“Okay, open wide.”
J.T. opened his mouth, and the Family Assistance Center technician wiped a cotton swab over the inside of his cheek.
“What’s that for?” the boy asked.
“DNA,” Nick said. “Do you know what that is, smart guy?” Nick held out a small package.
J.T. shook his head.
“I thought you knew everything,” Nick said. “Never mind—I’ll explain it to you later. Are you hungry? C’mon, I’ll show you what the soldiers eat—then there’s somebody I want you to meet.”
The boy was still sporting the same pair of knee-length shorts, but he now wore one of Nick’s oversized button-down shirts and a pair of Nike’s cadged from a female pathologist of similar stature. He spent a full ten minutes sorting through the selection of black-and-tan MREs before finally settling on “Cajun Rice with Beans and Sausage”—known to locals as “Bayou Beanie Weanies.” Nick chose a “Chicken with Cavatelli” for himself and threw in a “Cherry Blueberry Cobbler” for each of them. Ordinarily, he would have removed the entrées from their plastic bags and microwaved them—but he thought J.T. would enjoy using a chemical ration heater instead. Ten minutes later, the boy’s entrée was ready to eat; five minutes after that it was completely consumed.
“I once had a date with a woman who ate like that,” Nick said. “Scary.”
Nick glanced up and spotted Beth in the doorway, surveying the room. He waved to her and she approached.
“This is the lady I wanted you to meet,” Nick said. “J.T., this is Beth Woodbridge.”
The boy looked up and grinned. “You’re pretty.”
“And you’re sweet.”
“Forget it,” Nick said to Beth. “He’s already got plenty of girlfriends.”
“I can imagine. May I sit down, J.T.? I’d like to ask you some questions.”
She pulled up a chair on the opposite side of the table and watched the boy as he dug into his gooey cobbler. “How do you like it here at the DPMU?”
“I like the food,” he said.
“I can see that. Nick likes this food, too, don’t you, Nick?”
Nick had a mouthful of cavatelli at the moment. He gave the boy a big thumbs-up.
“Have you ever heard of the Family Assistance Center, J.T.?”
He shook his head.
“It’s up in Baton Rouge, just a few minutes from here. We assist families there, just like it sounds. We help people get back in touch with their loved ones when they get separated, like some people have down in New Orleans. We’d like to help you find your father again.”
“Nick’s helping me.”
“That’s very nice of Nick, but we can help too. We’ll put your name into a big database so everybody can see it—not just here, but all over the country. That might help your father find you.”
“They stuck a thing in my mouth.”
“A cheek swab? They’ll take that back to Baton Rouge and keep it there. It could come in handy later, but right now we’d like to know a few things about you and your dad. Where do you live, J.T.? What’s your address?”
“I forget,” he said.
“Nick says he found you in the Lower Ninth Ward.”
“That’s right—that’s where I live.”
“What street do you live on?”
“It changes.”
“You mean you’ve lived in different places?”
“Sure.”
“Where does your father live? Does he live with you?”
“We got separated. I told Nick.”
She glanced at Nick. “What about your mother?”
He shook his head.
“What about brothers? Sisters?”
He shook his head again.
“J.T., can you describe your father for me?”
Nick leaned in. “He told me he’s tall, and—”
“I want to hear him say it. Go on, J.T.”
“He’s like Nick.”
“Like Nick? How?”
“Tall. Smart. With glasses.”
She paused. “J.T., have you ever been visited by a social worker? Do you know what that is?”
“Sure.”
“Do you remember your social worker’s name?”
“It changes.”
“I see.” She watched the boy for another minute before she rose from the table. “It was a pleasure to meet you, J.T. I hope we can talk again. Nick is going to walk me to the door now because he’s such a gentleman, but he’ll be right back.”
She gave Nick a quick glance before she turned away.
“She’s pretty,” the boy said, “but weird.”
“That about covers it. Finish your food—I’ll be right back.”
Nick followed Beth through the doorway and just around the corner, out of sight. “What do you think?” he asked.
“I’m getting some mixed signals from him,” she said. “I’d like to contact the Department of Social Services in New Orleans; if I can reach them, they should be able to tell me who was working in the Lower Ninth Ward. If we can locate his social worker, we’ll save a lot of time. I’m not sure I’ll be able to get through since the phones are out in the city; I may have to go through the state DSS office in Baton Rouge, and that could take a while.”
“Do what you can,” Nick said. “In the meantime, I’ll see if I can—”
“You!” a voice said behind him.
Nick turned. It was Denny.
“In my office—right now.” He marched by without stopping.
Beth looked at Nick. “What did you do now?”
“Later,” Nick said. “Do me a favor, will you? Take the boy to Jerry—tell him to look out for him until I get back.”
