5:05 P.M.
The park was deserted. Concrete tables and benches situated on gum-speckled slabs were scattered around a treeless expanse of unruly grass punctuated with patches of red clay hardpan. Poles set into the corners of the slabs supported corrugated aluminum canopies that provided the only shade. The tables had seen a lot of meals but not a lot of cleaning. A few of the canopies were tilted at odd angles because someone had backed a vehicle too close and bent the support poles. Garbage was foaming out of trash barrels that looked like they hadn’t been emptied since Reconstruction. The sun was baking the stink of stale beer and rotting food out of the garbage.
“Since you don’t know what Dr. Bell told us, you must believe you know something you’re sure he doesn’t,” Wallace said, after they settled at one of the tables.
“Most three-year-olds know stuff he doesn’t,” Carla replied, “but that’s not what I meant. Do you mind if I know who you two are? I’m taking a big risk talking to you, so I’d like to know who I’m dealing with.”
“I’m Wallace Hartman, a detective with the Baton Rouge Police Department. And this is Mason Cunningham, with the DEA.” They both offered their credentials, but Carla seemed satisfied with the introductions and didn’t bother to look at the proffered identification.
“I know that whatever Bell told you isn’t everything, because he ordered me to help him cover something up.”
“That’s very interesting,” Mason said. “Exactly what would that be?”
“Matt Gable, one of the main researchers at Tunica, the one I work for, is missing. Since at least Sunday night.” Carla paused, shifting her gaze from Wallace to Mason.
“Please go on,” Wallace urged.
Carla told them about how her inability to contact Matt had eventually led her to his burned house on Monday morning, her dealings with the police in Bayou Sara, the little town near the lab, and about her and Kevin Bell finding the hidden apparatus in the storeroom.
“What was the hidden lab stuff for?” Wallace asked.
“We don’t know.”
“Bell never mentioned anything like that to us and he didn’t show us anything inside any storerooms,” Mason said.
“That’s because he ordered me to take everything down and destroy it.”
“You’re kidding me,” Mason snapped.
“I’m not. But I didn’t destroy anything either. I took it all apart and packed it in storage crates and hid it behind some other things in the storage room.”
“Could you reassemble it?” Wallace asked, waving away a squadron of flies.
“I think so. I made sketches and notes as I took everything apart.”
“You obviously think it’s connected to Matt’s disappearance?” Wallace said.
“It’s the only clue I have. That’s why I saved it.” Her gaze drifted and her demeanor shifted into a lower gear. “That’s why I followed you just now.”
“The two of you were involved,” Wallace probed, keying on Carla’s sudden change in mood.
“We were, but we never registered the relationship with HR,” Carla admitted. “We didn’t think it was anybody’s business. It didn’t interfere with our jobs, and we kept it out of the workplace, so we felt like we were entitled to our privacy.” Her shoulders sagged and she stared at the ground.
“Tell us what’s known about the circumstances of the fire,” Mason said.
“So far, nothing,” Carla replied. “The local police say an investigation is underway, but I don’t get the impression there’s any urgency to it. They did say that no one was in the house when it burned.”
“Is it possible that Matt set the fire himself?” Wallace asked.
“I can’t think of a reason he would, and I can’t imagine why anyone else would either. He was renting, so it’s not like he would get insurance money for it.”
Mason stood and paced in front of the table, his shoulders hunched and his hands stuffed in his pockets. “Could the fire be connected to the stuff you found hidden in the storeroom?”
“I don’t know. This wasn’t some kitchen-counter lab fire, if that’s what you’re getting at. He wasn’t cooking meth or anything.”
“Is it possible he’s seeing someone else?” Wallace asked.
“I don’t think he would trash his career for something like that. Besides, I know he loved me. We had only been seeing each other a few months, but things got serious really fast. Don’t ask me to explain it, but I don’t think this has anything to do with another woman. Matt’s in some kind of trouble.”
“What about family somewhere?” Mason asked.
“He’s an only child and his parents are both dead. He has distant relatives somewhere in South Dakota, but they’re not close. They haven’t spoken in years. And anyway, if that were the case, he would have gotten in touch. He hasn’t, so my assumption is that he can’t.” Carla’s face crumpled and her eyes brimmed.
“Mason and I may meet with the local police to see if they have any leads on Matt’s whereabouts.”
“The local police aren’t taking this seriously.”
“What makes you say that?” Wallace asked.
“Because they’re moving too slow,” Carla blurted, her emotions escalating. “When I went to file a missing person report, I explained about how devoted Matt is to his work—that he would never just disappear without telling anyone. And all I got was a bunch of slow-walking we have to follow procedure bullshit.”
Wallace was about to speak when Carla cut her off.
