At midday, after they had both managed to get some sleep—not together—Jack and Pandora met at the Serious Crimes offices on the sixth floor of the Depot. The IT guys—actually three women and one guy—handed Jack a fat envelope filled with printed reports detailing where the trio had been, including the Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans—there were digital copies of the hotel security camera footage that showed the Walker girls and “Diana Bowman” drinking at the Carousel Bar and swimming in the rooftop pool.
Jack liked that detail; the bluff he had run on Karen Walker turned out to be reasonably accurate.
One of the techs had worked on a screenshot of the three of them at the bar, isolating and enhancing a shot of the woman calling herself Diana Bowman. She had printed a full-color shot and included it in the packet.
Jack slipped it out and studied it for a while, then handed it to Pandora. She was looking at an attractive full-bodied, black-haired, green-eyed woman of no particular age—not young however—with high cheekbones, full red lips, her face caught in a sideways smile as she brought a glass of wine to her lips.
She was striking rather than beautiful, and the little black dress she was wearing looked to be made of raw silk. Studying her, Pandora thought, cold and sexy and sharp as shattered glass.
“This gone out yet? As a BOLO?”
Jack shook his head.
“No. Not yet. I think we should sit on it for a while.”
“You don’t want her to know we have a face shot.”
“No. I think she’s still close. I don’t want her to run, or change her look too much.”
She handed the shot back to Jack.
“If she’s been doing this for a while, she’ll change her look as a matter of tradecraft.”
“Maybe. But seeing her picture all over the media will sure as hell drive her deeper,” he said, looking at the photo, feeling again that sensation that he had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere in the past.
“What I don’t get,” said Pandora, “is where the hell is she right now? I mean, it’s like she just stepped off the planet.”
“Yeah. My guess, she’s gone into somebody’s house, maybe a deserted one, maybe she’s got hostages... Look, how about this?”
“I’m listening.”
“Thank you, Frasier Crane. She went dark just a few minutes after we chased her into the Intracoastal. Right there in that neighborhood—”
“Flagler County guys went door-to-door all over those streets. Everybody checked out.”
“I know. But...somebody missed something. There has to be a ripple someplace, where she dove deep. Know what I think? In one of those houses around there, something’s not right. Mace is doing a press thing today.”
“One o’clock. If he shows up for it. He hates the media more than steamed broccoli.”
“Yeah, so, what if we get Mace to ask all the people in that neighborhood to get out there, phone, go knock on everybody else’s door, check up on each other? See if somebody doesn’t answer, somebody looks scared when they come to the door—”
“Sounds like a great way to get a civilian shot if they actually do turn this woman up. She does guns. She’s a psychopath. A neighbor stumbles on her, she’ll stick a gun between his eyes, walk him inside, close the door and kill everyone in the house. Then go back where the guy came from and kill everyone there too.”
“Then do phone checks. Text. Emails. All that social media stuff. Anybody who ought to answer and doesn’t. Anybody who sounds weird.”
“Long shot.”
“Worth taking. I’ll ask Mace to get it out there.”
Pandora, distracted, was looking at her iPhone.
“Okay. Got a message from Mullvahill.”
“The autopsy on Karen?”
“Yeah,” she said, reading it. “You were right. It was cyanide, in an aerosol form.”
“That doesn’t sound like an easy thing to do.”
“Not that hard. Mix it with water, or even a light olive oil, so the droplets will stick better. Add some CO2 from a cartridge. The puffer is already an atomizer. Aerosol just means a bunch of tiny droplets. Would get the job done.”
“And it did. You know a lot about this. Ever killed anyone? I mean, other than in the line of duty?” Pandora had shot two men dead during a mall robbery. She gave him a sideways smile.
“Not that way. I do remember almost killing you one night in the Casa Monica.”
“I was fine. I just faked the heart attack to get you to stop.”
“Bullshit. It was pure rodeo and you were never going to buck me off. Anything from the Feebs?”
The IT team had submitted the enhanced screenshot to the FBI’s NGI-IPS facial recognition database, which scanned over 500 million photos taken from criminal, military and driver’s license shots in all fifty states, plus, it was rumored, the NSA’s massive database of passport and security camera surveillance shots taken at airports and travel hubs over most of the civilized world, and a lot of the uncivilized parts, as well.
The Feds liked to say—privately—that if your face wasn’t in their database, you didn’t exist and should probably stop paying your taxes.
“So far nothing,” said Jack. “But they’re still scanning other databases, so we’ll see.”
“Millions and millions of faces on the FBI database—most of them not criminals—and she isn’t one of them? Seems to push the odds a little, no? How the hell do you stay off the grid that long?”
“I don’t know,” said Jack, putting the shot back in the file. “We’ll have to ask her, when we run her down.”
“Literally?”
“If she gives me an excuse. Let’s go see Mollie.”
