by Roger Johns
“The budget review you mentioned? I suppose this means my little project will get sidelined, again.”
For three years Wallace had been pushing for funding for a big-data project that would help the department identify individuals most at risk for becoming repeat-offender drunk drivers, so that prevention efforts could be more efficiently targeted. Police departments around the country had awakened to the idea of predictive enforcement and the technique had been used successfully to target other types of criminality. But it had never been tried for the purpose Wallace had in mind, so getting the money was proving to be a hard sell. Burley’s half-hearted smile let her know he had expected her to bring it up.
“Look, I know how important this is to you, and I know it’s personal. But even with the cuts that are probably coming, there could be room for your project—at least on a trial basis. Help me get Mike Harrison back on his feet and I’ll push as hard as I can for you. The Overman homicide you picked up Sunday would be just the kind of case to turn him around. A nasty crime, a victim nobody’s gonna miss, but enough weight to make Mike feel like he’s being useful again.”
* * *
Wallace and Mike Harrison spent the rest of the morning going through her open cases, updating reports, and parceling out investigational duties. She was going to keep him on a short leash until she could get a handle on what he could do. In the meantime, she intended to limit him to chasing forensic details, interviewing witnesses, and doing computer-based research on suspects and persons of interest.
“This is just busywork,” Mike said, waving his hand dismissively at the computer.
“It’s detective work.”
“It’s bullshit busywork,” he said, raising his voice. “I want to work on the stuff that counts.”
“What are you talking about? This is work that counts.”
“You don’t get it. My reputation got messed up, so I gotta get back in the game, make a big play,” he said, pushing back from the desk, standing directly in front of Wallace.
“Mike, please, just listen—”
“I want to work on something hot,” he said, smirking, his crotch inches from her face.
Wallace stood and shoved him hard into his chair. “Promise yourself you won’t make that mistake again.”
“Come on,” he said, laughing and squirming in his seat. “I was just—”
Wallace leaned over, her hands resting on the arms of his chair.
“Hey, hey, Detective. Why don’t you two love birds get a room?” It was Tonya Eklin, head of the Sex Crimes Unit. She was standing in the doorway of a cubicle across the room, chatting with another of Wallace’s colleagues.
Wallace backed away and sat down. “You’ll want to mind your manners around me.” She stared at him until he looked away. “Now, let’s go back over the list of names I gave you,” she said, subduing her frustration. “See this guy right here?”
“Arthur Staples? Yeah. What about him?” Mike asked, sporting a sullen look.
“He’s a person of interest in the Overman homicide. Certain parts of his past are probably going to be forever closed off to us, but I want you to see what’s on record for him, his wife Wanda, and their deceased daughter Cynthia, since the family moved to Baton Rouge. The circumstances of Cynthia’s death may be important, so any names or places or events she was connected to, we need to know about them.”
“Look, I was out of line, before. My apologies,” Mike said, his eyes and nose reddening, his fingers drumming nervously on the desktop.
“Apology accepted,” she said, softening her expression. She returned her attention to the computer screen. “At the end of every day, you’ll have a progress report for each item on the list. Everything gets worked. Nothing gets neglected.”
“I got it, I got it,” he said forlornly. “Look, I’m just trying to get back in the groove, figure things out. Plus, I never had a female partner before.”
“One more thing,” Wallace said, standing up and putting things in her shoulder bag. “About a dozen kilos were taken into evidence on this case. I want you to go to the evidence room, and look at the bags themselves. Not the powder inside, the actual plastic bags. I want to know what they are and where they come from.”
“Seriously? I’m chasing down sandwich bags? I said I was sorry.”
When she looked down at Mike, he had a strange expression on his face. Wallace couldn’t tell if he was going to laugh or cry.
“I need to talk to someone about an old, inactive case. I’ll be back in a few minutes.” She left the bullpen wondering which unremembered transgression had wheeled Medicated Mike into the debit column of her karmic ledger. The only thing more dangerous than an eager-beaver rookie was an out-of-practice veteran with something to prove and, in a sense, Mike was a bit of both.
5:30 P.M.
When Wallace got back, Mike Harrison was gone, so she pulled up the preliminary autopsy results on Overman, for another read-through. The coroner, normally a stickler for rules and schedules, had been so intrigued by the possibility that someone had put a snake inside the victim, she not only agreed to put him at the head of the line, she did the autopsy on a Sunday—a day they were not normally done.
The results had been released late Sunday night so Wallace immediately took the time to study them and transfer information from there into her official police report. In addition to confirming the presence and species of the snake—a juvenile emerald tree boa, native to South America—the coroner reported that all of Overman’s fingertips had been crushed. Tightly spaced parallel groove patterns across his fingernails and the pads of his fingers indicated that pliers had been used. Wallace recalled the bloated, purplish condition of Overman’s hands at the crime scene. The swelling had obviously obscured the plier marks. The crushed fingertips supported Arthur Staples’s theory that Overman was being interrogated at the time of his death. Bits of cotton lint recovered from his oral cavity meant a rag of some sort had been stuffed into his mouth—no doubt to keep the noise down during the painful parts. And, interestingly, the coroner had determined that none of Overman’s physical injuries, separately or in combination, had been fatal. A determination of the cause of death would have to await the results of the toxicology screen. Those would not start trickling in for at least another day.