“And I could see in their eyes, what they’re thinking. That I’m just some starry-eyed girl who won’t face the fact that he’s off with someone else. I mean, for Pete’s sake, his damn house burned down, he won’t answer his phone, his lab was full of a bunch of shit nobody even knows what it is. Does that sound like somebody tomcatting around to you? Police can be such bastards. Present company excluded, I’m sure,” she added.
“Do the police know everything you just told us?” Mason asked, mopping his brow with a handkerchief. “Do they know about the funny business you found in Matt’s lab?”
“I didn’t find out about that until after I talked to them on Monday so, no, they don’t know about the lab.”
“Why haven’t you told them?”
“We all had to sign nondisclosure agreements at the lab. If I talk about internal matters to outsiders and Bell found out, he’d fire me and maybe Matt too.”
“But you’re telling us,” Mason pointed out.
“If I tell the local police and they blab it to Bell, but they don’t do any kind of real investigation, then I get fired for nothing. Somehow the fact that you came all the way out to the lab to look made me think you were serious about looking into this. That makes it a risk worth taking because you might actually help me find Matt.”
“Surely the locals are doing the standard things—a motor vehicle alert, phone and bank activity. What are you holding back?” Wallace asked, in case Carla was being cagey.
“I’m not holding back. Look, they haven’t even bothered to do a decent search in the woods around his house. If somebody who lived near the forest disappeared, wouldn’t you make that some kind of a priority?”
“What would make the woods near his home more likely than any other place to look?” Mason asked. He sat back down and began rolling his sleeves up to his elbows.
“Sometimes Matt ran to and from work along a trail through the woods between his house and the Tunica access road. I don’t know the actual route, because I never went with him. I’m not a runner and I don’t like being in rough country.”
“Can you show me where Matt started his runs?” Wallace asked.
“Sure. When?”
“Now, if you like,” Wallace said. “One more question, though, before we leave. Do you know what an osmosis bag is?”
“I’m a professional chemist. Of course I do.”
“Did the secret apparatus from Matt’s storeroom lab involve any osmosis bags?” Mason asked.
“No. There was nothing like that in the stuff I took down,” Carla said.
“Could the apparatus be modified so that the bags would need to be part of it?”
“Sure. Any lab setup can be modified any way the chemist needs it to be. But you would have to know what the setup is intended to do, before you could guess about someone else’s work.”
5:30 P.M.
Wallace and Mason followed Carla to the burned ruins of Matt’s house. It had been an older frame house built in the pier and beam style. The firefighters had arrived too late to save anything. The tops of the brick piers and a bathroom sink still attached to its drainpipe like a huge white flower were the only things visible above the drift of ashes.
Pine woods surrounded the lot on three sides. Every house in the neighborhood was on a large wooded tract. Carla led them through the backyard, then through a break in the foliage. Shade from the trees gave them a little relief from the heat. The air was sharp with the turpentine scent of pine sap and the forest floor was slippery with leaf litter and pine needles. A few yards in, they came to an area where the bare earth was exposed.
“This is where he would start,” Carla said. “It’s maybe two miles, I think, from here to the access road that takes you to the guard gate at the lab. In that direction,” she said, pointing off into the trees. “Matt said the terrain was pretty difficult, but he’s very athletic.”
No one spoke for nearly a full minute as Wallace did a slow turn, studying the forest in the direction Carla indicated. Because of the deep layer of pine needles there was very little scrub vegetation and the ground had a springy feel. Shafts of sunlight stabbed through the canopy of the treetops.
“I have to get back to the lab,” Carla said, breaking the silence. “I’ve got some time-sensitive tests running and I’ll need to look in on them, pretty soon.”
“That’s fine,” Mason said. “Just make sure to leave those crates you hid exactly where they are, for the moment. Don’t do anything that might indicate they even exist.”
“Here’s my number,” Wallace said, handing Carla one of her cards. “Call me if anything turns up. And let me have your number in case we have more questions.”
“Sure,” Carla said, pulling out her phone and calling Wallace’s number. “Is that good enough?”
“Perfect, thanks.”
“Will you let me know if you find anything out there?”
“I will,” Wallace assured her.
“I wonder where the trail is?” Mason asked, as they watched Carla walk away.
“See those streaks of paler brown going off in that direction?” Wallace said. “Where the color of the pine needles is vaguely lighter than the rest and it looks less cushiony?”
“Sort of. Maybe. Now that you point it out.”
Wallace looked deeper into the trees, her eyes scanning along the floor of the forest, then darting back and forth among the trees. She walked a few steps deeper into the woods.
“Are you thinking of trying to follow this?” he asked.
“It has to be followed.” She looked back at him. “A halo of peculiar circumstances is forming around this place.”
“I meant you personally. Shouldn’t we leave the cross-country tracking to the pros?”
“Why would you assume I’m not a pro at this?” Wallace demanded. “Because I’m a girl?”
“Exactly,” he laughed.
Wallace looked at him, trying to keep her face from betraying the curiosity his whimsical attitude was stirring. “You’re not like any fed I’ve worked with before.”
