R. Ellory - A Quiet Vendetta

This trip, however, was different.

The prints flagged through Baton Rouge and passed to the FBI Field Office on Arsenault Street were those of McCahill, and even now that same fifty-one-year-old ex-cop, ex-Marine, ex-Eagle Scout was also serving his time as an ex-human being on the County Coroner’s metal slab. It was he who was now heartless, daubed in quinine sulphate, and wearing a paper tag on his toe upon which was inscribed the legend John Doe #3456-9 .

And Catherine Ducane, she of temperamental moods, of exquisitely expensive taste, she of awkward moments and determined stubbornness, was gone.

Miss Ducane, nineteen years old, beautiful and intelligent and altogether spoiled, had been kidnapped.

This was the situation that faced Robert Luckman and Frank Gabillard as they walked from the Medical Examiner’s Office with Jim Emerson’s reports, as they crossed town to find Michael Cipliano and tell him as little as they could. This was the situation they confronted when they made the necessary phone calls to have Gerard McCahill’s beaten-to-shit cadaver transported from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, where it would be inspected and examined by the FBI’s own Criminalistics and Forensics teams.

This was Monday 25 August, and already the world was beginning to collapse.

For these men, though New Orleans was their home, understood all too well that this was a city like no other. Dirty Creole kids in Nikes and grubby shorts, wise-mouths backflashing words that shouldn’t have come from the lips of those so young; the smell of a city cooking inside its own sweat; beyond the limits the sprawling outgrowths of Evangeline, domain of the Ferauds and their ilk; gang wars and drug busts and liquor stills, moonshiners brewing twenty-five-cents-a-bottle rotgut that would strip the paint off a car and eat holes in a pair of good shoes; smack addicts and hopheads and folks mainlining amphetamines like there was no time to look for tomorrow; the sounds and smells of all of this, and you just had to live inside it to even have an inkling of how it was. New Orleans was the Mardi Gras, it was finding serpents and crosses in the same cemetery on All Saints’ Day, the spirit of loa Damballah-wédo walking there beside you as you crossed the street; it was Easter Souvenance, the Festival of the Virgin of Miracles, the celebration of Saint James the Greater and Baron Samedi, it was inscribing the floor of sanctuaries with vévé to summon the ritual spirits. New Orleans the beautiful, the majestic, the passionate, the terrifying. And no matter the training programs, no matter criminal profiling and VICAP reports, no matter gun ranges and Quantico and sitting three exams a year, there was nothing that could take into consideration the mores and ethics of the society within which they lived. New Orleans was New Orleans, almost a country all its own.

Cipliano seemed relieved that Luckman and Gabillard were taking his John Doe away. They told him that an FBI vehicle would be arriving within the hour to collect the body.

‘Got a freakin’ leaper,’ he told them while chewing a toothpick. ‘Head like sidewalk pizza if you know what I mean.’

They did not, and did not pretend that they did. People like Luckman and Gabillard dealt with serious business, not the inconsequential deaths of junkie suicides.

They left quickly and inconspicuously, as inconspicuously as two dark-suited, white-shirted, clean-cut men could manage, and drove back to the Field Office on Arsenault to begin the unenviable task of profiling a kidnap of Governor Ducane’s daughter.

They took their time reading the reports they had collected, and here they learned of such things as the severed vena cava through right and left ventricle at base, severed subclavian veins and arteries, jugular, carotid and pulmonary; of seventy percent minimum blood loss, of hammer-beatings, of lesions and abrasions, of freezing a man’s skin in order to scrape it away from the trunk of a stunning burgundy car with rivet scratches on the wing. They learned also of a constellation drawn across Gerard McCahill’s back, the constellation of Gemini, the twins Castor and Pollux, the third sign of the zodiac. They read these things, and once again silently marveled at the sheer madness of humanity.

‘Where to from here?’ Gabillard asked when they were done.

‘Kidnap procedure,’ Luckman said. ‘Take the fact that she’s a governor’s daughter out of the loop, that’s irrelevant right now, and we run a routine kidnap procedure.’

‘I don’t think that Ducane would be happy with that.’

