John Ames - Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Vol. 128, No. 5. Whole No. 783, November 2006

Beau looked around at the devastation and his heart sank even further.

“I heard the Quarter hasn’t flooded,” Cruz called out. “Yet.”

To illustrate her point, another chopper flew overhead with big sandbags for the levee break. Beau thought of the French Quarter. Hopefully, it wouldn’t flood. It was the first dry place the French discovered when they came up the Mississippi. Too bad the city had expanded away from the river into the marshland. If the Quarter was destroyed, New Orleans was gone.

Cruz called the cat Lucky — a female not a year old, according to a veterinarian at the airport. They wanted to put Lucky in a cage but Cruz would have no part of it. She took the cat to her room, little more than a closet along Concourse A. She scored some cat food from the vet, went in with the cat, and didn’t come out until shift change.

Three bodies were brought in at the beginning of their shift, two bloated from being in water, the third fresh. Beau stepped into the hangar serving as a temporary morgue and watched an army pathologist examine the corpses as the black body bags were un-zipped. The floaters appeared to have drowned. Unzipping the third body bag, the pathologist turned to Beau and said, “This’ll be for you.”

Another young African-American male, slim, light-skinned, clean-shaven, with a bullet hole in his forehead, dead center like Killboy, and like Killboy there was also a neat hole in the back of the head. Through-and-through with no sign of scorching or burn marks. Shot from a distance and the trajectory of the bullet was straight, too straight. It certainly wasn’t a hollow-point round, like Beau carried, which would mushroom and blow a huge hole out the back of the head.

“Armor-piercing round,” said the pathologist. “Saw a lot of this in Iraq.”

Beau glanced at the man’s nametag: Sumner.

“Gordon Sumner,” the man said as Beau jotted down his name. Beau narrowed his eyes, the name sounding familiar, which drew a nod from the pathologist. “Same name as Sting, but I had it first.” Beau stepped back to let the doc at the body.

“Find an ID, let me know.” Beau moved to the two state troopers and NOPD sergeant who’d brought in the bodies. He knew the sergeant from the Second District. Stu Copeland had a beer belly and short-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, his face red from exertion as he took a hit of an icy Mountain Dew.

“Where’d you find the fresh one?”

“Levee. Hayne Boulevard. Levee’s still holding up there but the Intracoastal Waterway’s got the east under water, man. Did you hear Notre Dame Seminary burned down?”

“The whole place?”

“Probably arson, former altar boys getting back at the priests.”

Jesus Christ.

As Beau moved back toward the pathologist, Copeland waved at the body with his Dew. “It was only about a mile from where we found the other one with the hole in the head.”

“Killboy?” Beau remembered the notes on Killboy. He’d been found atop a house on Mayo Road.

“Yeah,” Copeland confirmed. “Mayo and the levee. It’s right near South Shore Harbor. Where the casino used to be, the one capsized in the lake.” Copeland took another sip of drink. “I know I’m no homicide man, but that first body had been moved. Looked like it was dropped on that roof.”

“Moved?”

“Postmortem lividity was all wrong. You know. Blood settled on his backside but we found him facedown.”

“Maybe somebody rolled him over to check for vitals before y’all came around.”

“Could be.”

Dr. Sumner pulled a brown wallet from the victim’s pants pocket. Beau put on a pair of surgical gloves as Cruz stepped up. They used the hood of a blue police car from Hot Springs, Arkansas, to lay out and inspect the contents. There was a Blockbuster card in the wallet, pictures of three different women, one with a baby in her arms, a wrapped condom, four pieces of paper with writing on them, but the papers had been in water and the ink ran, and an expired Louisiana driver’s license with the victim’s picture on it. Freddie London, twenty-one years old, of 9111 Tricou Street. Beau took down his date of birth and social-security number.

“Lower Ninth Ward.”

Beau dropped the wallet and contents in a brown paper bag, writing his name and unit number on the outside, along with Freddie London’s name, and passed it back to the pathologist, who would send it along with the cadaver.

Cruz followed Beau into an office where a computer actually worked. The NOPD and Louisiana State Police computers were down, but the FBI was up. Freddie London, same DOB and SSN, had fourteen arrests, from rape to armed robbery, extortion, burglary, and two heroin busts.

“Jesus, what’s he doing on the street?” Cruz said as Beau reached into the small NOPD file on the desk to pull out a printout of NOPd’s Most Wanted. Freddie London was number twelve on the list.

Beau sat in the gray metal chair behind the gray metal desk and looked out the small window at the bright sky outside. He pulled his shirt away from his chest and fanned it. There was some sort of air conditioner working in the hangar at least.

“What are the mathematical probabilities?” he said. “Two of our most-wanted stone-freakin’ criminals are found a short distance from one another with holes in their heads, bullet trajectories nearly identical, through-and-through wounds so we can’t compare bullets.”

Cruz shrugged.

“Who is Sting?”

“You gotta be kiddin’.”

Beau shrugged.

“You didn’t have MTV in that cabin?”

Copeland peeked in and said, “They’re bringing in six more.”

Floaters. Three black, two white, one Asian, a teenager. Beau and Cruz watched Dr. Sumner examine them, keeping as far away from the stench as possible.

Beau found Copeland later, napping on a cot.

“You awake?”

“Huh?” Copeland blinked open his eyes and yawned. “I am now.”

Beau pulled up a folding chair and took out his notepad. “Describe everything, will ya? The area, how the bodies were lying, everything.” He handed Copeland a fresh Mountain Dew.

Juanita Cruz found a CD player and a Led Zeppelin CD and began playing one particular song over and over again, letting it reverberate through the hangar. After the first fifty times, Beau’d had enough of the little ditty called “When the Levee Breaks.” He hoped someone would complain. No way he could tell a partner who had lost everything that the high-pitched male voice bemoaning that when the levee breaks he’ll have no place to stay was getting to be too much. The electric guitars just kept groaning and the man kept singing about how crying won’t help you, praying won’t do you no good, ending with the refrain “going down, going down.” He watched Cruz and knew she was listening intently, but her face revealed no emotion. It was creepy.

During that shift nine bodies were brought in, all natural deaths. Drownings, classified accordingly by the pathologists, using the NASH classification system. Humans died a natural death, accidental death, suicide, or homicide. In New Orleans, where things were done differently on purpose, Beau had seen deaths listed beyond the NASH system. “Death by Misadventure” was the most common. Nearly everyone in Louisiana knew someone who’d died that way. Usually it was preceded by the victim calling out to friends, “Hey, y’all, watch this.” The victim would then jump off a roof or dive into a sluggish bayou that looked deeper than it was.

Beau thought “Death by Stupidity” would be more appropriate. That evening as the pathologists, Sumner and two others, examined the bloated bodies of these latest Katrina victims, Beau exchanged stories with them. Stories of weird deaths, morons playing chicken with trains, idiots playing Russian roulette, one particular cretin who told his buddies he was going into the house next-door to investigate a bad smell and lit a match in a house with a gas leak.