“Is that good or bad?” he asked, staring off into the trees.
“I’ll let you know,” she said, not entirely sure what the answer was. “In any event, once upon a time, my brothers and I did a lot of hunting in woods just like these. I still know how to find my way around pretty well.”
“Once upon a time?”
“My older brother died a few years back. After that, my younger brother and I sort of lost our enthusiasm for it.”
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to pry.”
“And you weren’t. I’m the one who brought it up.” She waited a moment to see if Mason would pick up the thread of the conversation. When he didn’t, she looked back toward the burned house. “Obviously, Matt Gable is of prime interest now, but I’m thinking that even though Kevin Bell is a deceptive little prick, he’s not involved.”
“Agreed,” Mason said. “If he were, he would never have let Carla see the apparatus in Gable’s storeroom. He would have destroyed it himself. But Matt and the Tunica lab itself…”
“They no longer pass the smell test.” Wallace squatted down near one of the pale areas, then turned to look back into the woods.
“Do you want to run this trail right now?” Mason asked, following behind her.
“I’m out of my jurisdiction. We’d have to clear it with the locals first. I can’t afford to get accused of claim jumping and trampling on evidence,” Wallace replied. “It should be easy to follow, though. It’s pretty clear what he was doing.”
“Really?” Mason asked, looking at his phone. “Those pale streaks you pointed out don’t seem like much to go on, and Google Satellite shows nothing but tree cover and a few creeks, from here to Tunica. If there’s a trail in there, it’s well hidden.”
“Okay, city boy, does Google show this?” she asked, using a stick to point out a scrape mark about seven feet above the ground on a nearby tree trunk.
“Not that I can see, on this tiny screen,” he conceded, smiling at her gentle dig.
“And just to keep our vocabulary straight, wherever it is you come from I’m sure those things would be creeks,” she said, pointing to the image on his phone. “Around here … they’re bayous.”
“Got it. Bayous.”
“How much do you know about birds?” she asked, turning her attention back toward the remains of the house.
“Beyond the basic wings and feathers bit, not much. Why?”
“I’m just wondering what kind of a bird lives in a birdhouse that’s wired for electricity.”
Mason followed her gaze to a tree a few yards from where the left rear corner of the house had once been. Attached to the trunk, about fifteen feet above the ground, was what looked like a well-crafted birdhouse. A wire, almost the color of the bark, ran from the back of the birdhouse, down the trunk and disappeared into the ground. Scorch marks on the bark of the tree, and several others nearby, showed where the blaze had apparently burned away branches that would ordinarily have obscured the birdhouse from casual inspection. Sunlight glinted off a reflective surface just inside the round entry hole in the front. As they looked at it, Mason’s phone signaled an incoming message.
“Maybe we can borrow a ladder from a neighbor,” Wallace said, heading toward the street.
“He’s dead,” Mason said, studying his phone.
“Who?” she asked, alarmed he might be referring to Matt Gable.
“Echeverría—a plane crash, in northern Mexico.” He held the phone in her direction.
“When?” She moved up next to him to look at the screen.
“Yesterday.”
“So he could have been here, and was on his way home,” Wallace said, stepping back and looking at Mason.
“Could have been. It looks like his plane was shot down.”
“That should be easy to confirm. Do we participate in aerial interdiction down there?”
“No. Not in northern Mexico. And apparently it wasn’t a Mexican government takedown, either.”
“A rival cartel?” she asked.
“That would certainly support our turf war hypothesis. And it could easily be the case. Some of these newer cartels are operating like military units, with the training programs and heavy weapons to show for it. Shooting down aircraft is nothing new and hardly beyond their capabilities,” Mason said.
A gun-metal gray, late-model Dodge Charger, with BAYOU SARA POLICE stenciled in orange on the door, cruised to a stop at the curb alongside Wallace and Mason. The driver’s window descended in perfect synch with the car’s deceleration. The painfully thin driver was hunched up in the seat, as if he were far too tall for the size of the passenger compartment.
“I’m Jamie Whitlock, the Chief of Police here in Bayou Sara. Are you all friends or family of the individual who’s been reported missing from this address?” Whitlock asked, giving Wallace and Mason a slow, obvious threat assessment.
“Neither,” Wallace responded, then introduced herself and Mason.
“Then would I be wrong in assuming that your next stop, today, Detective Hartman, was gonna be at my office, to apprise me of your presence and your activities in my jurisdiction?”
“It would have been our first stop, but we got sidetracked by an opportunity that presented itself before we could get there. An opportunity we didn’t think would be wise to pass up.”
“So, if I’m hearing you correctly, you and Mr. Cunningham were driving directly from Baton Rouge to my office,” Whitlock said, giving his statement only a hint of a question mark at the end. “Because, if that’s the case, I guess I missed the call where you phoned ahead to see if I would be in and available to meet with you.”