* * *
Mollie Zeigler, the head of the Forensics team, a big-shouldered red-haired woman with an amiable nature and an eye for critical details, met them at the gates of the Motor Pool Forensics lab in the basement of the FHP Depot building. After asking about Julie Karras and hearing that she was doing okay and would be released the next day, Mollie walked them back into the garage area, which looked exactly the way you’d think it would. Big red metal toolboxes everywhere, three hoists and the comforting smell of spilled gasoline, motor oil and ozone.
Only thing missing was a lanky bald-headed guy in stained blue coveralls with a white oval name tag with Dwayne on it in black script. And maybe the Playboy calendar stuck on Miss May 1977.
The big black Suburban looked like it had been hit by an RPG. It was scattered all across the floor and over several tables along the garage wall and a crew of technicians had spent the night going over seat cushions, floor mats, visors, windows, wheels, and slip pockets looking for... Well, they had no idea. Anything that looked like a clue, basically.
Jack was primarily interested in the backpacks and duffel bag that had been in the rear of the truck when he and Julie Karras finally ran it down.
The Forensic unit people had laid the three backpacks and the tan canvas duffel bag down on a long table, with whatever had been inside spread them out neatly in front of each one.
Mollie Zeigler walked Jack and Pandora along the table, pointing out what she found to be interesting.
“Most of this is just girl crap,” she said, indicating the array of items—makeup and mirrors, various bits and pieces of clothing, tampons, rings, an iPad Mini with a cracked screen, candy wrappers, gas and hotel receipts. “The Suburban might as well have been a Dumpster. These were not tidy people. Nothing but beer cans and candy wrappers and cigarette butts. Got DNA for the Walker girls off the butts, but nothing on the runner. Now, the duffel bag here, this was more interesting.”
They had reached the end of the long table. The duffel lay flat, emptied out, but in front of it was a collection of very old jewelry—rings and cameos and bracelets, beaded handbags, antique watches, brooches, framed pictures, hatpins and scissors and various kinds of hand mirrors, and what looked like a collection of dark brown sticks and stones. Everything was coated in a fine gray powder. Zeigler pointed to the dark brown sticks and stones.
“These are mostly phalanges, and the lumpy bits are metacarpals—”
Pandora, who had been a corpsman in Iraq, said, “You mean bones? Human bones?”
Zeigler gave a her a wry smile.
“Hand bones, to be particular. These look to have belonged to an elderly woman, suffered from arthritis, Caucasian descent, light drinker, mainly white wine from the Alsace region, a good dancer—”
“Okay,” said Pandora, tumbling to it. “You’re heating me up.”
“Maybe a bit,” said Zeigler, winking at Jack.
“But why bones?”
“See this white ash stuff? It’s dried river mud, silt and sand and granular vegetable matter. Coats everything, all to the same extent. So my call?”
They waited. Mollie liked her dramatics.
“A grave that has at one time been underwater. Probably a flood that receded, leaving the silt. And so long ago that everything dried up. The mud tastes a bit salty.”
“Jeez,” said Jack. “You didn’t lick the damn bones, did you?”
“’Course not, you moron. I look like a zombie?”
“Then how do you—”
“I touched one of the lockets and tasted my fingertip—”
“Mollie! For Chrissakes it coulda been fucking poison!”
“Don’t go getting the vapors, okay? I had one of the guys try it first. When he didn’t keel over and go into convulsions, I gave it a go.”
“Which one?” said Pandora, looking around at the techs, all of them involved in things mechanical, none of them paying any attention.
“Yugo, over there in the corner. Not the swiftest starling in the murmuration, if you know what I mean. And he’s crazy for me. Anyway, since it’s salty mud, I’m thinking a grave near the ocean, or a tide pool, something like that.”
Jack was looking at the tumbled collection of antique jewelry. It looked like junk to him. Why the hell would anybody want to steal a duffel bag full of junk jewelry?
Mollie was watching them work through it.
“Want to know where I think it all came from?” she said, letting the drama build up again. She had their attention.
“How can you tell?” asked Pandora.
Mollie reached into her apron pocket, pulled out a little gold locket, battered, and if there had been a picture inside it was long gone, but the locket glimmered in the work-light glow, standing out brightly from the rest of the muddy relics.
She held it out in the palm of her calloused hand, used a grease-stained finger to flip it over. The back was deeply engraved, a flowing script, done by a skilled hand. The engraving was still perfectly clear.
Mammaloi Marraine
Ma Cherie Minou
FWC
“It’s in French,” said Jack, which got him a look from the women.
“Wow,” said Mollie. “You should be a cop.”
“Yeah, yeah. Can you read it?”
“Yes. It says, ‘Mammaloi Marraine, my darling Minou,’ which means cat. And then the letters FWC.”
“FWC? The initials of the guy who gave her the locket?” asked Jack.
“Could be, but I don’t think so. I think this locket comes from Southern Louisiana. Probably New Orleans. I looked up the word mammaloi and it’s gris-gris for a witch, a priestess of gris-gris magic. And marraine means godmother in Creole patois.”
