by Roger Johns
“It still looks so shitty.”
“Which is why you have to set the record straight. You have to file a formal grievance over this. Not just what Burley did, but how he did it. It should never be a public spectacle like he made it. But you have to have clean hands to do this, so don’t leave any loose ends. Make sure you follow up everything you’ve got working on this case, right up to the minute you hand it over.”
She wanted to tell him about Mason’s call regarding the data change and the cover-up, but Colley’s expression told her his thinking had shifted gears. “What is it?” she asked.
“Stella doesn’t want me to go back.”
“Well, what do you think?” she asked, unable to hide her alarm.
“She’s probably right,” he said, quietly, not looking at her.
“She probably is,” Wallace said, trying to sound calm. She knew the chances of Colley coming back to work became more remote with every advance of his condition, but she hadn’t expected him to pull back so soon. She certainly hadn’t expected to get the news like this. When she tried to change the subject, Colley pressed the issue for a few more exchanges.
“I can’t talk about this anymore, right now,” she protested when it became clear that Colley had made up his mind. “You should have given me some kind of warning.”
“I know. I’m sorry. But look, last night was the first time Stella even hinted in this direction. I could tell she’d been thinking about it for a long time, but she never said anything until last night. She’s just scared, and I understand that. We were up most of the night, going round and round about it. So what can I say?”
“Listen, I have to go. I’ll come back later … this afternoon.” She leaned over to hug him, pressing her eyes against his shirt to blot her tears.
The walk from the porch to her car was agonizing. She forced herself not to turn and look back. She was afraid he would look sad … and a million miles away. Just drive to the lab to check on how Carla is coming along, close out the case, then come back in the afternoon.
TWENTY-FOUR
9:40 A.M.
Matt was starting to sweat, as he stared at his tablet. The voicemails from Carla that he had listened to yesterday were alarming enough, but the emails that had arrived late in the night, while he was sleeping, felt menacing. Someone claiming to be with the federal government had visited Carla at her home and had become agitated when she couldn’t produce Matt. The man had shown her a badge. He said he might return with other government agents. Carla’s description of her visitor made Matt fairly certain it had been the red-haired man.
The final email left Matt angry and frightened. She related that she had found something at Matt’s house when she had been there recently. Matt was already at work, and she was getting ready to leave when she was overcome by a fit of nosiness. She was ashamed, but she snooped anyway. She only wanted to get to know him a little better, so she had gone poking through his stuff—and found something. It looked work-related—the kind of thing that was forbidden to take outside of the Tunica facility. The kind of thing that could get one fired … or even arrested.
From: Carla Chapman 3:00 a.m.
To: Matt Gable
… so I was going to sneak it back into the lab and give it back to you there along with a teensy-weensy lecture on the evils of taking research documentation outside, but I chickened out. It would be just my luck the day I brought it back in would be my day for a random bag search. Can’t you just see me trying to explain my way out of that one without implicating you know who? But by the time I decided to just put it back where I found it and forget I ever saw it your house had gone up in smoke—just like you, apparently, which I don’t understand why you haven’t at least let me know you’re okay. In any event, I’ve still got it and it’s scaring the crap out of me, because now I don’t know what to do. In case it’s somehow a clue to where you are or if you’re in trouble and we could use it to buy your way back, I don’t want to destroy it. But what if Mr. Government Drone comes back with more questions? Or a search warrant? He wasn’t so friendly the first time so I don’t think having to do a second go-around will improve his attitude. What if they get the idea you and I were up to something together? Something besides … you know. Ha-ha. I might have to turn this thing over to them just to save my own skin. I absolutely don’t want to do that but I also don’t see myself holding up all that well under the search light in the face routine. I’m flying home today—family emergency—and I don’t know when I’ll be back so I have to make a quick stop at my house in Bayou Sara, at one o’clock, to pack a bag. If you want this thing back this would be a good time to get it.
Matt couldn’t decide whether Carla’s message was a threat or an invitation or a trap. She hadn’t signed off with any of her usual gooey stuff, but he actually viewed that as a welcome development. If nothing else, the email confirmed that he should never have gotten involved with her, but his ego and his libido had taken turns pummeling his better judgment into submission. Regardless, he had to reclaim his property.
How she had found his hiding place, he would never know, but there was nothing to be gained by trying to figure that out. If she had only minded her own business, all of the things he had hidden in the house would have burned, and his exit would have been clean and final. Now there was a loose end that had to be clipped. Grudgingly, he decided to return to Bayou Sara.
His paranoia-honed instincts were telling him not to reply to Carla’s emails, that he should just show up. If he hurried, he could get there in time to find a safe place to watch and wait.
It was hard to believe his career as a scientist—for that matter, his entire life up to this point—was drawing to a close. It had been only four days since he was last in Bayou Sara, but already the town was feeling like part of his distant past. He had never integrated himself into the community, even though he had lived in the little town for nearly three years. Once, during his senior year of high school, he had driven out to a ranch where he worked the summer before, just to yuck it up with the guys like he did when he worked there. But it hadn’t been the same. Everyone was polite and friendly, but nothing felt the way it had the previous summer. He had moved on, and they were still there. He was going places, they were not. After an awkward half hour, he left. He never even considered doing something like that again.