“We’d love to have the meeting with you right now, Chief Whitlock. Our situation is a bit more complicated than a run-of-the-mill courtesy call to request permission to poke our noses into your department’s business.”
“I love complicated. Why don’t we walk and talk, since it looks like you and Mr. Cunningham were about to have yourselves a stroll through the neighborhood, anyway,” Whitlock said, extricating his six foot eight inch frame from the car.
“Your department wouldn’t happen to have a twenty-foot extension ladder, would it, Chief?” Wallace asked.
“Will we be carrying this ladder around just for the exercise, or did you have a more conventional use in mind?”
“It’ll be easier to show you,” Wallace replied.
As they led Whitlock back toward the burned house, Mason and Wallace took turns telling him the basics of what was going on, including their visit to the Tunica facility. Wallace noticed that she and Mason quickly fell into a rhythm, each knowing what to tell and what to hold back, without having worked it out ahead of time. By the time they finished talking, they were standing beneath the birdhouse in Matt’s backyard.
“Estelle,” Whitlock barked into his phone, without preamble. “Send Jake and a twenty-foot extension ladder to that house that burned three nights ago on Juniper Drive. Tell him I got a suspicious-looking box I want him to take a look at and tell ’im I’m tapping my foot waiting on ’im.”
Whitlock looked at Wallace and Mason with a disbelieving grin. “I got it now. You two were about to go looking for a ladder when I rolled up.”
“Just for a quick peek,” Wallace said.
“Nobody will be doing any peeking into that little box up there until Jake has had a chance to go over it first. Just look at what’s left of this house. You’d expect to see part of the frame—at least some of the boards and the contents visible in the ash. There’s nothing left here but ash,” he said, his voice rising as his hands flew about his head. “The Fire Chief estimates it burned in about half the time it would normally take for a house of this type to burn.”
“Well, that certainly raises an inference of arson,” Wallace said.
“I don’t think there’s even a shadow of a doubt about that,” Whitlock fired back. “Anyone who would use such a powerful accelerant to burn the main structure might have also rigged the little contraption in the tree with some sort of explosive device.” Whitlock looked from Wallace to Mason. “Jake’s had some training on this kind of thing, so we’re gonna let him have first go at it.”
“Boy, do I feel like a damn rookie,” Wallace whispered.
“Better than feeling like a dead rookie,” Whitlock responded.
As soon as Jake arrived, Whitlock walked over to explain what he wanted.
Jake set up his ladder against the back side of the tree so he could keep the trunk between himself and the birdhouse. Using a series of flat and magnifying mirrors on extensible rods, he examined the exterior of the birdhouse. Finally, he used a small camera on a long goose-neck to peer inside.
“What do you see?” Whitlock called out.
“Three things, Chief. One, there does not appear to be an explosive device inside the box. Two, the glint the detective and the investigator saw through the door hole was the reflection off a camera lens. And, third, there’s what looks like a mobile hotspot stuck up under the peak of the roof inside. You know—the gadget you keep near a laptop when there’s no Wi-Fi around.”
“Is there any way to tell what the camera is seeing?” Wallace asked.
“Not with the equipment I have with me,” Jake said.
“Could you take the camera out and download the pictures it’s taken?” Mason asked.
“It doesn’t look like the kind of camera that stores anything. With that hotspot in there, it’s probably just sending whatever it sees to some place off-site, and maybe it’s getting recorded there.”
“Can you tell where it’s sending to?” Wallace asked.
“Should be possible, but that’s not anything I have the equipment or the know-how to do.”
“Chief Whitlock,” Mason said, “I have access to folks at DEA who do this sort of thing for a living. With your permission, I can have someone here by morning.”
“I’ll want name, rank, and serial number on anybody you bring in, and I’ll want it before they commence operating in my jurisdiction. And, because there’s an open arson investigation and a missing person report connected to this place, I’ll want whatever you find out.”
Wallace could tell from Whitlock’s tone that he was still ticked off about her and Mason’s failure to get his blessing before making themselves at home in Bayou Sara.
“You get everything we find,” Mason said, pulling out his phone.
“One more thing, Chief,” Jake said, as he began climbing down the ladder.
“What’s that?”
“See that tree at the front right corner of the lot, about four or five feet this side of the utility pole?” Jake said, pointing. “It’s got a little box on it that looks a whole lot like this one.”
They all walked toward the tree Jake was pointing at. “These are surveillance cameras,” Mason said. “Not home safety devices.”
“Right you are,” Whitlock drawled. “To provide safety they’d have to be a deterrent and to be a deterrent they’d have to be visible.”
“And these would have been fairly well hidden until the fire burned away those limbs,” Wallace said, pointing at the scorch marks on the tree. “The bad guys won’t be scared off by what they can’t see.”
“The question is what were these cameras watching for?” Whitlock said. “What was Matt Gable so afraid of?”
