Bad Karma In the Big Easy

by D. J. Donaldson

  What the critics said about Louisiana Fever:

  “Delivers .... genuinely heart-stopping suspense.”

  -PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  “Sleek, fast moving.”

  -KIRKUS

  “Broussard tracks the virus... with a winning combination of common sense and epidemiologic legerdemain.”

  -NEW ORLEANS TIMES PICAYUNE

  “This series has carved a solid place for itself. Broussard makes a terrific counterpoint to the Dave Robicheaux ragin’ Cajun school of mystery heroes.”

  -BOOKLIST

  “A dazzling tour de force... sheer pulse-pounding reading excitement.”

  -THE CLARION LEDGER (JACKSON, MS)

  “A novel of... “terrifying force.... utterly fascinating... His best work yet.”

  -THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL (MEMPHIS)

  “The autopsies are detailed enough to make Patricia Cornwell fans move farther south for their forensic fixes. ...splendidly eccentric local denizens, authentic New Orleans and bayou backgrounds... a very suspenseful tale.”

  - LOS ANGELES TIMES

  “A fast moving, ... suspenseful story. Andy and Kit are quite likeable leads ...The other attraction is the solid medical background against which their story plays out.”

  -DEADLY PLEASURES

  “If your skin doesn’t crawl with the step-by-step description of the work of the (medical) examiner and his assistants, it certainly will when Donaldson reveals the carrier of the fever.”

  -KNOXVILLE NEWS-SENTINEL

  “Keep(s) the reader on the edge of his chair and likely to finish in one sitting.”

  -BENTON COURIER (Arkansas)

  “Exciting reading... well planned... fast paced.”

  -MYSTERY NEWS

  “Tight and well-paced... Andy (Broussard) is a hugely engaging character... (the) writing is frequently inspired.”

  -THE ARMCHAIR DETECTIVE

  What the critics said about Sleeping With The Crawfish:

  “Streamlined thrills and gripping forensic detail.”

  -KIRKUS

  “Action-packed, cleverly plotted topnotch thriller. Another fine entry in a consistently outstanding series. “

  -BOOKLIST

  “With each book, Donaldson peels away a few more layers of these characters and we find ourselves loving the involvement.”

  -THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL (MEMPHIS)

  “The pace is pell-mell.”

  -SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS

  “Exciting and... realistic. Donaldson... starts his action early and sustains it until the final pages.”

  -BENTON COURIER (Arkansas)

  “A roller-coaster ride... Thoroughly enjoyable.”

  -BRAZOSPORT FACTS

  “The latest outing of a fine series which never disappoints.”

  -MERITORIOUS MYSTERIES

  What the critics said about New Orleans Requiem:

  “Lots of Louisiana color, pinpoint plotting and two highly likable characters... smart, convincing solution.”

  -PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (starred review)

  “An.... accomplished forensic mystery. His New Orleans is worth the trip.”

  -NEW ORLEANS TIMES PICAYUNE

  “Andy and Kit are a match made in mystery heaven.”

  -THE CLARION LEDGER (JACKSON, MS)

  “Nicely drawn characters, plenty of action, and an engaging... storytelling style.”

  -THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL (Memphis)

  “Donaldson has established himself as a master of the Gothic mystery.”

  -BOOKLIST

  “The tension will keep even the most reluctant young adult readers turning the pages...”

  -SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this novel

  are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  BAD KARMA IN THE BIG EASY

  Astor + Blue Editions LLC

  Copyright © 2014 by D.J. DONALDSON

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions

  thereof, in any form under the International and Pan-American Copyright

  Conventions. Published in the United States by:

  Astor + Blue Editions, LLC

  New York, NY 10003

  www.astorandblue.com

  Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data

  DONALDSON, D.J. BAD KARMA IN THE BIG EASY—1st ed.

  ISBN: 978-1-938231-32-2 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-938231-31-5 (epdf)

  ISBN: 978-1-938231-30-8 (epub)

  1. Detective Duo —Murder Mystery—Fiction. 2. Fiction 3. Police procedural and forensic mystery—Fiction 4. —Fiction 5. —Fiction 6. American Murder and Suspense Story —Fiction 7 New Orleans (LA) I. Title

  Jacket Cover Design: Ervin Serrano

  BAD KARMA IN THE BIG EASY

  By

  D. J. DONALDSON

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Other Books by D.J. Donaldson

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’m greatly indebted to Drs. Jerry Francisco and O. C. Smith for advice on forensic aspects of this story. Thanks also to Dr. Brian Chrz for patiently responding to my far-too-detailed e-mail questions about the FEMA mortuary operation in St. Gabriel after Katrina. And I can’t forget former New Orleans Homicide commander, James Keen, who helped me understand the impossible circumstances members of the law enforcement community faced in the hurricane aftermath. Finally, a tip of the hat to Bruce Rolf, former navy pilot, for insights into the operation of a Kiowa helicopter. My sincere apologies to any others who provided background for the story, but weren’t mentioned here. I alone, am responsible for any factual errors.

