ELEVEN

THURSDAY MORNING

Wallace pulled to the curb in front of Colley’s house, then waited—sorting through her feelings and putting on her game face.

Colley Greenberg had been Wallace’s partner since she had joined the ranks of the Homicide Division two years before. As a rule, partner assignments were made by department brass. They paired newbies with experienced hands they considered compatible. But because Colley had mastered the department’s inconvenient knowledge—the inventory of hush-hush favors and closeted skeletons that gave those lower down the ladder the occasional bit of influence over those clinging to the upper rungs—when his long-time partner took early retirement, Colley had been given free rein to select his new partner.

On top of that, because chronic illness made his continued presence on the force an iffy proposition, he had been ready to hand off his accumulated wisdom and experience. But he hadn’t just wanted a new partner, he wanted a protégé—someone with a keen mind and the heart of a lion. He wanted Wallace.

Wallace, on the other hand, had been praying for someone else—almost anyone else, in fact. Colley was so skilled at getting crosswise with his superiors that many times his career had hung by a thread. Wallace believed she had prospects, so she didn’t want to be hitched to a train that so frequently thumbed its nose at the tracks. But praying, like golf, could produce the right result even when you did it wrong. So it hadn’t taken her long to discover that her prayers had been answered. Colley was someone else. His reputation turned out to be a poor proxy for the man himself.

As Colley had told her, a few months after they started working together, it was as if the moment had been fashioned with exactly her in mind. As if just when the season had come for him to pass things along, she had materialized in the lane ahead, her hand stretched back, ready to take the baton. And Wallace could tell from the sum of their daily interactions that Colley felt as if he were racing toward her, eager to show her all the magic in his bag of tricks. But his darkening prognosis a year into their partnership made her feel as if, suddenly, she were running toward him. It had made her think of a childhood vacation her family had taken out West.

It was the last day on the outbound leg of their journey into northern New Mexico. They wanted to go all the way to the giant Shiprock—the colossal, jagged upthrust of rock that sits utterly alone on a vast expanse of the high plains. Its shape suggests a stately three-masted schooner cruising on an empty auburn sea and it is so enormous and the plain so otherwise unoccupied that it’s visible from an impossibly great distance.

Even though they knew they would be racing against the sunset, they headed toward the mountain anyway. They continued, even when the roads turned from asphalt to gravel to nothing but tire tracks on the dirt. But it seemed as if no matter how far they went, the damn thing never got any closer. Then, just as the monolith began to claim a bigger share of the view ahead, the sun started plunging toward the western horizon. They found themselves speeding through the artificial twilight of the big rock’s shadow, knowing they would never reach the thing itself before the sun set for good on their day and on their trip. Wallace’s mother cried when they were forced to give up the chase—something Wallace hadn’t understood at the time.

Wallace walked slowly from her car to the front door of Colley’s house. She knocked and waited. Stella, Colley’s wife, answered the door. Her look was enough. As Colley descended deeper into the world of some-days-are-better-than-others, Stella’s front-door demeanor had been whittled down to a good-day look and a bad-day look. Today brought a bad-day look.

Colley and Stella had married at a time when mixed-race couples were an unwelcome rarity in the South. Stella was an archaeology professor at LSU. The police department had hired her to do the forensic excavation of three bodies buried beneath an old house in Zion City—a black enclave in the northern reaches of East Baton Rouge Parish. Colley swore it was love at first sight for both of them, but that Stella had repeatedly rejected him for what she termed impossible irony—as an archaeologist she would dig up the past, but as a white cop’s black wife she would bury his future.

Stella told Wallace that at one point in the early days of the marriage she almost bailed out when it looked like her initial reservations were proving to be all too true. The straw that nearly broke the camel’s back came when she and Colley walked into a restaurant up near the Capitol, where they ran into one of Colley’s fellow officers and a couple of his civilian friends. The man started in their direction. His bully sneer and his hey-y’all-watch-this glances at his tittering confederates telegraphed the all-too-familiar scene about to unfold.

“Well, if it ain’t Colley Greenberg. And you must be Mrs. Collard Greens.”

Colley’s fist flashed up. The big man hit the floor. And Stella almost bolted.

Fighting criminals was dangerous enough, she said. Fighting the rest of the world, as well, was likely to bring Colley’s life and their marriage to an untimely end. “Find a less violent way to deal with the hecklers or find a new wife,” she’d told him.

“Just go on back,” Stella said. “He’s in front of the TV.”

“Colley, it’s me,” Wallace announced, from the doorway of the den at the back of the house.

He looked up and lit up at the sound of her voice. He was lying on the couch, watching the news, which he muted as she approached.

“Hey, kid,” he responded. “Have a seat. You got time, or is this a drive-by?”

“I’ve got time,” she said, sitting cross-legged on the floor by the couch.