Nick hurried after his boss. “Denny, I can explain.”
“Don’t bother—I don’t want to hear it.”
“I had to bring that body back. It was a matter of—”
“You just don’t listen, do you, Nick? I tried to tell you—we’re a part of a team here. That’s not just some slogan—that’s the way the system works.”
“Denny, if you’ll just give me a chance to—”
Denny swung open his office door and stepped aside, motioning for Nick to enter ahead of him. Nick stepped inside and found a man he didn’t recognize seated at Denny’s desk.
He heard the door click behind him. He looked; Denny wasn’t there.
“Come in,” the man said without looking up. “Take a seat.”
“Thanks. I’ll stand.”
The man didn’t respond; he continued to read from a file folder open on the desk in front of him. A full minute went by.
Nick felt the hair rising like wire bristles on the back of his neck. He didn’t mind getting his hand slapped—God knows it happened often enough—but he despised this kind of clumsy attempt at intimidation. “Mind if I get a magazine?” he asked.
The man didn’t reply.
A chair had been set strategically near the center of the room—not so close to the desk as to suggest friendship, and not so far away as to allow detachment. It was a spot intended to provide Nick with plenty of room to squirm; all the scene needed was a bare lightbulb dangling overhead.
Nick dragged the chair closer to the desk and sat down.
The man looked up. “So, you’re this bug man character.”
“Is that a question?”
He paused. “I’m with the Drug Enforcement Administration here in Louisiana—the New Orleans Field Division. We cover a four-state area: Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas.”
“That’s a lot of ground,” Nick said.
“Tell me about it.”
“How’d you guys fare in the storm?”
“I’m over in Metairie—we did okay. Our office in Gulfport was wiped out.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“It’s just a building,” he said. “What really fries me is when somebody screws up one of my investigations.”
“That was a subtle transition.”
“I don’t have much time for subtlety. Like you said: I’ve got a lot of ground to cover.” He looked down at the folder again. “Dr. Nicholas Polchak, PhD in entomology from Penn State University.”
“Go Nittany Lions.”
“Currently professor of entomology at North Carolina State University. Distinguished Member, American Academy of Forensic Sciences; Diplomate, American Board of Forensic Entomology; Member of Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team since 1995.”
“Please. I’m blushing.”
The man rose from his chair and slowly walked around to the front of the desk; he leaned back against it, folding his arms across his chest and staring down at Nick. Now Nick wished he had left the chair where it was; he felt like a schoolboy in the principal’s office—which, he supposed, was the intended effect.
Nick judged the man to be about six feet tall, maybe less. He appeared broad-shouldered and large-boned but slender, like an ex-ballplayer who had worked hard to stay in shape. His skin appeared weathered but not tanned, suggesting a man who had moved up to an office after long years in the field. His facial features were sharp, almost angular, with deep creases and hollows around his cheeks and mouth. He was almost bald on top; the hair on both sides had been cut to match, leaving salt-and-pepper stubble that wrapped from ear to ear. Nick wondered if the man wore contacts; his eyes were precisely the right shade of “intimidating blue.”
“Yesterday you recovered the body of a man from the Lower Ninth Ward, though you were specifically instructed not to. Last night your director reprimanded you for that infraction and reminded you of your instructions—yet today you recovered a second body from the same general area. I’d like to know why.”
“I’d like to know who’s asking,” Nick said.
“My name is Turlock,” he said. “Special Agent Frank Turlock.”
“Why is the DEA interested in my little faux pas, Mr. Turlock? Seems like an in-house issue to me.”
“Not anymore. How much do you know about the drug situation down here?”
“Only what I read in the papers.”
“We’ve got all the usual problems,” he said. “Cocaine and crack—those are the big ones. Heroin, too, but mostly in New Orleans. We’ve got all the club drugs too: Ecstasy, ketamine, GHB—the college kids go in for that stuff. This is an interesting town, Dr. Polchak: The Port of New Orleans is the busiest port in the world—most people don’t know that. That makes us a major drug distribution center for Colombia, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Plus we’re sitting on Interstate 10—that makes us a major east-west corridor for traffickers from Miami, Houston, and the Mexican border. We’ve got it all here—production, trafficking, and illegal abuse. The Dominicans, the Haitians, the Jamaicans—they wholesale the stuff. The black and Hispanic gangs kill each other over turf at the local level while the whites make most of the money. It’s a regular battlefield down here. My job is to put a stop to it.”
“Good luck.”
“It takes more than luck. It takes a lot of time and planning—two years in my case, and you were about to screw that up.”
“How’s that?”