  Prologue

  Jennifer Hendrin had always disliked being cold. Once when she was four, she asked her daddy if it would be warm in heaven. Eyes tearing, he told her she wouldn’t have to worry about that for a very long time, but yes, God kept the thermostat in heaven set at a toasty snug temperature.

  Thirteen months ago, a week after her twenty-first birthday, Jennifer had gone missing. Along with her father’s prayers that she would be found alive and safe, he hoped she would be warm. Had he known that most of the time she’d been missing she had been colder than she’d ever been and that now her sightless eyes stared at the ceiling of a refrigerated FEMA truck in St. Gabriel, Louisiana, waiting, along with bodies 428 and 429, for justice, he might have lost his mind.

  Chapter 1

  Andy Broussard, Chief Medical Examiner for Orleans Parish, rubbed the back of his stiff neck. Cots must have been invented by the Marquis de Sade. There couldn‘t be any other explanation for
the existence of such a wretched object. Fortified with a surprisingly decent cup of coffee and two hastily-consumed sausage biscuits, he stepped out of the abandoned schoolhouse where most of the area’s FEMA workers slept in former classrooms. Without pause, he set his stubby, tired legs moving, heading as fast as he could toward the makeshift mortuary next door. In most of the state, people who still had beds were in them. But here, though the sun had not yet made an appearance, the morning shift in the morgue was already well underway.

  And Broussard was late.

  Never mind that he’d worked most of the night shift. This was the day he could turn to the task that had been picking at his sense of order for weeks, so he was upset at having overslept.

  Broussard had lived with death daily for over forty years. It was as much a part of him as his bow ties and the lanyard that tethered his glasses to his neck when he looked through a microscope. It enveloped him as completely as each of his six 1957 T-Birds cradled his massive body. He could feel its touch as surely as the steering wheels of those cars, which rubbed against the buttons on his shirt when he turned a corner. It was in his gray hair and beard and the leather of the shoes with perforated uppers he wore to keep his feet from sweating.

  He did not fear death. He simply viewed it as a respected adversary that came in many guises, a cunning opponent with endless tricks to mislead those who would document and understand its handiwork, an antagonist capable of challenging his intellect at the highest level, especially when one human arranged for it to take another.

  But this easy familiarity with the dark eternal did not lessen the burden he had carried for weeks as the body count from Hurricane Katrina mounted. The corpses had been flowing at a shocking rate into the row of refrigerated trucks he could already see through the chain link fence surrounding his brightly lit destination. Over eight hundred souls lost at last count... mostly from failure of the levees. It was still incomprehensible to him that such a catastrophe could have happened. His beloved New Orleans... much of it destroyed... it was almost too much for the old pathologist to take. But he owed it to the dead to make sure every one of them was identified, and none had been murdered under cover of the storm. That, he would not tolerate.

  But Lord, it was hard to keep going. Once body recovery began, he’d worked practically around the clock, quickly pushing himself beyond exhaustion, often remaining in the morgue well into the hot afternoons, when everyone but he and one or two loyal assistants fled to more temperate surroundings in the school to wait out the sun. St. Gabriel, where the mortuary had been set up, was just south of Baton Rouge, sixty miles from New Orleans. Even if I10 hadn’t been clotted daily in both directions with refugees from Orleans Parish clinging to shreds of their former lives, it was too long a commute for Broussard to go home each time he needed a few hours sleep. So he hadn’t seen his own bed more than a few times since the horror started. That’s why he was already breathing hard even though he hadn’t covered much ground.

  Suddenly he felt light headed.

  He stopped walking to see how bad this episode was going to be. He’d had the first one a week after the mortuary started receiving bodies. An isolated event, he’d thought. But they had continued, so far, not progressing to anything worse, but occurring more frequently. He bent over and looked at the ground, muttering for this nuisance to go away. Instead, it rose in intensity until he thought he might pass out. Then, as quickly as it had appeared, it moved on, leaving him even more fully drained.

  He resumed walking, heading along a well-illuminated foot path through the weeds that led to a gate in the chain link fence five yards ahead. Three paces later, he felt something give way under his left shoe. Looking down, he saw his foot resting in the midst of a cluster of mud marbles, some of which were surely now sludgy little pancakes on the bottom of his shoe. He was an expert at wandering through fields and woods, often in much worse lighting than there was here and had never before in his entire life stepped in a pile of armadillo scat. He should have realized that event, though small, was telling him something. But he was too tired to get it.

  Reaching the fence, he held onto it and wiped his soiled shoe across some clumps of grass. He went through the gate and angled left, up the paved driveway toward the metal warehouse converted to a morgue.

  Ahead, showers of sparks shot into the air as a dozen construction workers continued assembling a refrigeration facility to replace the semi trucks now being used for that purpose. To see the living expend so much energy for the dead was both heartwarming and depressing.