“How’s your new case going—the Overman thing?” he said, immediately cutting off any opportunity for Wallace to steer the conversation into maudlin territory.

“I’m not even going to ask how you know about it. It’ll make me paranoid. But it’s going … somewhere. To tell you the truth, I can’t seem to bring it into focus.”

“Why’s that?”

“It’s got a lot of big, shiny, interesting pieces, but how they fit together isn’t so obvious. Plus, Burley stuck me with Medicated Mike for the time being, although I’m thinking Abdicated Mike might be more accurate because he’s never around. On top of that I’m working with this guy from the DEA who thinks the key to this whole business is that Baton Rouge might become ground zero in a cartel-level territory dispute. Throw in a missing government scientist and his secret lab, who might or might not be connected, and that’s how it’s going.”

“How they fit together comes after whether they fit together. Do they?”

“Well, before Overman was killed, he was tortured in a really gruesome way.”

“Snake in the belly. I heard.”

“Colley, if you already know everything about the case, why did you ask me how it’s going?” she laughed.

“I just know the basic facts,” he said, grinning. “I’m more interested in your thoughts on the matter.”

Wallace could tell Colley missed the game. That he wanted to be back doing what he was so good at. Somehow the emotional elephant Colley had tried to keep at bay, by talking shop, was now sitting squarely in the middle of the room.

“Well, this snake business is apparently a trademark method used by a really charming man named Fernando Echeverría, the head of the Mexican cartel that’s been supplying south Louisiana—and Overman—for years, so there’s that connection.”

“What about the missing scientist?” Colley asked.

“Matt Gable? It’s weird, but the bags the cocaine was found in—the bags themselves—might be the connection. They’re not plain old grocery store items. They’re something called osmosis bags. The kind of thing that only comes with big-girl chemistry sets.”

“So the merch with Overman was repacks, not the bricks that come up from the growers?”

“I won’t know that for sure unless I can get the lab to tell me whether it’s been cut down to street grade, but Burley is starting to pinch pennies. I can’t see him giving me the okay to spend money on a purity test until we’ve got somebody to prosecute.”

“Listen to you. Since when did you start worrying about big bad Burley?” Colley chuckled.

“Since I don’t have blackmail on half the department, like you do.”

“What do you know about these osmosis bags?”

“It’s high-end stuff. The bag maker ships all over the place and its middleman distributors sell worldwide. A supply of the bags was shipped to a federal lab in Bayou Sara but they and Matt Gable are now missing under fairly odd circumstances.” Wallace told him about Kevin Bell and Carla Chapman, and about Matt Gable’s secret lab and the hidden cameras.

“I’m just thinking,” Colley said, chewing his lower lip, his gaze unfocused. “There might be a way to get that coke tested and clarify any connection between Matt Gable and the late Ronald Overman.”

“Would you mind thinking out loud?” Wallace asked, bringing a smile to Colley’s face. Asking the other to think out loud had become one of their rituals as they worked through cases together. She stood and started moving around the room.

“Did I ever tell you about that time I went to Colombia? Back in the eighties we got this grant to do an interdepartmental exchange with some of our counterparts down in the cocaine capitals of South America. You know, one of those things where we get a look at their methods and their madness, and they send a few of their guys up to the States to get a look at ours.”

“Kind of,” she said. “Just that you went. I got the impression you thought it was mainly a load. Just something the politicos could point to when they needed to make it look like they were doing something.”

“Well, it was that, mainly. But I did, in fact, learn one interesting thing while I was there. Back then, before the worldwide market for cocaine got so well-developed, there were areas down there where there was so much cocaine around, it was as common as beach sand. And one of their guys was telling me that they had come up with this interesting way of figuring out just what part of what mountain or what valley a particular drift of this stuff had blown out of. Each area had its own version of the process they used to get the powder out of the coca leaves. I mean, they all used the same chemicals, but they used them in different proportions and concentrations and whatnot, and they were always tinkering with it, trying to find out how to get the best yield. Anyway, each cook’s extraction and purification process left faint chemical traces that were a little bit different from the ones the others used.”

“Molecular fingerprints?”

“Exactly. The government scientists down there learned to look for those chemical traces in the stuff they seized. That way the police could know which direction to point their guns.”

“Surely Mason, our visitor from DEA, would know about stuff like that, don’t you think?”

“One would think,” Colley conceded.

“Do you know if these traces survive all the hands this stuff passes through to get up here?”

“No idea. The crap that distributors and dealers use to cut it down to street grade is different from the chemicals the cartel cooks use to extract the powder from the leaves, so it’s possible. And since Echeverría is Mexican, he’s a middleman, not a producer, and all the cocaine he’s moving would come from just one cartel in South America. So batches cooked up around the same time could all have the same traces in it. And for sure, the people close to the retail end are not going to throw away time and money trying to purify it. So those extraction traces may still be there, just buried a little deeper at each step in the supply chain.”

