by Roger Johns
“You probably think I’m a mess.”
“What I think is that you must be unbelievably strong.”
“I’m not playing that part very well,” she murmured, wiping her face with the sleeve of his shirt.
“Not so.” He put his feet on top of hers, then reached toward her. “You bear it with a great deal of grace.” He took one of her hands in both of his. “We’ve spent a lot of time pretty close together over the last few days, and I never had an inkling you were carrying something so heavy. You can be so lighthearted and funny and gentle.”
“I shouldn’t have thrown all this at you,” she said. “We were supposed to be celebrating.”
“Actually, I’m glad you told me. I have to confess I’ve been so curious about you.”
“Well, you sure have a funny way of dealing with your curiosity,” she said, with a disbelieving smile. “It wasn’t until after you had your way with me, in the backseat of my car, that you asked even one question about me.”
Mason chuckled at her attempt to cast him as the playmaker. “To be perfectly honest, you frighten me just a little. You’re … intricate … unexpected … a lot to hope for in one person.”
Wallace hadn’t anticipated as much revelation and feeling as Mason’s words implied, but she wanted to hear what else he had to say. She waited for him to speak again.
“I’m not explaining myself very well.”
“But I’m enjoying it,” she said, with a soft smile.
Mason’s gaze traveled meticulously from her face to her toes, then back.
Wallace watched him, his eyes making her feel naked, despite the shirt draped over her body. She blushed.
Mason cocked his head and raised an eyebrow.
“I think that’s my shirt you’ve got there,” he said with a straight face.
“You can’t have it back, just yet.” She laughed and crinkled her nose, tucking the shirt protectively around her. Her face heated up with unaccustomed modesty.
“I’m afraid you can’t keep it. That would be theft. And you being an officer of the law and all…” With a raffish look, he extended his hand toward her, palm up, crooking his fingers in a slow hand-it-over gesture.
“Fine. Be that way.” She balled up the shirt and tossed it over his head toward the darkness beyond. As he reached high to catch it, she crawled on top of him, her hands quick and sure as they unfastened the button on his pants.
2:30 A.M.
They were mostly quiet on the ride back to Mason’s hotel. It felt like an intimate silence, if not completely comfortable. She could tell Mason didn’t want the evening to end, and she didn’t either, but she also needed to be alone for a while. A lot had happened in the past few days and she needed time to think through everything without more variables getting added to the equation. They agreed to talk in the morning.
She stared after him for a few seconds, as he walked from her car to the front door of the hotel, then she pulled away and headed toward home—a small bungalow in the Garden District that she shared with Lulu and Boy Howdy, a pair of overweight black-and-white cats.
2:45 A.M.
The detective certainly had good taste in cars, Don thought, when Wallace’s convertible pulled in front of the hotel. He couldn’t be absolutely sure, but the expression on Mason’s face as he exited the car made Don think that their being out so late together on a school night might have involved more than police work. And while he couldn’t see the detective’s expression as clearly, there was no doubt that her eyes followed Mason from the car to the front door of the hotel.
The big convertible was easy to follow as she drove off and the traffic around the hotel was heavy enough to give him cover. As they approached a residential area, however, most of the traffic evaporated. Don hung back a ways, losing sight of the Oldsmobile as it rounded a corner into a quiet, leafy neighborhood. When he turned the corner, her car was nowhere to be seen.
TWENTY-TWO
FRIDAY 3:00 A.M.
During the drive home, Wallace tried hard to understand the implications of her frolic on the levee. In general, she was good at knowing the difference between the things that made her happy and the things that made her feel good, and sex, rare though it was these days, usually accomplished at least one or the other. Tonight it had eventually accomplished both. But it had also left her feeling exposed and vulnerable, as if there were an uninvited, unexpected stranger in the midst of her emotions. And the sense of unfinished business she had felt earlier, when Mason had told her he would be going back to Washington in the morning, had intensified.
She entered her house through the carport door and looked around for the cats. As usual, Boy Howdy was home, but Lulu appeared to be out. Boy Howdy was a momma’s boy. Lulu was a slut.
* * *
Don drove slowly down the street, rubbernecking from side to side, looking for some sign of her. The pecan and oak trees lining the street were so big and their branches hung so low that a number of the streetlights were lost among the leaves, giving a murky green cast to the light that filtered down to the pavement. Just when Don was beginning to wonder whether he would be able to find her, a pair of headlights burst on, spearing him like a fish. A millisecond of fear arced across his nerves. Instinctively his hand went up, palm outward, to shield his eyes.
He quickly got his fright under control when he realized that even if she saw him, she wouldn’t know who he was. But it wasn’t her, and the car pulled into the street and sped away.
Several houses farther down the street, he spotted her car—the only vehicle in a two-car carport and she had parked dead center. That meant she was used to having the whole carport to herself. She lived alone.