  He entered the warehouse through the side door. At the security desk, he was greeted by Eddie Shavers, St Gabriel’s sheriff for over twenty years, now retired and volunteering his services. Shavers turned the clipboard with the sign-in sheet toward Broussard. Over the sound of the massive FEMA-installed air conditioner in the back of the building, he said, “Things are lookin’ better, yeah? I heard we only got four in yesterday.”

  Raising his own voice to compete with the air conditioner, Broussard said, “Wish we were back in the days when the discovery of four bodies was cause for alarm, not encouragement.” He scribbled his name and the time on the sheet.

  Shavers’s brow furrowed with concern at how Broussard had taken his comment. “I just meant...”

  Broussard put a reassuring hand on the old sheriff’s shoulder. “I’m just frustrated I can’t make this whole problem go away. Sometimes I let it show.”

  Shavers nodded. “...Know exactly what you mean.”

  Save for the afternoon hours when it was too hot to work, there were always around 75 people in the building, all toiling to identify the dead. Despite what Broussard had said to Shavers, the waning number of admissions was a hopeful sign that someday the gruesome flow would stop. FEMA had set up the morgue and coordinated deployment of all the volunteers working there. But they had put Broussard in charge. And he had decided it was now time to cut back to one shift and let many of those volunteers return to their normal lives. This easing of the workload was also why he could finally tackle that job he’d long wanted to begin.

  With plastic pipe and blue tarps, the old warehouse had been partitioned off into areas for clerical, body reception, whole body x-ray, dental x-ray, and DNA collection. There were also a couple of autopsy rooms as well as one for changing clothes. There were no ceilings on any of these rooms so the odor of decomposition was free to go where it would. And it went everywhere.

  Thankful that his smell neurons would soon fatigue and make the odor unnoticeable, Broussard stepped into the dressing room, where he ran into Charlie Franks, Deputy Medical examiner for Orleans Parish, already suiting up. Franks was late, too, but he had an aging mother and her sister to care for back in New Orleans and sometimes that obligation made it impossible for him to get back to St. Gabriel precisely when he wanted. Broussard understood this and no conversation about it was necessary.

  Franks looked at Broussard and said something.

  Hearing only half the words because of the air conditioner, Broussard leaned forward and said, “I didn’t get that.”

  “We have to stop meeting like this,” Franks repeated more forcefully as he slipped a disposable cover over his left shoe.

  “Nothin’ would please me more,” Broussard replied. “How are you this mornin?”

  “Better than yesterday. The power came back on at my house last night.”

  “That had to be a thrill.”

  “After three weeks... thrill doesn’t cover it. Even with candles on the table, MRE’s ain’t romantic.”

  “So you’re sayin’ now that you got electricity, you and the missus will be steamin’ up the bedroom windows?”

  “Oh yeah... that’s gonna happen.” A look of concern crept over Franks’s face. “Did you work the night shift?”

  “Not all of it.”

  “Damn it, Andy, you’ve got to slow down. You can’t keep going at this pace.”

  “Now that things are taperin’ off, I won’t h
ave to.”

  “Meaning you’ll go home tonight?”

  “That’s my plan.”

  “Hope you’ll stick to it.”

  Franks pulled on his other shoe cover, snatched a couple of masks from a box on nearby metal shelves, and shoved them into the pocket of his disposable jump suit. He put some rubber gloves in his other pocket and grabbed a full-face shield from the shelves. “See you in the trenches.”

  It took Broussard about ten minutes to change. From the dressing room, he followed the makeshift corridors between blue tarps to clerical, where, sitting behind a black metal desk bearing a big screen laptop, he found Fran Durbin, their chief data-entry volunteer from Omaha, wearing out her keyboard.

  Durbin had a long face and a large nose that made her a homely woman. Accustomed to noticing only a person’s best features, Broussard thought once again what nice skin she had.

  She looked up from her work, fatigue evident in her eyes. “And the fun goes on...”

  “Is it gettin’ to be more than you can handle? We’re to the point now where I’m plannin’ to cut some folks loose. If you like, you can be one of ‘em. Your call.”

  She shook her head. “I’m a lousy cook. And since the Forestry Service has started preparing our meals over there at the school, I’m eating better here than I would at home. So, think I’ll stick around awhile.”

  Broussard cupped his big stomach, which for all his travails, was still a ponderous thing. “As you can see, food is not somethin’ I care much about.”

  Despite their grim duties, Durban smiled. “What can I do for you this morning?”

  Of the countless bodies he had processed since the storm, three had remained foremost in Broussard’s mind... all collected from the same tangle of brush and trees in the lower Ninth Ward, all female, all naked. Today, his curiosity about them could finally be exercised. Hating that he had to refer to them by number, he said, “I want to take another look at 427... then the next two in sequence. Has the data we sent over to the missin’ persons center turned up anything on ‘em?”