After she finished reading the report, Wallace spent the rest of the day tidying up the details of other cases and compiling a list of online snake dealers who claimed to deal in emerald tree boas. She even called several, but none had made any recent sales. By the time she was ready to leave, Mike had still not returned.
As she gathered her things, her desk phone rang. She almost let it go to voicemail, but the DC area code intrigued her. How pathetic, she thought as she reached for the phone, that an out-of-town call from some unknown party could be a more fascinating proposition than heading home after a long, hard day.
“This is Detective Hartman.” She sat on the edge of her desk, one foot resting on an open drawer.
“Detective, this is Mason Cunningham. I run part of the Intelligence Division at the DEA.”
“How can I help you, Mr. Cunningham?”
“I’m not sure who would end up helping whom, but, at the moment, I’m trying to verify something. You’re the officer of record on a homicide committed in your jurisdiction on Sunday. The killer left a rather unusual calling card.”
“A calling card implies an identity. Are you saying you know who goes around doing this sort of thing?” She wasn’t going to reveal any details, in case the caller was a reporter scamming for information.
“I do know of such a person. I don’t know if it’s the same person in your case, but I would very much like to find that out,” Mason said.
“How many forms will I have to file, with how many agencies, before I can get the name of this sainted individual?”
“Fernando Echeverría.”
“That was suspiciously easy,” she said, as she scribbled the name onto her desk
blotter. Surely this was just the bait on the usual federal hook—the old give a little, take a lot routine.
“Detective Hartman … we’re on the same side.”
“But not on the same team.”
“Nicely put,” he said. “How many forms will I have to file, with how many agencies, before I can get you to agree to throw a little information my way?”
Nicely put, yourself, she thought, but she would not be charmed so easily. “You seem a little too practiced at this type of repartee, Mr. Cunningham. How could you help me any more than you just did? I already have access to all the major state and federal crime information databases. As we speak, one of my officers is checking out the name you just gave me,” she lied.
“Well, that last part is not true. I can see, in real-time, who’s searching those databases, and there are no searches for Fernando Echeverría originating from Baton Rouge, or anywhere else for that matter.”
Wallace remained quiet to see if he would react further to her little deception.
“It’ll probably turn out that neither of us will end up helping the other very much,” Mason continued. “But, I can tell you this—Echeverría is a very disagreeable person. If he or his heavies are in your neck of the woods, you can be sure big trouble isn’t far behind.”
“How did you even become aware of this?” Wallace asked.
“We operate a program that continuously compares information from DEA investigations to the information in local police reports to let us know when local investigations are targeting the same people we are. It searches by name and any other identifying feature that’s common to both sets of information. Monday morning it kicked out a cross-match between one of your cases and one of ours. It matched on the snake.”
Wallace knew the information from Overman’s autopsy report hadn’t gone into her official police report until she inputted it herself Sunday night. Whatever system her caller had, it was very thorough and very fast.
“With all that information, why do you need me at all? Why can’t you just go on the assumption it’s Echeverría, subpoena any of our records and reports you don’t already have access to, and move forward with your own operation?”
“We may do exactly that. But, I can’t afford to leave any stone unturned. I need more than just reports. I need street-level detail that’s not in the written record, your and your colleagues’ local knowledge of the players in south Louisiana. You know, personal cooperation.”
“I hope you’re not planning to use me to help you find this killer, then you whisk him off someplace where we can’t prosecute. This was a really ugly crime. I’ll want some really ugly justice.”
“I’ll do my best to make sure we don’t stymie you,” he said. “I can’t promise more than that. I’m coming to Baton Rouge tomorrow morning, and I’d like to meet with you … unless that’s not convenient.”
“Tomorrow morning is fine,” she said, wondering if his presence would, in fact, be fine, or if it would be a pain in the ass. The fact that a federal agent appeared to be taking her schedule into consideration instead of just announcing when and where her and her department’s cooperation would be forthcoming, seemed odd—but odd in a good way. She tended to get along better with people who were burdened with quirky habits like good old-fashioned common courtesy. Maybe it meant he wouldn’t try to take over her case. She knew of the occasional jurisdictional standoff between locals and the feds. Perhaps his diplomacy and his decision to come to Baton Rouge signaled nothing more than the importance of the matter.
“When will you arrive? I’ll have someone pick you up at the airport,” she said, bidding for control of the opportunity her caller represented.
“That’s a nice offer, but I was planning to just rent a car. I’m also setting up meetings with the state police, sheriff’s investigators, and the other federal agencies involved in drug suppression, so I’ll need to be pretty mobile.”
“Where will you be staying?”
“At the … let’s see … the Istrouma Hotel.”
