Doing the Devil's Work

by Bill Loehfelm

  “I’m well aware of that,” Maureen said. “I know you weren’t here. I only care that she was here. I’m not blaming anyone for losing her, I just want her found.”

  Maureen moved her hands away from her face, splayed them on the desk, pressing them flat on the metal until her knuckles turned white. She knew she sounded like a junior high guidance counselor when she spoke. She had to do better than that. “Okay.” A deep breath. “Okay. Let me rephrase the question. You’re right, I’m not being clear. Do you have any security video from yesterday morning of the hospital receiving a female prisoner from the sheriff’s department, most likely through the emergency room?”

  “Well, I have to look.”

  “Can you do that for me?” Maureen asked. “Please?”

  “Can I sit in front of the computer?”

  Maureen pushed up from the desk. “Of course.”

  The security guard sat, wiping his palms on his thighs before sliding the mouse around on the desk and clicking keyboard keys, sweating and frowning as he searched the hospital’s digital video archives for the early-morning footage. She wanted to find Madison Leary, Maureen realized, if for no other reason at this point than the woman was lost and no one else was searching for her. Somebody should know where she was.

  “And the nurses in the ER?” the guard asked. “What did they say?”

  “Not much help,” Maureen said. “Anything that happened on another shift may as well have happened on another planet. They’re overwhelmed.”

  “They wouldn’t even take you to the beds?”

  “They did,” Maureen said. “But there are only ten psych beds in the ward. Two were empty and the other eight were men.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m not a detective yet, but I can tell women from men. Would’ve been hard getting out of the academy otherwise.”

  “I’m only asking,” the guard said. “People come in here looking pretty rough sometimes.”

  “I believe it,” Maureen said. “Any luck with the video?”

  “I’m working on it, please. You checked the other hospitals?”

  “These are the only emergency psych beds in the city. This is where the sheriff told me the ambulance would take her. Only game in town, they said.”

  The guard turned in his chair. “What about the north shore?”

  Maureen drew her finger across her throat. “Closed down over the winter. State budget cuts.”

  “So there are ten beds for psychiatric emergencies,” the guard said, “in all of Orleans Parish.”

  “And Saint Tammany, too. Don’t you read the paper?”

  “I quit reading it when they went down to three days a week.” The guard shook his head. “Ask me again why I moved to Jefferson Parish. Good Lord. Where do the crazy people go?”

  “Elysian Fields, borders of the Treme. Under the I-10 overpass seems pretty popular these days. I’ll look there next.” She nodded at the computer. “Any luck finding our prisoner here, the place where she oughtta be?”

  “What do you need her for?” the guard asked, turning back to the computer.

  Because she’s a thief and person of interest in a murder case, though apparently I’m not supposed to care about that.

  “Police business,” Maureen said. “She’s not like a serial killer or a jewel thief or anything like that, but I really can’t say.”

  The guard pointed and clicked, shaking his head. “I really think my supervisor should be here for this. You really should talk to him.”

  “I would love to,” Maureen said.

  “He’s in Cancún, at a conference. He should be back by Monday.”

  “My prisoner is missing today!”

  The guard flinched when she shouted. She could see him melting into a pout. As much as she knew she needed to, she doubted she could rally the personal warmth to coax the man out of it. As bad as Theriot from the sheriff’s department, this one. Jesus. These soft fucking men were making her crazy. They could each of them take lessons from Marques.

  “Are you sure you don’t need a warrant for this?” he asked.

  Maureen wasn’t sure if he was being vindictive or if he was that ignorant. “I’m not asking for anyone’s personal information or file or medical records. I’m not asking to leave with anything. I don’t even want to leave with the prisoner. I just need to confirm she made the six-block trip from lockup to here like I was told she did. Is there a way, any way at all, we can do that?”

  “Not if she didn’t make it here.” The guard turned in his chair, back to the computer. “Sounds to me like your problem is with the sheriff’s department, but what do I know?”