“What if he didn’t put the cameras there?” Mason asked. “Maybe his employers were concerned about the kind of company he kept? Maybe they thought he was selling their secrets.”
“Would the kind of off-the-wall plant research you said they do at Tunica call for secret surveillance like this?” Whitlock asked.
“Possibly. Plant patents can be enormously valuable,” Mason said. “And industrial espionage is very profitable.”
“Well, regardless of who put the cameras here and why, the fact that they were hidden says somebody was worried about something,” Wallace said.
The clang of metal on metal drew their attention toward the street. Jake was strapping the ladder to the rack on the top of his truck.
“Jake,” Whitlock hollered, just as Jake was about to climb into the cab, “I want you and Sophie out here standing guard on these cameras until Mr. Cunningham’s people can get here to take a look at ’em tomorrow. Sophie stays ’til midnight, then you come out and relieve her until whenever the feds get here.”
“Done, Chief,” Jake replied, as he finished packing his gear.
“At a minimum,” Whitlock began, returning his attention to Wallace and Mason, “we find out where these cameras are sending their feeds and I’ll bet we get a good look at our firebug.”
“Is there anything yet on the whereabouts of the missing Matt Gable?” Wallace asked.
“Not a damn thing. We’ve asked the judge for permission to look into his phone and banking records, and we’ve put out an all-points on vehicles registered in his name—all the usual first steps—but we haven’t heard anything yet. The records request has been in for less than twenty-four hours and Judge Castro gets a bit testy if he thinks I’m trying to hustle him along.”
“What about a check on Gable’s current location using his cell phone? You don’t need a warrant if you’ve got a valid missing person report,” Wallace asked.
“Nothing on that either,” Whitlock said. “We called the law enforcement desk at all the cell service providers, and gave them the number for Gable that the Chapman woman listed on the missing person report. We’ve got a standing notification request in case he ever turns his phone on.”
“I need to make some calls to get the technicians lined up for tomorrow,” Mason announced, as he started toward Wallace’s car. “This may take a few minutes.”
“Chief, I’m really sorry we didn’t come to see you first, but we had no idea we would end up right here,” Wallace began, sensing this might be a good time to mend fences. “We came from Baton Rouge straight to Tunica and we intended to go to your office after we left there. But Carla Chapman followed us away from the lab. She and Matt Gable were … are a couple, and she’s worried. She spotted us when we were at Tunica and thought we might know something.”
“I’m glad you bring that up, Detective. That confirms something for me—namely, her interest in this Gable fellow. When she filed the missing person report, she started out as if she were doing so as a colleague, all formal and businesslike. But I think the general consensus around the station was that her concern went a little deeper than that because, after she got it in her head that we weren’t moving fast enough, she got downright surly.”
* * *
Mason leaned back on the car and waited for his call to be answered. The barest beginnings of a new theory about Matt Gable had begun to materialize. In order to test his new idea, he would need to reexamine some of the information Don Brindl had used to calculate the size of the cocaine supply in Overman’s territory. His call to Don’s office went straight to an out-of-office message. He left a voicemail asking Don to call, as soon as he could, then he called Neil MacKenzie, the section secretary.
“Neil, this is Mason. I just tried to call Don, but got an out-of-office message. Am I missing something, because I don’t remember that he was going on vacation or traveling for work?”
“He’s home, sick as a dog, but he checks in periodically. Do you need me to try and get him to come in?”
“No thanks. I left him a voicemail, and I have his cell number.”
As soon as Mason ended the call with Neil, he called the head of the technical section to arrange for someone to come to Bayou Sara to figure out where the birdhouse cameras were streaming their feeds.
As he walked back to where Wallace and Whitlock were still conversing, he could see that Wallace was having a rough go of it with the chief, who was probably still lecturing her on the fine points of interdepartmental etiquette. The tension was evident in their postures. Whitlock had positioned his tall thin frame a shade too close, forcing her to tilt her head back at an awkward angle just to maintain eye contact.
“Here’s the information on the techs who will be here in the morning to check out these contraptions on the trees,” Mason said, offering Whitlock a slip of paper.
“Thank you much. I’ll be waiting to hear from you.” Whitlock grinned and ambled off toward his car.
“I don’t think my career will survive any more fooling around in his jurisdiction unless we notify him first,” Wallace said, pointing at the departing police chief.
“Does that mean we forget about Matt Gable’s running trail?” Mason asked her, as the chief pulled away.
Wallace shook her head. “As long as we promise not to move or remove anything, or obscure any footprints, he said we can take a look.”
“Seriously?”
“Unofficially, but yes. He says his police force and his budget are both too small to do a major grid search on his own and it’ll be another day and a half before the sheriff can free up enough deputies to help. But Whitlock, himself, actually did a careful look through the woods behind the house—a couple of hundred yards in an arc around the back of the lot. But he didn’t find anything suspicious.”
