by Ed Kovacs
Honey had to spend yesterday morning in court testifying; today, thanks to the rarity of murder witnesses coming forward, she was about to arrest a quadruple murderer in a case she had been working for about ten days. Bleary-eyed TV news crews remained at the gate getting their equipment ready. At a pleasant seventy-eight degrees, the dead, humid night air didn’t seem so oppressive. I turned around to look up the dark street outside the trailer park. The neutral grounds of St. Roch were in much better shape now, but garbage and fresh debris just never seemed to go away. As residents continued to trickle back from Hurricane Exile, they gutted their damaged homes, keeping the debris piles constantly replenished.
As we moved into the trailer park pointing flashlights down onto the black asphalt, I remembered the day six months or so ago when I found a female lady friend murdered in her trailer, just half a block away. I had always wanted to cry for Kiesha Taylor, but had never let myself do it. I had never let myself cry for anybody, ever, even when my father and younger brother passed away. Crying simply didn’t seem like something a man should do, and it didn’t change anything.
The soft sounds of rubber-soled boots on the pavement increased in frequency as the pace got picked up in anticipation. Even though she was SWAT, Honey wore plainclothes since this was her homicide case and she would be making the collar. She tracked along quietly, adrenalin overriding her fatigue. Then she stopped and motioned me over for a quick conference in the darkness as her SWAT buddies hurried ahead to take up positions.
I had already given her an extensive briefing about yesterday’s events at the port. She’d been so tired she forgot to chide me for spending so much time with Harding.
“What’s with the TV cameras?” I asked.
“Chief’s orders.”
“Good publicity. He’ll be a happy guy. For a day.”
“This bust I’m about to make will cut us some slack. Major bonus points with the chief.”
“Decon’s prints come back from my door handle?”
“He’s not in the system.”
“That doesn’t make sense. He’s got con written all over him,” I said.
“He’s like the joker in the deck. Be better if we brought him in.”
“Sorry, I should have done that last night.”
“Eighth District can’t locate Danforth’s boyfriend Joey Bales. He’s got a rap sheet for burglary. Mostly art and jewel heists. Been in and out of drug rehab.”
“Sounds like a winner,” I said.
“Most importantly? We need to ID the other two members of the Buyer’s Club.”
I thought about my upcoming meeting with my old buddy and crime-lab tech Kerry Broussard. “I might have something on them in a couple of hours.”
Honey gave me a knowing look. “The two FBI CI-3 agents hounded me yesterday about Breaux’s laptop. They want it bad. And they mentioned a missing material sample.”
“They must be conferring with Ralph Salerno out at Michoud. Were CI-3 the ones who sanitized Breaux’s office?” I asked.
“That’s what I asked them. They glared at me.”
“But they didn’t answer.”
“Of course not. But they suspect we might have the goods,” said Honey.
“Think they’re the same crew running the Customs inspector?”
“Whoever’s doing that has to be rogue. These guys? I dunno.”
“I can log the laptop into evidence, like we discussed. Get those guys off your back. The sample I think we should keep.”
“Hold off for now. Just ID the rest of the Buyer’s Club.”
The SWAT commander approached with a phone and Honey began talking to the quadruple murder suspect in the trailer. Fifteen minutes later he meekly surrendered. Honey cuffed him herself, then lead him out past the cameras. He’d shot four young men to death in front of their girlfriends as they sat on a front stoop in the Tremé. Miraculously, two of the girlfriends decided to cooperate with a very sincere female police detective.
It occurred to me the suspect must have thought the killing was a way to prove his manhood. He had a mostly clean record and wasn’t a hardcase. Eighteen years old. I assumed he’d never see another day of freedom in his life. He no doubt lacked good role models and probably didn’t understand that shooting human beings down like animals isn’t really a rite of passage to manhood; it just makes you a cold-hearted murderer.
I was now, as a matter of course, going to great lengths to ensure I wasn’t being followed or tracked. I used a GPS jammer to defeat any GPS tracking device that might have been planted on the Bronco. And I used a broad-range radio-frequency jammer to block any kind of signal from a device similar to, say, LoJack. I kept my cell phone in a signal-blocking pouch when not in use so my position couldn’t be triangulated.
I drove I-10 out to Kenner, then turned around and headed back east. The heavy congestion on the freeway at Causeway was due to the never-ending road construction. The construction company knew how to stretch out a project to keep its guys working, just as they knew how to cheat The People by pouring less concrete than they were paid to pour. Miraculously they’d been caught and held accountable, meaning they had to tear up a newly formed stretch of roadway and do it all over again, doing it right this time and extending the massive road congestion by many weeks. Traffic jams created by the roadwork seemed to be more than many locals could bear, as evidenced by the large numbers of drivers who drove off the freeway onto the grass, then drove the wrong way against oncoming one-way traffic and used entrance ramps to exit. This was a certain Mississippi Delta behavior that today I mimicked. After all, the Louisiana State Police were spread thin with many of them still assigned to work as street cops in New Orleans and not as ticket-writing machines on the highway. It was also a good way to check if I was being followed.
