Dark River Rising

by Roger Johns

  “Sorry, Chief. That will have to wait.” Mason hung up on Whitlock, when his phone signaled a call from Wallace.

  * * *

  “I don’t know what kind of game you’re think you’re playing with me, pal, but I don’t like it,” Wallace said, not even trying to hide her anger.

  “What are you talking about?” Mason asked.

  “I’m talking about that evidence transfer that came from your office. The one ordering our people to pack up everything from Matt’s lab and make it available for a federal pickup.”

  “I didn’t do that. But, listen, we’ve got a bigger problem on our hands. We’ll straighten out this evidence thing in a minute. In the meantime, I need you to pick me up at my hotel.”

  “Mason, I’m not your chauffeur. Don’t just assume that I’ll drop whatever I’m doing to come drive you around.”

  “And I’m not asking you to just drive me around. Please. I need your help.”

  “I’m on my way,” she said, cooling off a bit. “Wait for me out front.”

  * * *

  As Wallace pulled up to the front of the hotel, she saw Mason pacing near the bell captain’s podium. He looked haggard and anxious.

  “I stopped the evidence grab, just like I said I would, so don’t even ask about that,” he said, as he pulled open the door and slid into the car. He looked ready for more of the conflict their last call had stirred up.

  “Thank you,” she said, meeting his gaze with a vague smile. “I’m sorry I yelled at you. I was caught off guard by that transfer order and I was still in the grip of an ugly exchange with the woman who runs the evidence room. I should’ve known you wouldn’t go behind my back like that. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I might’ve reacted the same way,” he said, returning her smile.

  As he leaned forward to set his bag on the floor, Wallace could make out the straps of a shoulder harness crisscrossing under the back of his jacket. “Are we expecting trouble?” She reached over and snapped the harness like a bra strap. “The shooting kind of trouble?” she asked playfully.

  For a second, his face brightened, then a dense cloud of worry moved in. “We need to be prepared.”

  “For what? And look, I’m not questioning your capabilities, but guns are serious business. Exactly when was the last time your job put you in harm’s way?”

  “I did my time toting guns on the border as a DEA agent—”

  “Right after the Mexican-American War.”

  “That’s actually pretty funny,” he said without smiling. “We should get going?”

  “You haven’t told me where, yet.”

  “Bayou Sara.” He pulled his tablet from his bag, then sat back, staring straight ahead. He started to speak, then stopped.

  Wallace pulled away from the hotel heading north toward the I-110. When she looked over at him, she saw deep lines creasing his forehead. “Mason?” she said softly, her hand on his shoulder.

  Her phone rang. It was Connie Butterworth.

  “Hi, Con. I need some good news.” She listened for several seconds. “Sorry you had to wrestle with Monica Simon. I would have warned you, but things have been galloping.” She listened for a while longer. “Keep this to yourself, for the time being. I think the victim in this homicide was killed for knowing what you just told me.”

  She ended the call, then looked over at Mason, to check his reaction to what she had just said, but he was still staring through the windshield. Apparently he hadn’t been listening. “Mason, what’s going on?”

  “I know who burned down Matt Gable’s house.”

  “Really?”

  “Mmm hmm.”

  “Neither of us is in the mood to do this cross-examination style, so why don’t you just tell it?”

  “Remember me telling you about the analyst that first identified the data patterns that made us think we were looking at a cartel war?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “His name is Don Brindl. The videos show him lock-picking his way into the back of Matt’s house just before the fire started.”

  “One of your own people is behind all this?”

  “Behind it all? I don’t know. Involved? So it would seem.”

  “How does this put Carla in danger?”

  “I spoke to Don, yesterday.”

  “So?”

  “So, this was before I saw him on the videos—before I knew he was the one who burned Matt’s house,” he said, typing and touching his way to the video of Don. “I told him about what we found in Matt’s lab and I told him about Carla. How she was his girlfriend but that she was also a scientist who worked with Matt, and how she was going to help us figure out what the stuff in the lab was all about. This is him,” Mason said, holding the screen so she could see the frozen image of Don approaching the door to what had been Matt Gable’s house.

  “And you think Don has been hunting Gable and now he’ll be going after Carla too?”

  “He might have already found Gable, which may be why we can’t. But in any event, if Don thinks Carla can help him get to Gable, he will certainly go after her. All I know at the moment, and this is from Whitlock, is that she’s not home and she doesn’t answer her phone. He’s looking but he doesn’t have the manpower to do this right.”

  Wallace had been right. Mason’s hard-case federal lawman attitude was an act after all. To his credit, it was a role he played well, but even more to his credit he knew how and when to let it go, to let the real man step forward.

  “I wish you had said this sooner. Here, look at this.” She thumbed open Carla’s text about going on a job interview and handed her phone to Mason.

  “And you know for a fact that this is from her?” Mason asked, as they passed the tall white limestone spire of the state capital building off to their left.

  “It’s from the number I’ve called her at before,” Wallace said.

  Mason visibly relaxed. “I need to let Whitlock know. He’s going to think I’m an idiot.”