“What if Gable’s lying out there, injured or something?” Mason asked, shrugging into a palms-up gesture.
“If he had gone for a run through the woods, then his cell phone would probably be on. Even if he was too hurt to make a call, it could still be located. But Whitlock says it’s not showing up.”
“He’s convinced Matt’s off with another woman somewhere,” Mason stated flatly.
“Yep—and that the husband or boyfriend of the woman he’s off with burned the house as revenge, and now Matt’s too scared to show his face in these parts.”
“Then why do you want to waste time traipsing around out in the trees?”
“Matt may not be the only thing out there worth finding. He’s a hider. He hid a secret lab inside his regular lab. There were hidden cameras around his house and I’m willing to bet he put them there himself. And—”
“And, since it looks like arson was involved, maybe the house was burned to keep something else hidden,” Mason finished.
“Very good. And, if Matt had other secrets, where better to hide them than out there somewhere? He wouldn’t have taken the time to mark his trails if they weren’t important.”
“Did you tell Whitlock about your Matt-the-Hider theory?”
“Nope.”
“Naughty, naughty.”
“Just pragmatic,” she said, with an unashamed, yeah-so? expression. “His permission was conditioned on how we’ll be searching, not why.”
“You would think that finding these cameras would get him a little more fired up about looking into things.”
“Oh, he’s fired up. While you were off communing with your people in DC, he and I had quite a chat. It seems he’s a rather compartmentalized thinker. Until he knows where the camera feeds are going, he says he can only speculate about who put them there and why, and that none of that speculation suggests a direction for the investigation.”
“But you could have suggested a direction by telling him your theory of Matt hiding things.”
“Which is still just speculation. Besides if he gets too fired up, he might want to start calling the shots. That might not slow you down, because you’re federal, but it could put me under his thumb.”
“Your approach to things is very … uhm…”
“Pragmatic. Surely that’s the word you’re looking for.” She smiled, then looked down her nose at him with a tread-carefully expression.
“That is precisely the word,” he conceded.
“And by the way…”
“Yes?”
“When we were leaving the lab you said you had a few more things you wanted to do. You never finished the list.”
“Well, finding out where the increased cocaine supply in and around Baton Rouge is coming from is critical,” Mason said.
“Anything else?”
“Why must I show all my cards first? Your turn.”
“The most important thing is the secret stuff Carla found in Matt’s lab. It needs to come out of Tunica as soon as possible,” Wallace said.
“It does, indeed,” Mason agreed. “And it needs to be examined by some serious federal experts, so I’ll want to accompany whoever the federal marshal sends to assert custody of it.”
“Not so fast,” Wallace said, raising a cautionary finger. “That equipment could very well be evidence that’s related to an already-committed crime under state law—a homicide—and for all we know kidnapping and arson might come into the picture as well. The state crime lab gets first dibs.”
“In fact, we don’t know that it’s evidence of anything, other than possibly some shenanigans by Matt Gable—federal shenanigans at that,” Mason said, his voice taking on a subtle peremptory edge. “Carla Chapman said the apparatus didn’t include any osmosis bags, so there’s no definitive link, at this point, between your homicide and the stuff in the storeroom. So, why would you want it or think you need it?”
“I just told you why,” she said, planting her feet wide and leaning toward him, her hands on her hips. “Those bags are rather unusual items. Until we can exclude a connection between the ones we found with Overman and ones that were at Tunica, I have to assume that somehow it’s a link between the lab and my case. What I can’t understand is why you’re so interested in it.”
“Look,” he said, elbows at his side, his palms up, “it’s federal property, it stays in federal custody, and it gets examined by federal scientists.”
“That’s not a reason. That’s just you being a big shot. Bravo,” she said, pressing her palms together in a kowtow.
“Okay. I can see I’m getting under your skin—”
“Can you really?” she asked, with a phony smile and a wide-eyed glare. She turned toward her car and started walking.
“Of course I can,” he said, calmly, as he followed along beside her.
“Well then, try this on for size,” she said, brushing past his irritating composure. “Let’s assume Matt was kidnapped. We know he wasn’t kidnapped from a federal facility because Kevin Bell told us lab security showed him leaving the place Friday evening. So, unless he was kidnapped and taken across a state line, it’s a state matter. And if the stuff in the lab holds some clue to Matt’s situation, then we’re looking at a state crime that just happens to involve federally owned evidence.”
“Hard to argue with that,” he said.
“Thank you—”
“But I’m going to.”
“Look, buster, I’m as fun-loving as the next person, but don’t start playing games with me.” She stopped and leaned toward him, her face inches from his. “Some people you can do that with. I’m not one of those people.”
“Have you ever tried to get a state court to issue a warrant authorizing a search and seizure at a federal facility?” When Wallace didn’t answer, he was about to ask the question again but her expression told him she was about to yank up the welcome mat. “Look, I’m just trying to figure out the best, fastest way to get at this stuff,” he said, instead.