“Let me explain something about drug trafficking organizations—DTOs, we call them. A DTO is a lot like any other business: Everybody has a place, everybody has a position, everybody knows what belongs to them and what doesn’t. They don’t want to kill each other—that’s bad business. Only the gangs are stupid enough to do that, and that isn’t really about drugs; that’s mostly testosterone.
“And like any business, it isn’t easy to keep track of where everybody is and what everybody’s up to—that’s what makes our job so hard. Now, along comes Hurricane Katrina, and what happens? The port shuts down, the roads are closed, distribution channels are broken, and supply lines are cut off. Whole territories suddenly become available, entire neighborhoods are up for grabs. People see opportunities to get ahead: A dealer sees the chance to become a distributor; a distributor thinks he might become a major supplier. People know the opportunity won’t last, so they act—people who used to be invisible to us. This hurricane is a rare opportunity for the DEA, Dr. Polchak. When the water rises, the snakes come crawling out from under their rocks—some of them for the first time in years. They become visible, they make mistakes, and when they do we’ll grab them—if somebody doesn’t tip them off first.”
“Somebody like me.”
“Yeah—somebody like you. Tell me about the body you recovered yesterday.”
“It was sighted floating on the surface, only a few hours after the storm had passed. That made me curious, so my partner and I checked it out. I found a blunt-trauma wound on the forehead infested by calliphorid larvae—blowfly maggots. The species is terrestrial, not aquatic—and their stage of development indicated a postmortem interval of several days. In other words, this wasn’t a hurricane victim; he died on land sometime before the storm. Had he died in the hurricane, his blunt-trauma wound could have been caused by anything—a rock, a tree branch—but under these circumstances, it indicates foul play.”
“And that’s why you brought it back.”
“Exactly.”
“Even though you were ordered not to.”
Nick shook his head. “Do you know what the SAR teams are calling the water in the Lower Nine? Toxic gumbo—that’s a pretty good name for it. The water’s over ninety degrees, and it’s filled with bacteria and chemicals that speed up the decomposition process. Everything I noticed on that body—the trauma wound, the blowfly larvae—it would have all been obliterated in another day or two and the man would have looked just like any other hurricane victim. I didn’t bag that body just to be a wise guy, Mr. Turlock—I did it to preserve forensic evidence.”
“What about the second body—the one you picked up today?”
“It was in an even more advanced stage of decay. I can only guess at the time of death—at least a week ago, possibly two. An autopsy might tell us more; identification will be difficult for that one, unless they can still salvage a DNA sample from bone. The National Guard spotted the body and passed the coordinates on to me; I bagged it because of something unusual that I found.”
“What’s that?”
“How much do you know about forensic entomology?”
“Enlighten me.”
“Well—forensic entomology is the study of certain species of insects that inhabit bodies after they die. The life cycles of these insects have been timed precisely, allowing us to use them to determine time of death—and sometimes cause of death. In the past, almost all of the species we’ve studied have been terrestrial; very little is known about aquatic and marine insects of forensic value.”
“Aquatic and marine?”
“‘Aquatic’ means freshwater; ‘marine’ means saltwater; here you’ve got both. The Mississippi is freshwater; Lake Pontchartrain is salt. When the lake floods, salt water pours into the city; when the storm surge backs the bayous into the Industrial Canal, freshwater pours in. Like I said, you’ve got both. Actually, Mr. Turlock, Hurricane Katrina is a rare opportunity for forensic entomologists—sort of a large-scale field study.”
“Back to the body,” Turlock said. “What did you find that was so unusual?”
“I found caddis flies—they’re aquatic insects, one of the few that have been shown to have forensic value. The caddis fly lays its eggs on the surface of water; the eggs then sink and hatch, and the larvae attach themselves to whatever they happen to find nearby—including a body.”
“Why is that important?”
“It tells us that, unlike the first victim, this man died in water—or at least his body spent a significant time underwater after death. The general condition of the body was consistent with this—the tissues were thoroughly softened and the skin was beginning to slough.”
“I’m not sure I’m following you.”
“Well, think about it,” Nick said. “The guy’s been dead for a couple of weeks; he’s been in the water most of that time—but where? Two weeks ago there was no water in the Lower Nine. That means the body was moved.”
“Moved?”
“That’s my guess.”
“I’ve heard reports about bodies floating up out of cemeteries.”
“Without a casket? Besides, if it came from a cemetery, the body spent the last two weeks underground; then I wouldn’t have found caddis flies. No, I think somebody got the bright idea to use the flood to take care of some loose ends.”
“What do you mean?”
“Bodies are notoriously hard to get rid of—ask anybody on death row. Suppose you kill somebody and hide the body as best you can, but you know someone will eventually discover it—it’s only a matter of time. But then the hurricane comes along and you get a flash of inspiration: Why not dredge up the body and set it loose in the flood? That way it’ll turn up along with a thousand others, and nobody will know the difference. It’s pretty clever, when you think about it.”