  “Maybe he won’t,” she said.

  Mason spent the next few minutes on the phone with Whitlock, explaining about the text and eating crow.

  “Since the heat is off on the Carla rescue, I need to run a quick errand. Do you mind?” she asked, after he ended his call with Whitlock.

  “Not at all.”

  They were moving through an area that had been cut in half by the building of the freeway. Fragments of residential zones segued into stretches of sparse woodland and swampy patches. The airport appeared off to the right. A jet flying low and slow on approach lumbered over the car as they sped north.

  “After my errand, you can bear witness to my humiliation as I hand off what little is left of this case.”

  Mason looked over at Wallace. She was just staring at him, a huge smile spreading across her face. “What do you mean by ‘what little is left’?”

  “Do you know why Don was breaking into Matt’s house?” she asked.

  “No, but I’ve got a funny feeling you’re about to tell me?”

  “My friend Connie, who works at the crime lab, has made some rather interesting discoveries.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as … the cocaine we found in the warehouse with Overman has none of the traditional purification traces, no contaminants, nothing.”

  “If that’s what your lab found, then I’m sorry I called off the evidence transfer.”

  “Before you climb all the way up on that high federal horse of yours, you might want to know the rest of the story.”

  “I’m listening,” he said, giving her an impatient get-on-with-it finger twirl.

  “The residue from the product end of Matt Gable’s lab setups was tested and it’s not just any old blow. It’s identical to what we found with Overman—also, clean as a whistle.”

  “Well, that just makes no sense at all. Why would Gable or Overman, or anyone else for that matter, waste money cleaning up wholesale-grade product just so downstream sellers in the
States could recontaminate it when they cut it back down to street grade?”

  “I had the same question.”

  “Wallace, look—”

  “Just wait. Connie also compared the coke from Gable’s lab and from Overman, looking at the alkaloid and isotope ratios.”

  “I’m impressed,” Mason said.

  “Don’t be smug. It’s unbecoming.”

  “Just tell it already, would you? I can see you’re dying to lord this over me.”

  “That’s true. I am. But tell me something first—and this is probably something you would know. Why is the cocaine business exclusively an import business?”

  “Because the coca plant grows only in the Andean highlands of South America.”

  “Rubber trees don’t grow here, but we don’t import all the rubber we use,” she countered.

  “Well, that’s because we can make synthetic rubber from petroleum. We cannot, however, synthesize the cocaine molecule in the lab—at least not the psychoactive left-handed version.”

  “We can’t?” she asked.

  “Back in the late 1800s, someone discovered a method, but it produces almost entirely the wrong version along with lots of contaminants and by-products. The yield of L-cocaine hydrochloride is so low that the cost of a gram of street-grade would be thousands of times higher than what the imported stuff sells for. Many have tried but, so far, none have succeeded.”

  “But if some chemically savvy Rumpelstiltskin did figure out how to spin the straw of ordinary chemicals into cocaine gold, do you think you would have heard about it at the exact instant it was discovered?” Wallace asked, exiting the freeway.

  “Well, no, of course not. I’m just saying.…” Mason’s voice trailed off.

  “When Connie called just a minute ago, she had just finished testing the glassware from the input end of Matt’s process. Wanna know what she found?” Wallace asked.

  “Not cocaine.”

  “Not cocaine,” she echoed.

  “Un-fucking-believable,” he murmured. “What made you think to test the input end?”

  Wallace told him about her lunch with her brother and his fellow priest. She recounted their discussion about the priest’s forthcoming book and how it touched on the idea of synthesizing living organisms in a lab—something no one had done before—and how that suddenly got her wondering why the cartels went through all the trouble of growing coca way down in South America, then extracting the drug from the leaves, and then purifying it and shipping it to markets across thousands of very dangerous miles.

  “Why don’t they just make it in a lab, like they do meth, I wondered? Then it hit me.”

  “Is it possible Connie made a mistake? That the stuff on the input end was just a really low grade of cocaine? So low her tests missed it? And that for some reason we can’t yet figure out, Matt was trying to bring it up to sellable grade?”

  “She said she ran the test twice and both times it came back negative. It will take time to identify exactly what the chemicals were that Matt was feeding into his process but, for the moment, all we really need to know, and the thing she called to tell me a few minutes ago is that, whatever those chemicals are—”

  “—they’re not cocaine,” Mason finished. He was stunned. She had figured out, over lunch, what he had been unable to do with a Ph.D. in statistics and a platoon of analysts armed with big-time computers.

  No wonder she had gotten past his defenses so easily, the night before. She hadn’t been just listening to his story, she had been taking him apart, decoding the patterns in his life, just like she deciphered everything else.

  “Where did you go?” Wallace asked, breaking into his thoughts.

  “Just thinking. You are seriously good at what you do.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “I still can’t believe Gable figured this out,” Mason said. “Since he was making it cheap enough for Overman to sell on the street, his process obviously has a high yield and it uses inexpensive inputs. In my world this is equivalent to discovering cold fusion.”