“They have a rental car desk, there. Let us pick you up, take you to the crime scene—which is about halfway between the airport and your hotel—then drop you off. You can get your car at the hotel.”
“Well … alright then. Your way sounds fine. I’ll want to meet with you and with any of your officers on the drug beat who know the Overman organization.”
“I can set that up, but we may not get all of them in one go,” she said. “They tend to have erratic schedules.”
“I understand,” he said. “Thanks for whatever you can do.”
“You’re welcome. And listen, before we hang up, there’s something you might be able to help us both with. The man who discovered this homicide—Arthur Staples—is a city employee whose history, beyond a certain point, gets murky. He had an obvious opportunity to kill Overman, and he’s admitted to some sort of a motive for wanting him dead. You might be in a position to uncover information about him that is, so far, proving to be out of my reach.”
“The illicit drug economy is really all my outfit deals with. Do you think he’s involved with that?”
“He hinted he was once employed by Uncle Sam in some unusual but unspecified capacity.”
“And you want to know if Uncle Sam gave him the skills to do what was done to Overman.”
“Means, motive, and opportunity—the big three in my line of work. If you could throw a little light on the means part…”
She gave him what she had on Staples, but she wasn’t sure how much effort she should expect him to put forth. Then again, he hadn’t tried to force her cooperation or tried to impose any jurisdictional mandates on her. Maybe he was a fed who knew how to play nice. What would they think of next?
After they hung up, she called the head of the Narcotics Division to arrange the meeting Mason requested, then she called Mike Harrison to let him know when and where the meeting would take place. Mike didn’t answer so she left a message.
FIVE
WEDNESDAY MORNING
“Your card says you’re a Ph.D. Do you prefer Dr. Cunningham or Mr. Cunningham?” Wallace asked. They were in her unmarked cruiser, moving south through a blighted area, headed away from the Baton Rouge Metropolitan Airport.
“Mason is fine. And you?”
“Just Wallace. Ever been to Baton Rouge?”
“Never been in Louisiana.”
When she looked over at him, Mason was staring straight ahead, not looking at the buildings or the people on the street. Whenever she traveled to a new place, she gawked at everything with a goofy country-come-to-town look plastered across her face. She couldn’t be sure, but he seemed almost shy or ill at ease.
After a short silence, he continued. “When we spoke yesterday you said you would have someone pick me up at the airport. I wasn’t expecting it to be you.”
“The governor was busy.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Wallace could see an eye roll and a strained smile disrupt the stony federal façade Mason had maintained since his arrival. Somehow she had gotten it in her head that a statistician would look about as exciting as the occupation sounded, but this guy definitely beat the odds by a fair margin.
“Anything new since we spoke yesterday?” he asked.
“We’ve got a time frame for when the killer left the scene,” Wallace said. “The snake died around three forty-seven. A reptile expert the coroner consulted said it probably could have survived for around twenty minutes.”
“Assuming twenty minutes is reasonably close and working backward from three forty-seven, that means the snake was inserted at around three twenty-seven. What time did your engineer find him?”
“At three thirty-two. So it was sometime during that five minute stretch when the killer took off.”
“Which means he, or she, wouldn’t have been too far away when Overman was discovered.”
“We also found a baby monitor wedging open the door to the warehouse—the transmitter part that goe
s near the crib, which probably means—”
“—the killer was working alone or at least without a lookout,” Mason said, finishing her sentence. “Clever. He kept the receiver with him, so he’d hear anyone approaching. They’re cheap and they can send a signal over several hundred feet.”
“You know a lot about baby monitors. You have little ones?” she asked.
“My sister just had a baby. I gave them a monitor. So, I did my homework first.”
Under the basic rules of polite chitchat, Wallace knew this would be the place for him to ask if she had children, but he didn’t. The silence felt like a missed opportunity.
“I’ve tried contacting snake dealers,” Wallace said. “Maybe we can link a purchase to some personal information about the buyer like a credit card or an address. No luck, so far, though.”
“It’s low probability,” Mason said. “There are a ton of breeders. They all ship everywhere and it’s easy to buy anonymously. Same with the baby monitor. It’s doubtful you’ll ever put a name to either one.”
During the remainder of the drive, she filled Mason in on the particulars of her conversations with Arthur and Wanda Staples.
The warehouse was back from the road, in a light industrial district, in the southeastern part of Baton Rouge. A deep lawn overtaken by scrub trees and underbrush made it difficult to see from the street. Wallace pulled all the way up to the crime-scene tape.
“After we leave here, do you mind if we stop at that little taco restaurant we just passed?” Mason asked, as they got out of the car. “Breakfast on the plane was useless,” he said, as they walked the rest of the way to the building.
“Too dangerous,” Wallace said, pulling a key from her pocket.
“But you’re carrying a gun.”
“And I’m a really good shot, but salmonella is tough to shoot.”
“Then maybe you know a place where the odds of survival are more in our favor.”
Wallace opened the padlock the evidence techs had installed on the door and they went in.