Wallace stopped pacing and perched on the arm of a chair, her eyes focused in the distance. Colley watched serenely as she computed the possibilities. Slowly, she surfaced from some deep pool of thought.

“We’ve got the stuff from Overman, and we’re about to lay our hands on the gear from Matt Gable’s hidden lab. If the chemical fingerprints in the coke we found with Overman point toward Echeverría, and we can link the bags to Matt Gable, then we have a link between Echeverría and Overman, and a link between Overman and Gable. Or if there’s coke residue in Gable’s secret labware…”

“And that’s the linchpin. Burley won’t stand in your way if testing the coke will help you line up a set of connections like that. Do you have any product you know for sure comes from Echeverría?” Colley asked. “For comparison purposes?”

“I’ll have to find that out.” She went quiet, again, her eyes closed in concentration.

“Would you mind thinking out loud?” Colley asked.

Wallace smiled at the question, but only half-heartedly. The old routines were comforting, but they were also making Colley’s absence an even starker reality. “I’m arranging these three guys at the corners of a triangle and trying to see the connections between them. Isn’t this what you would do?”

“It’s exactly what I would do,” Colley said. “Just remember—”

“I know … the case might be more complicated than a triangle.”

“Right, and—”

“I know, even if we can show that Overman and Matt Gable are connected by those osmosis bags, that won’t tell us which direction the goods were flowing.”

“It won’t tell you what that hidden lab was all about, either.”

“Or whether the purification traces are inconclusive or point to some other cartel.”

“Listen to me,” Colley said. “All of a sudden, I don’t like this case. It’s making me nervous. Be careful, will you?”

Wallace gave him a startled look. In all their time together, regardless of the situations they faced, Colley had never once told her to be careful.

“Why are you saying that?” she asked.

“If you get that coke tested, and the chemical fingerprints belong to some other cartel, your new friend from DEA’s gonna look like a genius with his cartel war idea, which means the two of you could find yourselves standing in the middle of some really hateful crossfire.”

*   *   *

Wallace drove toward the state crime lab. Despite Colley’s warning, she felt the thrill that came when a case started cracking open a bit. It was like a runner’s high—the endorphin rush that persistent effort called forth. Maybe Colley’s idea would clear the fog a bit. She was just starting to soar, when her phone rang. She lost altitude quickly when she saw it was Carla Chapman. She checked the time. Mason and the marshal would have finished their evidence grab by now and it was very likely that the waves it stirred up were swamping Carla’s boat. Wallace almost chickened out and let it go to voicemail, but resolved at the last second to give up faintheartedness for the rest of the day.

“Detective Hartman,” she said, bracing herself.

“You fucking bitch. You and that dog turd you hang around with just ruined my career.”

“Whoa. Take it slow, there—”

“I am taking it slow,” she blared. “I can’t believe you did this. I tried to help you, and you have completely fucked me over.”

“If you’ll remember, you’re the one who brought it to our attention in the first place, and you knew the risks involved. You spelled it out quite clearly for us. Surely you didn’t expect us to just leave that stuff where it was.” Wallace was amazed that her words and her attitude had the same insensitive tone she had faulted Mason for less than twenty-four hours before.

“But there was no need for a search warrant and a dawn raid. I would have gladly hauled it out and given it to you, and Bell would never have been the wiser.”

“Even if that’s true,” Wallace continued, trying to soften her words, “how would you have done it without getting caught? Plus, even if you were successful, you would have further compromised any evidentiary value it might have. And on top of that, it wouldn’t have kept you safe anyway. For it to do us any good you would eventually have to testify about where it came from. The light was going to shine on you at some point.”

“What do you mean further compromised it? If I hadn’t done what I did, all that shit would have been compromised into powdered glass by now.”

“Sorry. Poor choice of words. What I’m getting at is that anytime something is moved from its original setting, its validity as evidence is diminished. Once it’s changed from the state it’s originally found in, the person who made the change will have to testify as to what it was like before they changed it. Testimony is always less reliable than physical circumstance. Always. If you had taken the further step of removing it from Tunica on your own, the only connection between it and Tunica would be your say-so. At that point, any evidentiary value it might have would be extremely low.”

“So what are you saying? That I’m the one who screwed up my own career, by trying to do the right thing?”

“I’m saying it’s a risk you knew you were taking,” Wallace said, again alarmed at how much she sounded like the side of Mason she liked the least. “You came to us. We couldn’t just ignore what you told us.”

“This is all just so shitty,” Carla whispered and began to cry.

“Listen, I’m not a lawyer, but I know that Bell can’t fire you for refusing to commit an unlawful act. And destroying evidence is an unlawful act.”