  “Is it too much of a stretch to say this is what Don was doing in Matt’s house? Trying to get his hands on Matt’s process?”

  “I think it’s obvious that’s what Don was after. And it explains who fiddled with the data in my office—he did. And now we know why.”

  “But what made him think someone discovered how to make cocaine in a lab? I mean, how did he know the extra supply here wasn’t coming from some other source, the way you and I first thought?”

  “My guess is that he didn’t know. The most likely scenario is that he started going over the data and saw there was a great deal more cocaine in Louisiana than could be accounted for by any realistic shift in existing supplies, and that none of the other U.S. markets were being starved for product. From there, he would have dug deeper and seen that Overman had actually become an exporter instead of just an importer, and that Overman was using new routes to move stuff out of Louisiana into the surrounding states. That would make the existence of a new source almost a certainty. So he massaged the data to throw the rest of us off, then started coming down here to do a bit of fieldwork.”

  “But how did he zero in so precisely on Baton Rouge? On Ronnie Overman?”

  “There was a cholera outbreak in London in 1854. John Snow, a physician, used the statistical tools of his day to map the location of every known case. In almost perfect concentric circles, the number of cases increased the closer he got to one particular neighborhood and to one particular water well. He disabled the well by removing the pump handle and the epidemic came to a screeching halt. Put a hundred and sixty years of improvements in statistical methods together with the massive computing power we have today, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Don had figured out Overman’s blood type.”

  “Okay, he figured out Overman was the distribution point, but what about where Overman was getting the new stuff?”

  “That’s where the field work would have come in. He would have to come down here and find that out the hard way.”

  “By torturing it out of Overman?” she asked.

  “So it would seem.”

  “Clearly, though, he had to already be tuned into the idea that synthetic cocaine was a possibility.”

  “It’s been a subject of speculation and worry for a long time.”

  “Would Don have known how to make it look like Echeverría’s handiwork?” Wallace asked.

  “He was fascinated by the personalities that pulled the big levers in the cartels. He studied them like most guys study the stats of their favorite sports figures.”

  “What happened to Overman was pretty gruesome, though. Could Don have actually done it himself, or do you think he had help?”

  “Good question.”

  “What was Whitlock’s reaction to Don in the videos?”

  “Skepticism is definitely the man’s strong suit. He was willing to concede that we now have a suspect in the arson case.”

  “Did he think there was a connection between Don and Gable’s disappearance?”

  “What he said was, and this is pretty close to an exact quote, ‘Agent Cunningham, I know to a certainty that you, and probably Detective Hartman too, are already holding this Brindl fella responsible for Gable’s disappearance, and I am equally certain that there’s nothing I can say that’ll pry you loose from that idea, but I’m reserving judgment on that until I can get my hands on a bit more corroborating evidence.’”

  Wallace laughed at Mason’s off-key attempt to mimic Whitlock’s southern accent. “I don’t know why he had to lump me in with you.”

  “Probably to make one of us feel good.”

  She smiled at his lame joke, happy that he had worked his way into a better humor. “There’s one last thing I don’t understand.”

  “What’s that?” Mason asked.

  “If he is, in fact, the one who killed Overman, why did he do it in a way that was calculated to catch your attention? Why not just make i
t look like an accident, or a run-of-the-mill homicide?”

  “Even before Don presented his faked-up analysis that made it look like a turf war was brewing, the raw data from this area was heating up, so to speak. I knew something unusual was going on. But we weren’t going to know exactly what it meant until the data was analyzed. Don knew attention was focusing on south Louisiana and he knew things were going to be looked at pretty closely, so he skewed his analysis—”

  “—to reinforce the bogus cartel war idea and get everyone looking the wrong way,” Wallace finished. “I get that. But still he could have ginned up some totally benign explanation and kept you miles and miles away from all this. And I would have gone on my merry way and worked it as just another drug-related killing.”

  “Once Don figured out Overman was the epicenter, he knew he’d eventually have to kill him. The death or disappearance of such a major drug figure would tell me something was wrong here. And if it came on the heels of some innocent explanation of the quirky data, that would have looked like a contradiction. Don would know something like that would just beg for intense scrutiny.”

  “So he concocted his cartel war idea, doctored the data, then made Overman’s death look consistent with that, figuring you’d accept it for what it appeared to be.” Wallace shook her head and drummed her fingers on the steering wheel.

  “The bigger the lie, the bigger the buy-in,” Mason agreed. “The oldest propaganda trick in the book.”

  “A brilliant plan.”

  “From a brilliant man and a master game player,” Mason finished. “And, he wouldn’t need us looking the wrong way forever—just long enough for him to get his hands on the magic method. It didn’t hurt that Echeverría happened to get killed when he did. Just a lucky coincidence but, since dead men tell no tales, it meant we might never be able to prove Echeverría wasn’t behind it all.”

  “I guess Don’s mistake was his assumption you would never come down here to investigate.”

  “A safe assumption. In my shop, I’m famous as the geek who never leaves the office. I’m a number jockey,” Mason said.