“I see what you mean.”
Nick leaned forward now. “That’s why we have to recover the bodies, Mr. Turlock—that’s what I’ve been trying to tell Denny. It is pretty clever, and whoever did it just might get away with it—unless we grab the bodies before this kind of evidence is destroyed. I can prove that those two men weren’t hurricane victims—but with every day they spend in the water, it will get more difficult to do. If we wait too long, it’ll be impossible.”
Turlock said nothing; he just continued to lean against the desk with his arms folded, staring at a point in the center of Nick’s chest.
“We’ve got a problem,” Turlock said.
“What’s that?”
“These bodies that you want to recover—we don’t want them brought in yet.”
“Why not?”
“We’ve identified the first body you recovered. He was a midlevel drug dealer who worked out of the Lower Nine. We think he was trying to improve his station in life, but somebody got to him first.”
“Congratulations. That should save you guys a lot of time.”
“You’re not listening. We don’t just want him—we want the people around him. Once a body is identified, it’s only a matter of time before the information goes public.”
“Keep the victims’ names classified. You guys ought to be able to pull that off.”
“Which names? There are already thousands of people demanding information about lost family members. Which names do we keep under wraps? We don’t even know who these people are yet—that’s what we’re trying to find out. We need time, Dr. Polchak—and right now FEMA is giving it to us. They want to rescue the living first, and that works for us. What we don’t need right now is somebody dragging bodies out of the water when we’re not ready for that to happen.”
“I’m not sure you’re listening,” Nick said. “If you wait to recover these bodies, then whoever’s doing this will get away with it.”
“So what?”
“That doesn’t matter to you?”
“Tell me the truth: The two bodies you recovered—can you tell me who killed them and how? Can you find me a murder weapon? Will anybody at DMORT be able to tell me, even after they do an autopsy?”
“I doubt it.”
“Then I can’t get a conviction—the killer will get away with it anyway. Look at it from my perspective, Dr. Polchak: All you can do is prove that a few men weren’t really hurricane victims; I might be able to bring down an entire DTO. From where I stand, I’ve got a lot more to gain than you do.”
Nick said nothing.
“You’ve got a problem with this, don’t you?”
“I’ve got a big problem,” Nick grumbled.
“I figured. That’s why you’re here, and that’s why you’re a problem for me. I could send you home, Dr. Polchak—I have the authority to do that—but the bodies are eventually going to come in, and DMORT needs everyone they’ve got. I don’t suppose you’d promise not to look for any more bodies?”
“I’m a man of my word,” Nick said. “I just use a lot of vague and slippery ones.”
“In that case, I’d like to suggest a compromise.”
“What sort of compromise?”
“I want you to find bodies—but I want you to find them for me.”
“Meaning what?”
“I want you to look for bodies just like the other two you found—bodies that indicate foul play, bodies that weren’t the result of Hurricane Katrina or the flooding. When you find them, take a GPS reading—but leave the bodies in place. Do you understand what I’m saying? Do not bring the bodies back—let’s see what we can learn from them there. Then, when we think the time is right, we’ll bring them in; we’ll know exactly where they are. Do we have a deal?”
Nick thought for a moment before nodding.
“And just so we avoid any of those vague and slippery words, let me add one more thing: If you recover one more body without my permission, I will send you back to your classroom at NC State. Got it?”
“You really know how to threaten a guy,” Nick said. “Okay, I get the point.”
“Good. I’ll inform your boss about our arrangement.”
“Are we done here?”
“We’re done.”
Nick got up from his chair and smoothed the front of his shirt. He started for the door, then turned back. “What about the second body? Have they identified that one yet?”
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s need-to-know only.”
“I have an emotional need to know. Does that count?”
“Good luck, Dr. Polchak. Keep me posted.”
Nick stepped out and the door closed behind him.
When the office door clicked shut, a side door opened and another man stepped into the room. He was slightly taller than Turlock and at least twenty pounds heavier; he carried most of it around his waist. He had sandy red hair cut in a utilitarian flattop that he had probably maintained since high school. His hair was beginning to fade and thin at the same time, causing it to blend almost perfectly with his ruddy complexion. It was cut close on top, leaving an almost bald oval in the center of his head.
“Did you hear all that?” Turlock asked.
“I heard,” the man said. “Do you think he’ll follow orders this time?”
“He never has before.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I want you to follow him, John. Take one of the boats—make sure Polchak does what he agreed to and nothing more.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“We’ll deal with that if we have to. We can’t let him mess this up.”
“Do you think he could?”
“I think he’s trouble,” Turlock said. “Guys like him always are.”