“Twice,” Wallace said. “I’ve done it twice. Once it went off without a hitch. The other time I got nowhere, because my federal counterpart took such an obstructive attitude.”
“How long did it take you to get the warrant?”
“Not very. Where are you going with this?” She stepped off the curb and walked around to her side of the car.
“I see this whole business breaking down into three pieces. Who gets the stuff from Gable’s lab, how quickly it can be gotten, and how it’s analyzed after it’s out of Tunica.”
“Is there some reason you can’t just get the evidence out of Tunica and then turn it over to the state lab? You’ll obviously get any and all information we develop.” She pulled open the door to her cruiser and slid behind the wheel.
“How certain are you of the range of capabilities at your lab?” Mason asked, stowing his satchel in the footwell behind his seat and then climbing into the front.
“Is that what this is all about? You’re worried we’re just a bunch of local yokels who can’t tell a Bunsen burner from a hat rack?” She slammed her door, rocking the car.
“I’m not worried about anything,” he said, coolly. “I just don’t know, so I have to ask.” He slammed his door and stared straight ahead.
“As far as I know, we can do what any other lab can do. Anything that requires exotic equipment or really high-end chemistry that isn’t cost effective to do in-house, we have consulting contracts with the relevant science departments and med schools at every major university in the state. If it can be done, I’m sure it can be done here.”
“Good. Then we’re settled.”
Wallace reached for the ignition but pulled her hand back and then turned to face him. “You know, it occurs to me that besides your lame Uncle-Sam-owns-it-so-Uncle-Sam-gets-it gambit, you’ve never made a case for why you even care about this stuff.”
“While you and Whitlock were having your little come-to-Jesus meeting, it occurred to me that Gable’s connection to your case and mine—assuming he’s connected at all—might be that he’s developed a new, more efficient technique for extracting the cocaine powder from the coca plant itself. Faster, less costly, higher yield.”
“Would it have killed you to say that earlier?” she asked, shooting him a sidelong glance as she started the engine.
“I was debating whether to bring it up at all. A major advance in that direction was made several years ago, so I don’t know if further developments of any significance are even possible. I’m just grasping at straws. I don’t really have any facts to support my thinking. So, technically, my enhanced-extraction idea might be as lame as my Uncle-Sam-owns-it idea.”
“Just for the sake of discussion,” she asked, forcing herself to speak calmly, “could a more efficient extraction technique account for the supply discrepancies your analysts found?”
“It would depend on how much of an improvement it was, and the scale of the operation. Even a dramatic improvement wouldn’t have much impact unless it was used on a big enough fraction of the harvest,” Mason pointed out.
“If every square foot of his lab space was devoted to such a process, would it be enough?”
“I don’t know. But let’s say the stuff in the storeroom was just a proof of concept and that, once he debugged it, he ramped it up on an industrial scale.”
“Could something that big be hidden somewhere out there? In the woods behind Matt’s house, maybe?”
“Possibly, but I’m not a chemist so I can’t say for sure.”
“If he actually figured out something like that, and word leaked out, it seems like a lot of nasty people would be trying to get their hands on it.”
“And on him, which might account for his currently unknown whereabouts.”
“Well, this opens a whole new window into the matter,” Wallace said, staring off into the trees lining the road.
“Which is why I’m so concerned about what happens to the things Carla so thoughtfully set aside. It will have to be made operational again.”
“Surely, with Carla’s notes and sketches, that won’t be a problem,” she said.
“Assuming we can figure out what chemicals he fed into it, where in the process they went in, at what temperature, and so on. There could be a lot of variables.”
“So, do you want to get a federal warrant, or am I going to be doing this?”
“I’ll get it,” Mason said. “It’ll be easier.”
As they traveled back to Baton Rouge, Mason spent the better part of the drive time arranging for one of the legal officers in the DEA’s Resident Office in Baton Rouge to get a warrant with an order of seizure issued and delivered to the federal marshal. Mason and the marshal would pay a surprise visit to the Tunica Research Lab, bright and early, the next morning.
“We need to think of a way to lessen the blow this is going to have on Carla,” Wallace said. “If it weren’t for her, we wouldn’t know about this stuff. And, once Kevin Bell finds out she kept it, he’s going to rough her up.”
“Bell tried to have her destroy evidence. Instead, she reported it to the proper authorities—you and me. So I don’t think he’ll be in a position to do much damage. Plus, we can’t afford to ignore the possibility this lab stuff represents.”
“I’m not suggesting we ignore anything. I’m just looking out for someone who took a risk to help us. You never know when you’ll need to go back to that well.”
“She went out of her way to help herself,” Mason said, the peremptory tone creeping back into his voice. “That was pretty clear. She’s interested in having us find her boyfriend. If she didn’t have a very personal stake in this, you can be sure she’d have never chased us down and the things in that storeroom would have been destroyed.”