  Over his shoulder Maureen watched the fast-forwarded version of the morning in question in the emergency room. She was about to give up when a flash of blue, Madison’s T-shirt, caught her eye. “Stop it, stop the video.”

  The guard did so. There, seated at the end of the row of plastic chairs in the ER waiting room, was Madison Leary, slumped forward, her hands upturned in her lap, looking much like she did seated in the white pickup.

  “Son of a bitch,” Maureen said. “Let it roll. Not too fast.”

  The sequence played forward at an accelerated pace. With a view from above, Maureen watched Madison and the time stamp in the corner of the video. Leary sat motionless like a turtle in the bottom of an aquarium, the nurses and doctors and patients flowing around her like colorful fish. After about twenty minutes, Madison stood, stretched, turned around, and walked out the sliding glass doors of the ER, as if an invisible spirit had entered and animated her body. She disappeared into the night. “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”

  “That would explain why she’s not in one of the beds,” the guard said.

  Now it was Maureen doing the pacing. “Can I, uh, can I sit there a sec?”

  “I don’t see why. You found what you needed. She’s not here. She was, but she’s not anymore.” He sounded giddy with relief. “It’s not our responsibility.”

  “I’m going to have to ask you to step aside,” Maureen said, “and let me have a look at that computer.”

  “Or?”

  “That woman is a fugitive,” Maureen said, which was an exaggeration, she knew, since Madison had never officially been in custody. “And this computer documents her flight. I will come back with six more cops and seize it, and take it down to the DA’s office, and you with it, where they will pore over every file looking for more evidence of her escape from custody. And then he’ll grill you like a fucking sausage. You want that? You want to call Cancún and explain that hot mess to your boss? You been looking at airline tickets, at Craigslist for another job, we’re gonna see it. Been playing poker, looking at porn, we’re gonna see that, too.”

  “You can’t really do that,” the guard said. “Can you?”

  “Fucking try me. Please. Because this seems to be the week for that.”

  The guard jumped up from the chair. “Fine, have it your way, but I’m putting this whole episode in the shift log. My boss is going to want to chat with your boss.”

  Maureen squeezed the back of the chair. “Officer Maureen Coughlin, Third Platoon, Sixth District. Badge number fourteen-twelve. My duty sergeant is Preacher Boyd. Put it on my permanent record.”

  “I’m getting coffee.” The guard turned on his heel and left the office, slamming the door behind him.

  “I didn’t want any anyway,” Maureen yelled after him.

  She sat at the computer, rewinding the video prior to Leary’s appearance in the waiting room. She knew what had happened, but she wanted to see it with her own eyes. After a few minutes of video, the automated sliding doors opened. In came Theriot and another deputy dragging Madison Leary, limp and barely staggering, her feet stepping then dragging. Each man held one of Leary’s arms. Leary seemed only half conscious, a long line of spit hanging from her bottom lip, unaware of where she was or what was happening to her. She was tiny, hanging limp and broken between the two men escortin
g her. Why hadn’t anyone gotten her a wheelchair?

  The deputies dumped Leary in a chair, wiped their hands on their uniform pants, and hustled out of the waiting room, looking like two frat boys leaving a drunk date on the doorstep. Maureen watched them closely. Neither of them spoke, not to each other, to Leary, or to anyone else in the emergency room. Neither man even glanced back at their charge on his way out the door.

  Not long after Leary’s arrival, the emergency room erupted into a frenzy as a man with blood pouring from his abdomen and down his lap, an obvious gunshot wound, staggered into view. He turned in a slow circle before collapsing in a tangled heap of limbs not three feet from where Madison sat. Though Maureen couldn’t hear it, she knew shouting and screaming rang off the walls. Leary didn’t react to anything around her. She didn’t even look at the man who’d been shot. She slumped like an exhausted child snoring through a boring TV show. A pack of people in different-colored scrubs rolled over a gurney and addressed the man’s wound. They loaded him onto the gurney and wheeled him away out of the picture. From there, the footage Maureen had already seen. She stopped the video.

