by Roger Johns
“First I need to share some information with you. Information that needs to stay … unpublicized,” Mason said, cautiously. “If we can agree on that—”
“Most of the folks in this room are undercover, Mr. Cunningham. They’re trusting you with their lives, just by letting you see their faces,” Bosso retorted. “We know how to keep secrets,” he continued, not bothering to look up from a careful study of both hands.
“I’m not calling your discretion into question,” Mason fired back. “I’m flagging the information as something that hasn’t been released. Its value would be lost if it got loose.”
“We understand,” Beverly said. “Let’s just get on with this.”
Mason began by laying out the data showing the sudden fall in street prices for cocaine and the rise in dealer arrests, then finished with Don’s theory that cocaine originally earmarked for the surrounding states was being diverted into south Louisiana.
“Interesting idea,” Beverly admitted. “If it’s true, the potential for cartel-level violence would seem to be very high.”
“What I’m seeing bears that out,” Bosso said. “There does seem to be more and cheaper shit on the street. But how widespread that is, I couldn’t say.”
“As to whether the extra product is coming in from places like Mississippi and Arkansas, that would be anybody’s guess,” one of the other officers said.
“Based on your knowledge of the area, how feasible would that even be?” Mason asked.
“It could happen,” Bosso said. “But geographic factors would limit where. There’s only so many bridges across the rivers between Louisiana and Mississippi. Those are low probability because they’re so heavily watched.”
“That leaves the northern border of the parishes, between the Pearl River and the Mississippi,” Mason said. “Detective Hartman tells me that’s some pretty rough country. So if the cocaine is coming in from Mississippi, wouldn’t that be a likely place?”
“That would actually be the very best place since it’s so difficult to patrol and, obviously, sitting right on top of south Louisiana,” Bosso said, pulling his feet off the table.
“I know most street-level dealers don’t know which cartel produces their goods,” Mason said. “But the ones getting arrested, are they giving up anything on the source of their stuff?”
“No. But like you said, they don’t know and they don’t give a shit,” Beverly said. “For information like that, we’d need a really talkative individual who was high up in Overman’s bunch. Which, at the moment, we don’t have.”
“What about who might have killed him?” Mason asked.
“Like I told Detective Hartman, the day Overman got wasted, other than the usual suspects—people trying to take his sandbox away from him—we’re in the dark,” Bosso said, returning his attention to his left hand.
SEVEN
WEDNESDAY 2:00 P.M.
It had rained heavily for about fifteen minutes, but now the sun was out full force, raising tendrils of steam off the hot streets. People on the sidewalks squinted against the glare reflecting off the rain-slick windshields and glass buildings. The dirt smell of the river, a few blocks west, was heavy in the soggy air.
“The area where Overman was killed is sort of on the way to Tunica,” Wallace said. “Since we finished our meeting early, we have some extra time. I’d like to follow up the half-assed neighborhood canvass. Will that work for you?” she asked, as they drove away from the police station. Wallace felt her low opinion of Mike Harrison was vindicated by his failure to show up at the meeting, but she was also irritated at having to do the work she wanted him to do.
“I’m perfectly fine with stopping to do a little poking around in the neighborhood by the warehouse.” He studied her closely. “Are you?”
Either she was losing her poker face or Mason was more observant than she’d given him credit for. “Am I so easy to read?”
“Your no-show partner getting under your skin?” He pulled his tablet from his shoulder bag and opened Google maps.
“Something like that.”
Traffic was light as they headed northeast away from downtown. They rode in silence for several minutes. When she glanced over at him, he was focused on the tablet in his lap.
“I’m looking at the satellite view of the area around the warehouse.” He swiped his finger across the screen and spread the image. “It fronts on a street called Choctaw Ridge and backs up to a large wooded area. What looks like a wide, well-groomed power line easement cuts through the trees and opens at a residential neighborhood about a mile away.”
“So someone approaching from the rear would have had a sheltered pathway there and back.”
“Any idea what this is?” he asked, pointing at what looked like a series of parallel brown bands in the otherwise uniformly green easement.
Wallace pulled onto the shoulder and took Mason’s tablet, zooming in as close as she could. “It’s close to the back of the neighborhood, so it’s probably a community vegetable garden.”
“People farm under high-tension power lines?”
“It’s illegal, but they do it anyway. In fact, let’s start there. Maybe someone was tending the pea patch and saw something.”
Their approach to the warehouse took them through an old part of Baton Rouge. Residential areas built during the fifties and sixties transitioned into stretches of metal buildings and homes converted to commercial use.
As they neared their destination, Wallace turned off Choctaw Ridge and worked her way toward the neighborhood that lay behind and to the north of the crime scene. She stopped at the southernmost part of the neighborhood, nearest the mouth of the power line easement.
They parked and took off on foot, looking for the rows they had seen on the satellite image. The easement was about two hundred feet wide. Thick electrical cables drooped heavily between the huge skeletal towers that marched into the distance. About a hundred yards in, the cleared area turned sharply to the left. As they made the turn, the plowed rows came into view. It was indeed a garden—quite a large one. A group of men and women, all appearing to be in their sixties and seventies, were getting down to business with rakes and hoes.