Luckman shook his head. ‘Don’t give a rat’s ass what Ducane thinks or doesn’t think. Truth of the matter is that there’s a standard kidnap procedure and we have to follow it.’

Gabillard nodded. ‘You wanna call it in to Baton Rouge?’

‘I call it in to Baton Rouge and they’ll take the case as well as the body.’

‘You got a problem with that?’

Luckman shrugged. ‘I got no problem with it. You?’

‘I got no problem,’ Gabillard said. He reached forward and lifted the receiver. He called Baton Rouge and spoke to Agent Leland Fraschetti. Agent Fraschetti, a veteran of twenty-six years, a man with a head as hard as a baseball bat, asked that one of them accompany the body from New Orleans and bring all available documentation with them. That, Gabillard said, he would willingly do. He figured it would pretty much kill the day stone-dead; when he got back it would be closing time.

Luckman chose to go with him. They drove back to Cipliano’s office and waited for the vehicle from Baton Rouge.

Two miles away John Verlaine looked from his window and tried to erase the image of McCahill’s body, the strange glowing lines across the skin, the sensation of disturbance that these recent events had instilled in him. This is no work for a human being , he thought, and once again managed to convince himself that were he not there the work would not be done.

It seemed to run its own relay: from Verlaine to Emerson, Emerson to Cipliano, Cipliano to Luckman and Gabillard, and when the body arrived in Baton Rouge, Luckman clutching the files and thinking of the game he would not now miss that evening, Leland Fraschetti was waiting there for them, his eyes wide with anticipation, ready to take his place in this bizarre concatenation of events. Leland Fraschetti was a dark-minded man, a cynic, a natural pessimist. A loner and a failed husband, he was a man who watched Jerry Springer just to remind himself that people – all people – were fundamentally crazy. Fraschetti was also a man who went by the letter of the law and, once Gabillard and Luckman had closed the office door behind them, he pored over the reports and summarized his findings, penning extensive notations regarding the errors the local police had made in their handling of the investigation thus far, and when he was done he e-mailed his proposal to the Field Office in Shreveport where local agents would handle the governor’s demands to be updated constantly on the progress they were making. The truth was, bluntly, that they had nothing, though Leland Fraschetti, pessimist though he was, would have been the last to admit such a thing.

By the early evening of Monday 25 August, twenty-seven local FBI agents from New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Shreveport were assigned to the standard kidnap protocol. Governor Ducane’s phones were tapped, his house was under twenty-four-hour watch; the Mercury Turnpike Cruiser was driven on a flatbed truck to Baton Rouge and housed in a secure lock-up where Criminalistics went over it time and again with infra-red spectrophotometers, ultra-violet, iodine and silver transfers. The plates were traced to the ’69 Chrysler Valiant, now rusted and broken and lying on its roof in a wrecker’s yard in Natchez, Mississippi, and thirty-eight vehicle storage units – including Jaquier’s Lock ’N’ Leave, Ardren & Bros. Rental Carports Inc., Vehicle Warehousing Corporation (Est. 1953), Safety In Numbers (Unique Combination Vehicle Storage) – were checked to see if any of their respective owners remembered the Cruiser residing there at any time in the past. No-one remembered anything. No-one, it seemed, wanted to remember anything, and by the time Tuesday the twenty-sixth rolled around, a frustrated Leland Fraschetti stood in the doorway of his office in the Baton Rouge FBI Coordination Headquarters and felt his heart sink. He had taken three Excedrin and still a migraine pounded through his skull and threatened to vent itself through his temples. He had unit chiefs calling from Shreveport and Washington DC, he had agents on double shifts and late hours, he had a task force mobilized that was costing something in the region of twenty-three thousand dollars a day, and still he had nothing to take to the High School Show ’n’ Tell. Criminalistics and Forensics had come back with almost the same report as had been prepared by Emerson and Cipliano, and there seemed to be no links between this case and anything from the past despite rushing a profile through Quantico. The thing sucked, sucked like a whirlpool, and Leland – he of the dark moods and lonely cynicism – was right in the vortex waiting to drown.