracking.

  “Just some facts I learned about your background. Coupled with my own life experience. My dealings with the world, the flesh, and the devil. And all the while, trying to walk a path illuminated by a God who has proven to me beyond a reasonable doubt that he can take a junkyard of a life and turn it into a garden.”

  In my peripheral vision, I could see that Heather was staring at me.

  LD made a little sound like the muffled chirp of a bird, a half cry that was struggling to get out.

  In front of me, LD Gaudet, assistant computer forensic specialist for the Department of Justice, was trying desperately to suppress a primal lament that had been welling up inside for too long and was now looking for a voice because of her bruised and tortured past. The murder of her sister. Then the collateral damage of her father, who doped and drank himself to death out of grief for his savagely slain daughter.