Driving aimlessly through the neighborhood, he pondered his next move. Attempting to deal with the detective by entering her house seemed too risky. Cops carried guns and she might be the type who kept hers handy, even when she was off duty. As a female cop, living alone, she probably slept with her gun. Plus, she might be more valuable alive. She might even lead him to Matt Gable.
Don wound his way back onto Wallace’s street and drove past her house again. Her car was still there. Pulling to the curb about fifty yards away, facing toward her house, he killed the engine. Then he tried to find a position that was bearable, but not comfortable enough to send him into dreamland. He didn’t need to make his next move in pursuit of Matt until lunchtime tomorrow. For now, he would watch the detective, trying to figure out whether she would be a threat or an opportunity and how to deal with either eventuality. He would also fuck with Matt Gable’s head some more. He pulled Carla’s phone from his bag.
* * *
After putting down food for the cats, Wallace wandered into the den and lay down on the couch, once again letting her mind page back through the last several hours. She hadn’t talked about Kenny, her late husband, in a long time. But tonight her usual list of reasons for remaining tight-lipped seemed inconsequential and hard to bring into focus. Without warning, a brief sadness clutched at her. Something old and comfortable was slipping through her fingers. A feeble nostalgia glimmered around the edges of her memories, but it faded quickly.
She wanted to talk to Mason—to find out more about what he was thinking and feeling. But tomorrow would be soon enough, after she had a bit of distance from the events.
Boy Howdy circled by within easy reach, nonchalantly playing for affection. She hauled the massive cat onto her chest, intending to confide the secrets of her day to the purring, wide-eyed creature, but his heft and his warmth were almost instantly narcotic.
TWENTY-THREE
7:30 A.M.
The ringing startled her awake. She was still on the couch. Boy Howdy had deserted her in favor of the top of the backrest. He stared down at her as she felt around for her phone.
“Hello,” she rasped.
“It’s Mason. Sorry to call so early, but my office just called. Things have changed. I know this won’t be your case much longer, but I think you need
to know this.”
“I’m listening.”
“It was from someone in our recon section. They do satellite photo analysis.”
“Don’t tell me. They got shots of us on the levee last night.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” he laughed. “But no, that’s not it. Do you remember me telling you about the supply analysis one of my guys did?” Mason asked.
“Sure. That drove your theory that the Overman killing might be the start of a turf war.”
“If an analysis reveals something that might require a change in tactics, as a precaution we have a second analyst attempt to replicate the result. It’s a top-to-bottom redo. Everything gets looked at again.”
“And?”
“The second analyst got the same results.”
“That’s good, isn’t it? It means we were operating under the correct assumptions, right?”
“Yes, but this person from the recon section, where some of our data came from, she was helping the second analyst. She started to question the data itself. It didn’t look right to her. It was too symmetrical. Naturally occurring data has a certain randomness to it, but this didn’t, so she ran a data integrity analysis, thinking that somehow the information had become corrupted.”
“Had it?”
“It was tampered with.”
“Before or after the original analysis?”
“Before. Months before.”
“Is there any way to know who did this?”
“So far, all we know is that it was done from an unassigned terminal, using the login ID of an employee who couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with it.”
“Who would do such a thing? And why?” she asked.
“Good question. I’ve tried to contact the original analyst, but he’s been out sick, and he’s not answering his phone or email.”
“Is there any way to restore the original data?”
“That’s already been done.”
“So, what’s the bottom line? Where does this leave things?”
“At a minimum, it means that someone wanted me, the Intelligence Division, to believe a turf war was brewing, when it wasn’t … that distribution patterns were changing in ways that they weren’t. That the increase in the street supply of cocaine in south Louisiana was due to an influx from surrounding states, but that’s not the case either.”
“So what data was changed?” Wallace asked.
“The direction that some of the cocaine was moving when it was seized. In fact, unusually large amounts were seized moving out of Louisiana into Mississippi, but the data was modified to make it look like it was moving into Louisiana, instead.”
“Why would anyone bother to do that?”
“To make it look like the rival cartels that were operating in those other states were moving their product into Louisiana because it was becoming more profitable here. Hence, our cartel war theory. In fact, the overabundance we saw appears to somehow be originating in Louisiana and some of it is being moved out into the surrounding states.”
“So we’re still wrestling with the same question,” she said. “Where is it coming from?”
“And still no answers. Plus a new question—who altered the data, then covered their tracks?”
“Let’s go back over what we have so far,” she said, now fully alert. “A spike in supply in south Louisiana, a missing … hang on,” she said, when her phone signaled an incoming call.
“Detective Hartman,” she answered.
“Detective,” a reedy woman’s voice began, “this is Louise Mautner. You sent me the picture a that motorbike.”
With all that had happened in the last thirty-six hours, Wallace had forgotten about sending the picture. “Thanks for calling back. Does it look like the … uh … crotch rocket you all saw?”
“I showed it around. That’s what took me s’ long to call you back. Not everybody agrees, but there’s more says it is than it idn’t. Me? I know it is. There’s a scrape mark along the rear fender kinda looks like a lopsided arrowhead. Forgot all about that ’til I saw it again in your picture.”