Pandora was considering the locket.
“Did you shine this up, Mollie?”
“No. It was like that. Good catch.”
“Yeah. It being the only thing shined up means that, out of all this stuff here, this locket was the only one to get some special attention.”
“From whom?”
“Can’t say,” said Mollie. “But my guess would be from the woman you’re looking for. Why? I have no idea. But the locket sure called to her. So maybe that’s something to work on?”
“I get the patois words,” said Jack. “But why aren’t the letters somebody’s initials?”
“They could be. But in that part of Louisiana the letters FWC usually mean Free Woman of Color. So taking all this in, and the bones, and the rest of the trinketry here, and the signs of flooding, and you get—”
“Katrina,” said Jack. “August 25, 2005. All the graveyards got flooded, didn’t they?”
Mollie was impressed, and showed it.
“Not all, but a lot. I’ll bet if you had the silt analyzed, you’d nail it down solid. But that’s my call.”
Jack turned to Pandora.
“The Walker guy, the dad? Didn’t Karen say he was with the government?”
“Yes. The Army Corps of Engineers.”
“Yeah, but what did he do? Specifically?”
Pandora’s face changed as she got it.
“Forensic archaeology. Which is—”
“Old bones and relics.”
“Told you so,” said Mollie.
“No, you didn’t,” said Jack.
“Well,” she said, shrugging, “I was about to.”
Jack looked at Pandora. She looked back. They were both thinking about what Karen Walker had told them, just before she died. That Diana Bowman was obsessed with finding a particular gold locket.
“You got anything pending, Pandora?”
“Two weeks vacation, long overdue.”
“Yeah, yeah, but work related?”
“No. Nothing I can’t free up. Why?”
“Well, unless Mace objects, I’m gonna take this one on. I want to ask this Walker guy if he knows anything about lockets, anything that might have to do with why Bowman got close to him in the first place. You in?”
“Road trip? All expenses?”
“Yeah. Road trip. And maybe I buy you lunch.”
* * *
They threw together some traveling gear, checked an unmarked slate-gray pursuit car out of the motor pool, and headed north to Amelia Island, specifically to the Intensive Care Unit of Baptist General at Fernandina Beach, where Gerald Walker, the last Walker breathing, was, they sincerely hoped, still clinging to life.
* * *
Back at the Depot Mace Dixon was up to his garrison belt in a toxic spill of print reporters and TV newspeople, all of them wanting to know how a sixteen-year-old kidnap victim had managed to die in Protective Custody, which seemed, to the media pack, to be something of a contradiction in terms when you looked at the outcome, namely a dead girl.
Dixon was dealing with the barrage of questions as well as he could while keeping one nervous eye on the back of the Press Briefing Room, where a grim-looking rake-thin blonde woman named Marylynne Kostic was leaning against the wall, her arms folded, her face in Full Hatchet and her pale blue eyes locked on him the way a mongoose looks at a chicken.
In his heart Dixon wished he was on the road with Jack Redding and Pandora Jansson. He even closed his eyes and tried to make that happen—if he had ruby slippers he would have clicked them—but when he opened them again he was still here facing an angry mob of flying monkeys and those two ratbags were still heading safely out there, disappearing into the misty blue distance.
Dixon got them all to shut up, for a moment.
“Look, look—we’ll get to the questions in just a second. But we—the FHP—want to ask you guys for some help here.”
“Looks like you need it,” said the carrot-head dork from CNN. Got a big laugh.
“Well, maybe we do. The woman we’ve been looking for—”
“Got an ID on her yet?” asked one of the bobblehead media chicks from the local affiliate.
“Not yet—”
“Got a photo? Must have from somebody’s security camera.”
“Not ready to comment on that yet.”
This brought on a babble of objections, which, it occurred to Dixon, for only the fiftieth time, made them sound like a room full of geese. He held up a hand.
“When we’re ready. But right now, we are working on the idea that the fugitive might have gone to ground right there in the Flagler Beach area. Flagler County did a house-to-house, but we think it might be possible that she slipped the net somehow, that she might still be in that area, in a house, maybe holding hostages. So what we’d like from the people of Flagler Beach is to check on their neighbors.”
“And get themselves shot—” said Carrot Head.
“Not in person. Phone, email, text—whatever. And then if anyone comes across anything even remotely suspicious, they call it in to the Bureau of Criminal Investigations—not 911—the number is 850-617-2302—and we will investigate.”
“You think she’s taken hostages?” said Bobble Head Two.
“We have no information that she has. This is just a request for the people of Flagler Beach to do some very careful checking in their area to make sure everyone is safe.”
“So release the picture you’ve got,” said Carrot Head, and everyone started gaggling again, and at the back of the room the mongoose was waving her stick-figure arms and making angry mongoose sounds. Pointing at her, he braced himself and said, “Yes, Ms. Kostic, you have a question?”
She had several.