  She leaned back in her chair and scratched at her scalp. Why? Why abandon a prisoner in the middle of the emergency room? That was an easy one. Because she wasn’t a prisoner, Maureen thought. She wasn’t even a person. She was a problem, a stray on the wrong doorstep, nothing more than that. She was bodily fluids and physical effort and cavity searches and paperwork. She scared the deputies. So they ditched her in a way that left no paper trail back to the department. Just in case that scary, skinny little woman turned out to be dangerous. Or know a lawyer.

  Maureen got up from the desk, left the security office. The guard was nowhere to be found. She passed through the bustling emergency room and out into the hospital parking lot. Two smoking EMTs at the back of an idling ambulance gave her the once-over. She gave them the finger and they giggled like children. An old woman in a wheelchair stared at her, hostile.

  Maybe she was being too harsh, Maureen thought. Maybe the deputies got caught up in the drama surrounding the gunshot victim outside the camera angle. Maybe they’d run outside to help someone. Maybe they’d meant to turn over Leary the right way and lost track of things. She could believe that, if she wanted to give the deputies the benefit of the doubt, if she tried real hard to fool her own instincts and her own eyes.

  As for right now, Maureen thought, climbing into her patrol car, Madison Leary could be passed out under a car in this hospital parking lot, or behind a nearby Dumpster. She could be miles away by now. She could have leaped from the Crescent City Connection and into the fucking river. Maureen wondered if there was anyone other than her who cared. She wondered why she cared, and how much she really did, now that the effort had become draining.

  Leary wasn’t the only person in New Orleans she’d proven unable to help, Maureen thought. She had a job shot through with failure. Failure of genetics, of governments, of systems and institutions, of parents and schools, of morals and souls. Failure was why she had a job. Shit, if the world ever got its act together, she thought, she’d be back waiting tables.

  Maybe she should take a page from Atkinson’s book, she thought. Maybe the thing to do was sit back and wait for vibrations in the web, see what happened around her instead of always forcing the issue. She studied her own eyes in the rearview mirror. They looked strange to her. Old. Tired. That was what she would do. She’d hang back and see how things shook out. Nobody was asking her for anything. In fact, Preacher had warned her off Leary’s trail. She dropped the cruiser into drive. Marques and his grandmother, Quinn and Ruiz, Heath, Gage, Cooley, and Madison Leary: she’d let them go, all of them, let them fend for themselves at least for the night—as soon as she straightened out that lying motherfucker from the sheriff’s department.

  13

  Maureen threw open the heavy door to the intake and processing center, storming past a glum-looking family of four seated in the lobby. She slapped her palm several times on the protective plastic at the reception window. The same female deputy she had dealt with the previous night, when she had first come looking to find Madison Leary, rose from behind a desk. She stood with her chin raised high, her shoulders drawn back.

  “Excuse me, Officer,” she said, not moving from behind the desk. If she recognized Maureen, she gave no sign.

  “You need to come to this window,” Maureen said, “or buzz me through that door. Y’all have some questions to answer.”

  Taking her time, the deputy edged around the desk and sauntered to the window. “Bad night on the streets?”

  “Always better to be out there working,” Maureen said, “than to be sitting on my ass in the air-conditioning.”

  “But you keep coming to me for help,” the deputy said.

  Someone in the seated family caught their breath.

  The deputy leaned toward the window. She lowered her voice and raised her eyes to Maureen’s face. “You need to stop talking to me like I’m some corner punk. Now.”

  “You need to stop dumping my prisoners out onto the street because you feel like it.” Maureen leaned her elbows on the counter, her nose inches from the protective plastic window. “What ambulance company was it that took my prisoner over to LSU Public the other night? You remember that? The woman, Madison Leary. Can you look that up for me?”