“May I he’p you?” one of the women asked, as Wallace and Mason approached.
The crowd visibly tensed when Wallace introduced herself and Mason. As if a secret signal had passed among them, everyone dropped their tools and began to walk back toward the houses.
“Just take what you want,” one of the departing women said over her shoulder. “There ain’t gone be enough left for us to make it worth doing anymore, so don’t expect nothin’ after this. Take the tools too. We ain’t gonna have no use for ’em.”
“We’re not here because of your garden,” Wallace said. “We’re investigating a crime that took place near here, a few days ago.”
“You talking ’bout dat drug dealer what was kilt over on Choctaw?” one of the men asked in a wheezy voice.
“Yes sir. But we’ll get to that in a minute. Is someone shaking you down, here? Cops?” Wallace asked.
The ones walking away stopped, but no one spoke. Wallace walked over to the woman who had spoken first. She had the dead-eyed, jut-jawed expression of someone who had been forced to submit too often.
“If you’re being victimized by a police officer, tell me. I’ll make it stop.”
“You gone run on up to headquarters and complain for us?” the woman asked. “And then what? You make trouble for ’im, instead of stealin’ from us the son of a bitch’ll just get mad and come out here and start hurtin’ people. You gone fix that too?”
“We’re old, not stupid,” one of the men said.
“In case you change your mind,” Wallace said, handing the woman her card.
The woman stuck the card in a pocket of her work shirt, without looking at it. “I know you’re tryin’ to do right, but let’s just leave that to the side, for the time bein’. You prob’ly wanna know if anybody here knows anythin
g ’bout that fella in the warehouse?”
“Yes ma’am,” Wallace said. “And I’m sorry if you’ve already been over this, but the officers who went asking around in your neighborhood the day it happened didn’t have much luck finding folks at home. And please, tell me your name.”
“I’m Louise Mautner. Most of us are retired and lots of us spend our time out here. Helps us make ends meet and it’s good exercise. Them officers prob’ly didn’t find too many folks at home ’cause a lot of us woulda been out here.”
“Well then, thank you for taking the time now,” Wallace said.
“How much do you know about the individual who was killed?” Mason asked.
“Just what was in the papers,” Louise said.
“It happened Sunday afternoon,” Mason added. “Was everyone that’s here today, out here then?”
“My sister and I were here,” Louise said, as she pointed to another woman in the group. “And those three men over there.”
“We’re most interested in the time between three and four,” Mason said.
“Anything you can remember,” Wallace prompted. “Even if it doesn’t strike you as terribly important.”
“Only thing we saw was some fool shootin’ through here on a motorcycle,” Louise said. “But there’s lots a that goin’ on, right along in here. Lots of folks on four-wheelers and dirt bikes and thangs like that.”
“Then what made you notice that particular motorcycle?” Mason probed.
“Well, we pretty much know the people that ride around in here, ’cause they’re from the neighborhood. This fella whadn’t anybody I’d seen before.”
“Fella? The rider was male? You’re certain of that?” Wallace asked.
“Well, not absolutely certain, no. He was wearin’ a helmet with a tinted visor, but he looked like he was built like a guy,” Louise said.
“And he was going fast,” one of the men said. “Most of the regulars is just cruising, out having a little fun. But this guy whadn’t wasting time. He was loud and he was moving.”
“Do you remember what the bike looked like?” Wallace asked.
“Not the make, or nothin’,” the first woman said. “It was shiny black all over. What the kids call a crotch rocket.”
“Did he exit the easement at your neighborhood, or did he continue in the easement past the subdivision?”
“He drove right out into the street at the corner and disappeared. You could hear him for a while, but once he hit the street I couldn’t see him anymore,” Louise said.
“Could you tell from the sound, which way he went?” Mason asked.
“East,” Louise said.
“And, can you pinpoint the time?” Mason asked.
“Not exactly, no,” Louise said. “I do remember we were on our way back to the house when the motorcycle went past. And when we walked in the back door, the clock in the kitchen said three-oh-five. I remember that ‘cause I needed to put somethin’ in the oven at three forty-five, and I remember thinkin’ to myself that I had forty minutes to get cleaned up before I needed to start cookin’.”
“How long between the time the bike went past and when you saw your kitchen clock?” Wallace asked.
“Prob’ly no more than five minutes, at the most,” Louise’s sister said. “A couple of minutes to go to the house, and another two or three to get the tools and the boots put away.”
“Can you think of anything else?” Mason asked.
“No. Can y’all think of anything?” Louise asked, looking out at the rest of the group. The question was met with a muted chorus of no’s and negative head shakes.
“This is going to sound like a strange thing to ask,” Wallace began, “but do you mind if we walk back to your house with you?”
“What for?” Louise asked, suddenly suspicious.
“Just trying to get the time frame as close as possible. Do either of you carry a cell phone?”
“Of course. We both do,” Louise replied.
“Would you mind comparing the time on your kitchen clock to the time on your cell phone? We’ll wait out by the street.”