That same sense of no longer belonging that he had felt back then was strong now and it made his skin crawl. He needed to retrieve what was his and get the hell out of Dodge—permanently.
9:50 A.M.
“Ms. Chapman hasn’t come back to finish putting all this together,” the evidence tech said.
“Have you called?” Wallace surveyed the neatly laid out glassware and other devices.
“I don’t have her number.”
“How much was left for her to do?” She called Carla’s number.
“I’m not sure. We laid it all out, according to her labels and diagrams, so maybe it was only a matter of putting everything up on the racks and hooking the setup together.”
“Who’s going over all this once it’s put together?” Wallace asked, as Carla’s number rang.
“Dr. Hardison. He’s a consulting chemist from the university. He’s supposed to be here pretty soon. I was hoping we would have everything ready before he got here.”
“I need some of whatever is in the piece from the very end, the output end, made available to Connie Butterworth,” she said, hanging up when Carla’s outgoing message started to play.
“She took it already. She was waiting for me when I showed up this morning.”
“Perfect. I’ll keep trying to get in touch with Carla and see if I can get her over here. Could this stuff be put back together without her?”
“Maybe. Whether everything’s correct depends on how good her notes were. I’d rather wait.”
Just as Wallace was about to head back to her car, her phone signaled an incoming text. “Call me.” It was from Connie Butterw
orth.
“Connie, it’s Wallace. I’m in the building, but I was just about to take off. Do you need me to wait?”
“I’ll be right down.”
Two minutes later Wallace and Connie were leaning against her car in the parking lot.
“Listen. I found a few things and they’re all kind of blowing my mind,” Connie said.
“In a good way or a bad way?”
“In a weird way. First of all, the cocaine from the Overman homicide had none of those homegrown extraction traces that Colley was telling you about. It’s not just that there was very little—there was nothing.”
“Is that unusual?”
“Nobody with a profit motive would spend the money just to get street drugs that clean.”
“What else did you find?”
“Remember our little science lesson about alkaloids and isotope ratios?”
“Sure.”
“Well, the ratios don’t match any known patterns.”
“What would account for that?” Wallace asked.
“A new growing region, maybe, that nobody knows about. Some radical change in growing conditions. There could be other explanations. I just don’t know.”
“I’m afraid to ask what else you found.”
“The stuff from Gable’s lab is just like the Overman stuff.”
“I don’t get this,” Wallace said. “Wherever this stuff comes from, why would anyone purify it to the point that it’s uneconomical, then hand it off to street dealers who will just cut it back down to street grade?”
“I’ve got a feeling the answer to those questions are the solution to your case. Listen, I gotta go. I’ll email you my formal reports later today.”
Wallace sat for quite a while in the parking lot, mulling over what Connie had told her. She sensed some deep invisible thought process struggling to surface. It was as if she had everything she needed to understand the case, but she just wasn’t seeing it the right way. Maybe when three o’clock rolled around, instead of handing things off to another team of detectives, she could rub Burley’s nose in a fully solved case.
Despite trying to make sense of everything, the answer never came. Her only breakthrough was a bit of inspiration about how to stop all the ugliness her colleague Officer Marcels was inflicting on Louise Mautner and her fellow gardeners out on Choctaw Ridge. Wallace pulled out of the parking lot, headed toward her brother’s house. When she saw a supermarket up ahead, she stopped and picked up a sack full of produce. As soon as she and Marcels had a bit of face time, hopefully later today even, she would use the vegetables to drive home her point.
11:05 A.M.
Wallace pulled into Lex’s driveway. As she was getting out of the car, a text came from Carla’s number, letting Wallace know that after she had gotten home from the lab the night before, a friend had called to tell her about a job opportunity. A minor position in a small company on the East Coast had come open unexpectedly and she had managed to arrange an interview. The quickest flight was from New Orleans, so she had driven there, late last night, and she had just boarded. She would return as quickly as she could, to finish their little project at the crime lab.
“I’m sorry I’m a few minutes late,” Wallace said, as Lex opened the front door.
“I’m just glad you got here before Father Rudanski got too liquored up,” he said, standing aside as she stepped into the living room.
The other priest tried to eye roll past Lex’s sophomoric conversational gambit, but Lex pushed on, trotting out gentle barbs, one after another, to provoke conversation. After a few minutes, Lex led them into the kitchen. He was fixing something involving ducks he had killed himself. Things had been moving so fast over the last few days, and with Colley’s bombshell about not returning to work, she needed to let her mind just coast for a while. The chitchat with her brother and his fellow priest, along with the simple chores Lex gave her, felt relaxing and therapeutic.
“You can easily see that Father Rudanski is a whole lot older than me,” Lex gibed. “So you’re probably wondering how we could have gone to seminary together.”
“I really hadn’t given it much thought,” Wallace lied.