  Maureen saw the flash of recognition in the deputy’s eyes. She hadn’t worked the night Maureen had brought Madison in, but she was a witness to the lies the other deputy told. She had no interest in protecting her coworker, Maureen knew. She’d be plenty pissed at him for putting her in this mess. She’d give up anything to get Maureen and her attitude away from the window, and to excise herself from the rest of the story.

  “I want to talk to Theriot,” Maureen said. “The big, bald guy. It’s important. Where is he?”

  “He’s in the shed tonight.”

  “The what?”

  “The guard shed, down at the end of the street, at the entrance to the construction site. The city wants someone in it twenty-four seven. Tonight, it’s his turn.”

  “Don’t call him,” Maureen said, standing. “Don’t tell him I’m coming.”

  She turned, almost colliding with the young mother from the family, who had come up close behind her. Her husband sat with a kid on either side of him, a boy and a girl, about seven years old, maybe twins. The man scowled, none too pleased his wife was talking to a cop.

  “Excuse me, Officer,” the woman said. “Can you help us?”

  “Depends,” Maureen said, in a hurry to get to Theriot. “The deputy back there can probably do more for you than I can.”

  “It’s not that,” the woman said. “We came to check on my brother. He got arrested last night. We got what we needed, but now our car won’t start. My husband says it’s the battery.” She tossed a cold-eyed glance over Maureen’s shoulder at the deputy. “Seems no one in the sheriff’s department’s got any jumper cables.”

  Maureen knew she had jumper cables in the cruiser. But this is how it starts, she thought. They ask for something small, then slowly raise the stakes. When the jumper cables didn’t work, she’d be hit up for cab fare, or even a ride home, like a damn taxi service. She’d get the sob story of how the brother was a quiet neighborhood guy trying to turn his life around, was there anyone she could talk to for him? Then back in the neighborhood they’d motherfuck the sheriff’s office and the NOPD to anyone who would listen. The next time NOPD came around asking questions, looking for help, no one would know a thing. Maureen took a deep breath. “Listen, I’ve got work to do. If you don’t have a phone, I’m sure the deputy can call you a cab. Or make change for the pay phone.”

  “Tol’ you,” the husband grumbled.

  “A cab from here to the Seventh Ward is expensive,” the woman said. “We put up what we got extra for my brother. And then our car is stuck here. I got a phone. I left a message at my cousin’s house ’bout an hour ago.” She held up a
glittery white cell phone. “But he at work and hasn’t called back.”

  “Typical police,” the husband said. “Quit wasting time, girl.”

  Maureen stared at him, stepping in his direction, but speaking to the woman. “I’ve got cables in the unit, ma’am. Get the kids a soda. Soon as I’m done talking with the other deputy, we’ll see if we can’t get your car started. Just hang tight for a minute.”

  “Thanks, Officer,” the woman said, rocking on her heels, twisting her lips at her husband. “’Preciate you.”

  The husband kept his head turned away, frowning over his shoulder at nothing. The kids looked at the floor, swinging their short legs and sneakered feet under their chairs, embarrassed and confused by the adult hostility over something as simple as a ride home.

  Maureen left the cruiser parked, walking the two blocks to the construction site, silent and locked up for the night. The looming square of the new jail stood tall against the highway and the stars, a black cube aglow in the faint lights from the nearby cranes. Plastic banners bearing construction company logos wrapped the box like a half-opened birthday present. Their loose edges flapped in the wind. One of the banners caught Maureen’s eye. There it was, like Atkinson had told her, HEATH DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION. Big white letters against a blue background. She hadn’t noticed it before.

  “Well,” she mumbled, “would you look at that.”

  She’d seen the company banner elsewhere around the city. They’d recently finished a shiny new four-story building, lots of metal and glass, on Earhart Boulevard in her district, corporate offices or something. The building’s sleek modern look was out of character for the surrounding industrial area, which was otherwise old warehouses and tumbledown shacks lined up along one of the outfall canals from the lake. There was a bakery on the ground floor. Other cops in her district had high praise for the bakery’s coffee, but the place was never open during her night shifts.