Wallace didn’t fancy herself the sensitive type, but she also wasn’t the type to be callous without provocation. She had never gotten completely comfortable with the collateral damage suffered by decent people like Carla, who just happened to fall into possession of what turned out to be dangerous information. The casual arrogance of some in the law enforcement community always struck her as wrong, and coming from Mason it was disappointing and confusing.
“Will you call me, once you and the marshal are done?” Wallace asked, bringing her focus back into the moment. “I want to be at the crime lab when the stuff rolls in.”
“Sure, but I thought you were going to show off your professional tracking skills tomorrow. Remember? Over the hills and through the woods.”
“I’m not leaving Baton Rouge until late in the morning. New reports on what they found at the warehouse might come in, plus I need to visit someone. Colley Greenberg.”
She waited a few seconds to see if Mason would ask who Colley was. But he didn’t.
“Mike Harrison is just a temporary partner,” she said. “An interim gig until Colley, my regular partner, comes back from medical leave.”
“I hope his recovery is speedy. And, look…” He hesitated, staring down at his feet.
“Yes?” Wallace said, turning toward him.
“You know … I could have done a better job of negotiating this business with the stuff from Gable’s lab.” He looked up at her. “There was no need for me to inject all that friction into it. In Washington, I’m so used to fighting tooth and nail for every little scrap. Sorry. Can we back that up and pretend I acted like a grown-up?” He extended his right hand toward her.
“We can,” she said, taking her hand off the wheel to shake his, her chest tightening a bit.
“Thanks. It wouldn’t have been good to leave that standing between us. You never know what kind of problems that can cause down the road.”
Wallace turned to look out of her window. “So, just to make sure, you do want to go with me tomorrow on my little cross-country expedition?”
“Yes, I do. I assume that after the stuff from Matt’s storeroom arrives at the lab you’ll be heading back to Bayou Sara?”
Wallace continued to gaze out of her window.
“Wallace?”
“Sorry, what was that?” she asked. That was the first time he had called her by her first name.
“After Gable’s stuff arrives … you’ll be going back to…”
“Right. Bayou Sara. That’s the plan. What?” she asked, when she noticed him studying her.
He continued to stare at her for a few seconds, his brow furrowing, the left corner of his mouth pulling to the side. “My electronics technicians—they’re coming up from the New Orleans Division—should be rolling into Bayou Sara to look at those cameras at about the time we get things buttoned up at Tunica, so I’ll have the marshal drop me off at Matt’s house. I’ll wait for you there.”
“Perfect.”
They rode in silence for several minutes. The next time she looked over at him he had fallen asleep with his head leaning against the window.
When they reached the hotel, Wallace squeezed his shoulder until he woke up.
“Oh, sorry,” he said sheepishly.
“Don’t mention it. You snore at the same pitch as the engine noise, so it was actually kind of soothing.”
“Really?” he said groggily, then grimaced when it became obvious she was making fun of him.
As Wallace drove away from the hotel, she found herself puzzling over Mason’s decision to partner up with her for the excursion to the lab. She hadn’t expected it. No other federal agent she’d ever met would have included her in what was really his investigation simply because it was an efficient way of doing things. All the rest of Uncle Sam’s tribe viewed such unforced generosity as treasonous, but for Mason it seemed second nature.
Their little skirmish over the things from Matt’s secret lab proved he could play the role of the straight-ahead, federal buzz cut, but then he’d been so quick to make amends. And yes, he was nice looking. She hadn’t expected that, either.
8:00 P.M.
Once she got back to the police station, Wallace spent half an hour at her desk checking progress on other cases. Nothing clamored for her immediate attention. Mike Harrison had yet to call her back, but he had left a report for her on the desk, with a note explaining that he had had to duck out to attend to some personal business that had come up at the last minute.
She pulled up the city-wide duty roster and noted the unit number and the names of the officers who had daylight patrol duty in the area that included Choctaw Ridge, where she and Mason had met Louise Mautner and the other gardeners under the power lines—Marcels and Romer, in Unit 107. With a quick call to a fellow officer who worked out of the North Baton Rouge substation, she learned that Marcels was the long-timer on the beat and that Romer had been riding with him for less than a week.
She left the building trying to focus on the case, but as she made her way to her car, her mind kept straying back to Mason and she had to keep reminding herself that she didn’t need a man in her life—especially not one who lived and worked so far away. But she kept thinking about him anyway. She had been so confident that she had retired that part of her life. A part that, at one time, had been as perfect as such a thing could be on this side of heaven. But all of that had been snatched away.
On the few occasions when she had mustered the courage to try again, she found she could go only so far before the old fears took over. As soon as she found herself beginning to care she retreated. Caring meant responsibility and responsibility raised the possibility of failure. And failure had proved itself capable of deadly consequences.