“Sure. We can do that,” Louise said, the suspicion draining out of her voice.
Mason and Wallace followed several steps behind the sisters as they walked from the garden toward the neighborhood. A few minutes later, Louise met them on the sidewalk in front of her house.
“The kitchen clock is two minutes ahead of my cell phone,” she said. “So I guess we actually walked into the kitchen at three-oh-three, not three-oh-five. Is that what you wanted?”
“It is. Thank you,” Wallace said.
“One last question,” Mason said. “Is this easement a shortcut that people might use to get from the main road up there to somewhere north of here?”
“No. Just vacant land on out past the subdivision. Unless you’re drivin’ some kinda off-road vehicle, it’d be quicker just to take the regular streets back on into the neighborhood.”
“Thanks, again,” Wallace said. “It’s possible we might think of a few more questions. Is there a way I could get in touch with you?”
“Sure,” Louise said. She pulled Wallace’s card from her pocket and called Wallace’s cell.
Wallace’s phone began to ring. “Is this you?” Wallace asked, showing her phone to Louise.
“Yes ma’am,” Louise said, turning toward her house.
“Thank you,” Mason called after her.
“It’s probably time that we headed up to the Tunica Laboratory,” Wallace said, as they watched Louise move slowly up the walkway to her front door.
“You look ready to play the what-if game,” Mason said, in response to her thoughtful look.
“Stop getting in my head like that,” she said, smiling. “You don’t know me well enough.” She paused. “So … what if we assume Mr. Crotch Rocket was a member of the cast in that little drama at the warehouse?”
“Then, based on your earlier calculation that Overman and the snake got cozy at about three twenty-seven, it looks like Mr. Crotch Rocket had already exited the stage about thirty minutes before that.”
“Which means that there had to be at least two people with Overman. The guy on the motorcycle and the guy who stayed behind in the air shaft,” Wallace said. “And it seems reasonable to assume the guy in the air shaft was the snake handler.”
“So if the snake guy was there the whole time after Crotch Rocket left, then he and Overman were alone together for the thirty minutes between then and the time Arthur Staples arrived.”
“We can’t assume it was just the two of them in the warehouse at that point,” Wallace added.
“True,” Mason said. “But we know the motorcycle rider was gone—”
“Which raises the question of whether he and the snake handler were together or whether Overman encountered them separately.”
“And we still don’t know how Overman got to the warehouse, or how the snake handler in the air shaft got away.”
“We don’t actually know if the motorcycle rider is even part of this,” Wallace cautioned. “It’s just an assumption, at this point.”
EIGHT
WEDNESDAY 3:15 P.M.
Kevin Bell was the Director of the Tunica Research Laboratory, although, if he had many more weeks like he was having now, he wasn’t sure how much longer his directorship would last. Late Monday morning, Carla Chapman had notified him that Matt Gable, one of the lab’s most important scientists, appeared to be missing. Carla was Matt’s principal research assistant and a talented scientist in her own right. She had returned from a conference late Sunday night and been unable to get Gable on the phone. She said she assumed he was working late.
On Monday morning, though, when Matt was not at the lab and still not answering his phone, Carla had driven by his house. When she discovered that the house had burned down during the night, she became alarmed and went straight to the police. They told her no one had been in the house at the time of the fire, so she had filed a miss
ing person report and then returned to work. That was when she had called him to say Matt was probably missing.
After checking with security, Kevin discovered that Matt had exited the lab the previous Friday and hadn’t been back since.
Monday afternoon Kevin had gotten Carla to walk him through Matt’s lab areas, looking for some clue as to the researcher’s whereabouts. What they found instead was a locked storage room that concealed what appeared to be functioning but unauthorized apparatuses. Kevin’s best guess was that Matt had been diverting lab resources to some personal, probably illegal, purpose. There was no way he could tolerate any off-the-books shenanigans, especially when inspectors from his funding agencies would be descending on the lab in less than two weeks. Slow progress toward its goal and an increasing need for resources kept the lab under intense scrutiny and its continued existence seemed to hang forever in the balance. Kevin had to think of the greater good, so he had ordered Carla to disassemble the whole business and send it to the crusher.
Then, late Tuesday afternoon, the local police chief had called to see if Matt had returned or been located. Kevin assumed that if the police had taken an interest in Matt for reasons related to the apparatus in the closet, they would have shown up at the gate with a search warrant by now. Since they hadn’t, he was relieved he had gotten rid of it. Going on the assumption that the less he appeared to know, the better off he and the lab would be, he had told the police chief the absolute minimum—that Matt’s whereabouts were still unknown.
Today, he was finally starting to feel like some semblance of order was returning to his world. Even though Matt had still not surfaced, Kevin was content to let the local police handle the search for the rogue chemist. He was also feeling pretty clever about having Carla destroy the stuff from the closet, instead of doing it himself. If push came to shove, he could very plausibly claim ignorance of the matter and Carla would certainly be in no hurry to admit to anyone that she had been a participant in the destruction of evidence.
Kevin’s intercom chirped. It was his administrative assistant.