“He always does this,” the other priest said with another eye roll. “And call me Jack, please.”
“Jack was married and had a career before he became a priest. He has two kids—grown kids,” Lex said.
“You’re a widower?” Wallace asked, expertly rocking a chopping knife up and down along the curve of the blade, reducing a carrot to precisely segmented discs.
“My wife died when our kids—twin girls, by the way—were just a few months old.”
“I’m so sorry. What did you do, before you became a priest?” She scraped the pieces of carrot into the salad bowl.
“Chemical engineer. I worked in the petrochemical plants along the Mississippi.”
“Becoming a priest seems like a radical shift from engineering,” Wallace replied.
“The priesthood was my original career choice but I fell in love during high school. After my wife died, I knew I’d eventually make good on those intentions but I had two girls to raise first.”
“What does a chemical engineer actually do?” Wallace asked.
“Unbelievably boring stuff,” Jack said. “In my case it was the ultra-exciting world of polymer synthesis. I designed processes that industrial companies would use to produce specific products—mostly soft plastics and things like that.”
“I’ve been trying to get Jack to see if he could synthesize a consecrated host in the lab,” Lex said. “It would put an end to the Vatican monopoly on transubstantiation.”
“Your brother must have been a handful, as a kid,” Jack said. He raised a glass of wine to his nose and inhaled slowly before taking a sip.
“As a little boy he had a lot of mischief in him, but during his teenage years he went through a goody-two-shoes phase,” Wallace reminisced. “Our mother used to joke that he came dangerously close to burning the candle at one end. He didn’t become a wiseass until he went off to the seminary.”
11:30 A.M.
Nearly four hours after Mason had finished his call to let Wallace know about the data tampering, he received the password that would allow him to access the videos from the other camera—the front camera—that they had found at Matt Gable’s house. He set up the video from both cameras to run side by side at three times normal speed, then sat down to watch. Even at the faster speed, the long stretches of nothing happening caused Mason’s mind to wander. He found his attention consumed by thoughts of the previous night. He couldn’t stop thinking about her.
Their first phone conversation, the day he had called to set up his trip to Baton Rouge had left him intrigued. She was a quick thinker and refreshingly unimpressed by his federal pedigree. After their first morning on the job together, he had gone from intrigued to captivated, but he and Wallace lived different lives, hundreds of miles apart. If he got too attached, going back to his life in Washington would be painful. But if he passed up the chance to get to know her, he knew he would regret it forever. With some difficulty, he had decided to choose regret over pain, so he promised himself he would just stick to business. But things hadn’t worked out that way. Even after he had realized that she was going to overpower his resolve, he hadn’t expected to discover that they would both have tender feelings in play.
A change in the video caught his attention. Someone had moved across the frame and was standing at the door, facing away from the camera. Mason rewound to just before that point, then played it forward. He froze as he watched the grainy image of Don Brindl move across the screen. A cold sweat erupted over his entire body. With a trembling finger, he stopped the video and called Whitlock.
“I just got back to the office, Mr. Cunningham, and I was just about to call you to say thanks for keeping your word.”
“Carla Chapman is in serious danger,” Mason blurted.
“Come again.”
“I know who
burned Matt Gable’s house.”
“You’ve seen the videos?”
“I have. But listen, you need to get someone to her place as soon as possible. I have to make another call. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
“Mr. Cunningham, you’re gonna—” Whitlock began, but Mason was gone.
BAYOU SARA 11:50 A.M.
Mason’s call had seemed frantic enough that Whitlock decided to check out Carla’s house himself. He parked in front and did a slow walk around, looking carefully at all the windows. He tried the front door, but it was locked. His knock went unanswered. There was a locked gate at the end of the driveway, just off the garage, at the rear corner of the house. Through the gate Whitlock could see a fenced-in yard shaded by an ancient sycamore near the back. A metal storage shed sat off to one side, in the shade of the big tree. The six-foot chain-link fence along the rear property line was completely covered by a thick ligustrum hedge, except in the center where a padlocked gate opened onto a central alley that ran behind all the houses.
After a couple of minutes of rooting around in the collection of flowerpots flanking the garage door, he found the gate key and let himself into the backyard. He tried the back door. It was unlocked. He pushed it open a few inches and called Carla’s name. There was no answer. He listened carefully for the sound of a television or a shower, something that might drown out the sound of his voice, but the house was quiet. He pushed the door all the way open and moved slowly through a small utility room into the kitchen, identifying himself and continuing to call her name as he moved deeper into the house. He looked in every room, but no one was home.
If Carla was in some sort of jeopardy because of her connection to the missing scientist, her troubles were playing out elsewhere. The house showed no signs of a struggle.
Whitlock left through the back door. He would call the skittish DEA agent to let him know that, as far as he could tell, nothing was amiss. The thought of having to spend time hand-holding the man was irritating, but the thought of having to field even more calls about the situation seemed worse. Whitlock was about to exit the backyard when he decided, instead, to take a quick peek inside the storage shed. Nobody was home there, either.