“Thank you, Louise. This is very helpful. If you think of anything else, please, you have my number, don’t hesitate to call.”
“Alright, Detective. Good luck.”
“Oh, and by the way, we never got back to our little discussion about Officer Marcels, your friendly neighborhood shakedown artist.”
When Louise neither spoke up nor hung up, Wallace took it as confirmation that Marcels was indeed the creep involved.
“As I was sayin’, Detective, good luck with your investigation,” Louise said, hanging up.
“Mason, are you still there?” she asked, reconnecting.
“Yeah. Everything okay?”
“That was Louise Mautner, the woman we met under the power lines. I sent her the picture of Matt Gable’s motorcycle and she’s positively identified it as the one they saw the day Overman was killed.”
“So unless someone else was riding that motorcycle, the connection between Gable and Overman now seems pretty solid,” Mason said.
“And it puts them at the warehouse at approximately the same time. But we’re still no closer to knowing where all this unaccounted-for cocaine is coming from. Now that we know some as-yet-to-be-identified employee in your office is involved, are you still leaving today, or will you be staying?” Wallace asked.
“I don’t see how I can leave until I find out how my outfit is involved in what’s going on. We obviously didn’t know as much as we thought we did. When will we know what’s in the stuff from Gable’s lab?”
“I’ll call Connie at the lab, the minute we hang up. Any luck on the camera feeds from Matt’s house?”
“We’ve both got homework. I’ll call you back.”
“From eleven to one, I have an appointment, but I’ll try to call you before that,” she said. Their plan to find a quiet part of the morning to talk about the previous night had crumbled before the day even started. She hurried through breakfast and a shower, put down food for the cats, and headed out. She needed to stop at Colley’s to let him know about getting booted off the case. She was terrified that he would be disappointed.
After that, she would switch out her personal car for her police cruiser and then drive to the crime lab to check the progress on setting up the materials from Matt Gable’s lab.
8:45 A.M.
She cruised through her neighborhood, taking in the sounds and smells of the Garden District. At least one member of her immediate family had lived in this part of town for over seventy-five years. Until she was about seven or eight, though, she couldn’t get her mind around the idea that a house that had once belonged to someone in the family could ever belong to anyone else. It just didn’t seem right. Capitalizing on her oddball notion, her ever-enterprising brothers had concocted a mission to “get inside” the house their uncle Raymond had at one time owned, and for once, they were going to let Wallace take the lead.
Standing on the front porch, the home’s then-owner had listened patiently to Wallace’s pitch about how the house belonged to their uncle and that she and her brothers just needed to see inside to make sure everything was still okay. Wallace had burst into tears of frustration when it became obvious that the lady of the house wasn’t going to throw open her home to inspection by a posse of pint-sized rascals. Wallace’s frustration quickly turned into hurt when she looked toward her brothers for moral support and saw them hooting and high-fiving at the curb, just before they tore out on their bikes, leaving her behind.
The memory was so vivid and so encompassing that Wallace failed to notice the van that was following her.
* * *
Colley and Stella lived near the old Bocage area of town, several minutes from Wallace’s house. Most of the homes had been built in the sixties and the neighborhood had matured nicely. Their home had a deep porch that ran across almost the entire front of the house and wrapped around the right side. He and Stella had spent a sm
all fortune unburdening the house of all of the architecturally appalling upgrades inflicted on it by previous owners. Period bathroom fixtures had been purchased from dealers in antique building materials and re-enameled in their original but now out-of-fashion pastel shades. And after years of carting around two rotary dial telephones from her childhood home, Stella had made Colley put them back into service. Installing and hiding the converters that made the phones function on a digital line had taxed Colley’s craftsmanship, but the phones worked perfectly.
Colley was sitting on the front porch in a white wicker chair, drinking coffee and reading a magazine, when Wallace stopped at the curb. She saw a tiny current of worry cross his face as she walked up to the house.
9:06 A.M.
Well, isn’t she the dutiful daughter, Don thought as he rolled past the house and saw Wallace and the older man chatting on the front porch. How touching, that she would put a visit to Daddy ahead of getting to work on time. Mason had been correct—she was nice-looking, very nice-looking.
As he reached the end of the block, Don pushed those thoughts aside and focused on the next steps in his plan to capture the elusive Matt Gable. For that, he would need to keep his meddlesome boss and the pretty detective running in the wrong direction for a little while longer. That would not be a problem. He turned in the direction of the freeway, and Bayou Sara, wondering how Carla was adjusting to life in captivity. Before the day’s festivities got underway, he would need to pop in on her to make sure she was still sufficiently zonked out.
* * *
“You did right,” Colley said, after Wallace told him about her confrontation with Jason Burley. “I’d have handled Mike Harrison exactly the way you did. And Burley is a shithead for pushing him on anybody.”
“But it’s so humiliating to be yanked off a case,” she said.
“Only if you fucked up … which you did not do.”