“Kevin Bell is a dickhead, not a dumbass. He didn’t fire me for saving the glassware because—you’re right—that would expose him to the charge that he ordered an illegal act. This isn’t him retaliating against a whistle-blower.”

“Then what?” Wallace asked.

“He’s saying I violated the terms of my employment by not registering my relationship with Matt with the lab’s HR office.”

“That’s a firing offense?” Wallace asked. “How did he even find that out?”

“You told the Bayou Sara chief of police, and when he called Bell to see if Matt had turned up yet, he just happened to mention it.”

Wallace pulled her car to the side of the road and got out. She felt like she was going to be sick. She remembered telling Chief Whitlock about Matt and Carla’s relationship, but she hadn’t foreseen that he might spill the beans to Carla’s boss. Now Carla had lost her job and Wallace felt responsible—and negligent.

“Plus, Bell is saying the stuff that was seized, he had never seen it before, that if it was ever part of anything at the lab, that I was the one who hid it from him. His story is that because Matt and I were involved, I was engaged in some kind of cover-up to protect Matt. And since we never registered our relationship, he says that’s just further proof that I was trying to keep things from him. And since Bell and I were the only ones who saw the things in the closet, there’s no one to contradict his version of the story.”

“I’m sorry things worked out this way. Truly. I don’t know what I can do, but I’m sorry.”

“I know. Me too,” she said, her voice cycling from angry back to despondent.

“You said, a minute ago, that you and Matt were involved. Past tense. Has something changed since we spoke to you in the park?”

“Isn’t that sweet, that you’re so concerned about my love life. But no, sorry, I can’t help you. Matt hasn’t called to give me the official heave-ho.”

The line went quiet for several seconds, then Wallace could hear Carla crying.

“You know, I’d almost be willing to forgive him for dumping me if it meant knowing he was okay.”

“Carla, I feel really bad for getting you in trouble, but this case is turning scarier by the minute. There’s already one dead body—”

“What dead body?”

“A drug dealer was killed in Baton Rouge, four days ago.”

“You can’t possibly think Matt is connected to something like that,” Carla moaned.

“We don’t know what to think, at this point. What my instincts tell me, though, is that the possibility that Matt is connected to the homicide in Baton Rouge is growing, not diminishing.”

“That’s absurd.” A faint echo of her earlier hostility had crept back into her voice. “He could never do anything even remotely like what you’re saying.”

“I hope you’re right. But that will be determined by the evidence.”

“I know you’re just doing your job,” Carla said after a long pause. “It’s just that a few days ago everything seemed just about right. Now my whole world has been turned inside out. And not because I’ve done anything wrong. It’s just not fair,” she said, finally winding down.

“Listen, while we’re on the phone, I need to ask you something. The stuff that was just seized from Matt’s lab is on its way to the state crime lab in Baton Rouge.”

“So?”

“We need your help to reassemble it.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Carla said. An ugly chill edged into her voice. “Let me see now—you get me fired from my job, you ruin my career, you all but accuse my boyfriend of being a murderer involved with drug dealers, yet you still have the nerve to ask me to help you?”

“You would be helping us find Matt, or at least find out about Matt,” Wallace said, immediately regretting her ham-handed attempt at leverage.

“You’re a real piece of work, Detective.”

“Please,” Wallace pleaded, brushing past Carla’s whine. “I’ve got a dead body and a scientist missing under suspicious circumstances. I hate the way things have turned out for you, but I can’t not follow the trail where it leads me because of your, or anyone else’s, bruised feelings.”

“You said, a minute ago, that a connection between Matt and this drug dealer was looking more likely. How much more likely?” she asked, her tone thawing a few degrees.

“I don’t know. Cases evolve. Assumptions change. All I can say is that when I first started down this path, it looked like a real longshot. Now, my instincts are telling me otherwise.”

“If something concrete has changed your thinking, I’d like to know what it is. That’s only fair, after what this is costing me.”

“I’m telling you what I can,” Wallace said, trying not to sound evasive. “Look, we’re letting precious time slip away. Will you help, or won’t you?”

“I can try,” Carla said, sounding defeated. “That’s assuming my labels haven’t been removed. But I’m getting the distinct impression you’re not really telling me anything.”

“At this point, there’s no way for me to know what information might be dangerous for you to have. If Matt’s disappearance is connected to something he knew, your knowing it could endanger you as well.” Wallace waited to see if Carla would push for more, but she didn’t. “Do you want me to pick you up? I can take you to the lab.”

“Just give me the address of this place where you want me to go. I’ll drive myself. I don’t want to go with you and then be stuck there when you get called away on something else.”

The moment she ended the call her phone rang. She almost didn’t want to look at it, afraid it might be Carla, again. But it was Mason.