Kerry Broussard and I sat at separate tables and never made eye contact at Puccino’s on Veterans Boulevard. We’d done surreptitious drops before, so Kerry knew the drill. The laptop sat on the chair next to him under a copy of Gambit Weekly, a free local paper that raised a lot of hell about local politics and also provided discount coupons for strip clubs, thus ensuring a healthy circulation. Kerry whispered into the Wall Street Journal stock price pages which he held in front of him. My eyes constantly scanned the 7 A.M. Metairie coffee crowd that ebbed and flowed, looking for what didn’t look right.
“Password’s written on page three,” said Kerry.
I wasn’t a ventriloquist, but did pretty well at talking without moving my lips much.
“Okay.”
“I took a peek. Couldn’t resist.”
I wasn’t happy to hear he’d looked at files after he’d doped out the password. “And?”
“Watch your back. I mean it.”
Kerry folded his newspaper, tucked it into his briefcase, and walked out with his macchiato. After sitting for twelve minutes alone in the shop, I nonchalantly gathered up the newspaper, laptop, and a lucky two-dollar bill marked up with red.
After the laptop pick-up I’d let myself into Pravda, not that I had a key. The bar wasn’t alarmed and the front door locks not particularly consequential. I brewed up a pot of coffee and skimmed the depths of Del Breaux’s Department of Defense-issued laptop. Perhaps because of the encryption—I couldn’t say—but Breaux used the device as a repository for all of his personal affairs and business as well as his secret government work. The word “jackpot” didn’t do justice to what I had in my hands. It would take days to examine all of it.
A few things quickly became clear. The secret materials project he had been working on at Michoud was called GIDEON and its purpose was to insulate U.S. military and intelligence satellites from enemy attack by lasers or electro-magnetic pulse weapons. GIDEON was in final testing, and, I assumed, the material sample from Chu’s container had been purloined from Michoud and sold for $2.5 million. Cash that came directly from the Bank of China, according to Honey. The Chinese government had already demonstrated a willingness to shoot sat
ellites out of the sky; they must have wanted the GIDEON material very badly.
The laptop also clearly showed that Breaux was not working in weapons development of any kind. There was no mention of DARPA or any kind of weapons program. And yet, the most shocking revelation in the computer was that Breaux was a weapons broker.
Del Breaux was an arms dealer, pure and simple. At least for the last year. All of Breaux Enterprises’ business files were in the laptop. Spreadsheets showed what he bought, when, for how much, and who he subsequently sold and shipped to. Transportation and warehousing expenses were clearly delineated. He bought exclusively from Global Solutions. The laptop showed that on the night he died, Breaux bought a parcel of “non-lethal weaponry”—one dozen portable microwave crowd-dispersal generators—for $312,000. There was no indication that he had sold or shipped the non-lethal weapons.
There was a separate category for “Bribes.” And Breaux’s assistant Peter Danforth had been raking in 1 percent of the action.
Breaux’s laptop did not indicate that weapons like the kind Decon had described seeing or the kind Honey and I uncovered in the green cargo container were being developed or manufactured at Michoud. So were all of these armaments being manufactured by Global, or simply being acquired by them? For a federally licensed entity, Global Solutions Unlimited remained an enigma.
As a bonus, other laptop files revealed the identities, phone numbers, and local addresses of the Buyer’s Club. Peter Danforth had told the truth: Clayton Brandt was a member. As was Tan Chu. Two men named Grigory Pelkov and Nassir Haddad rounded out the group, whoever they were. New Orleans was a corrupt place, but it made me mad that an association of businessmen seemed to be selling out America to our enemies—working hand-in-hand with them—probably aided by crooked feds, all for the coin of the realm.
I’d been lost in the laptop for three hours when my encrypted cell phone rang with Harding on the other end. I had the phone out of the signal-blocking pouch, otherwise I couldn’t make or receive calls or texts. I hadn’t swept Pravda for bugs, so I moved behind the bar and turned on the sound system.
“What’s up?”
“I’m off the case, officially and with finality. And I’m not supposed to have any contact with you.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Me too,” said Harding, then after a pregnant pause, “I’d like to have another drink.”
“I think that can be arranged.”
“Go to the front door. A package has just been left for you. Burn everything after you read it. I’ll explain more the next time we meet.”
The line went dead.
Outside, I retrieved a large sealed manila envelope on the sidewalk. I relocked the door, and was pleasantly surprised to find copies of FBI dossiers, complete with photos, on Clayton Brandt, Tan Chu, Grigory Pelkov, and Nassir Haddad. I recognized Haddad from a picture in Breaux’s laptop that showed three men all cozy in navy dress whites: Ty Parks, Peter Danforth, and, apparently, Nassir Haddad.
Harding had just handed over to me the suspects in her investigation, which had been all about arms trafficking, not espionage. But why would CI-3 order her to stop? Inter-divisional rivalry? Her orders had to have come officially, through channels.
Maybe even more troubling was how the hell did she know I was at Pravda? I could only surmise she had triangulated my cell-phone signal or was having me watched. Before I had a chance to read the dossiers, much less burn them, Honey called.
“You get your perp booked and all the paperwork in?” I asked. “Because I’ve got something you’ll want to see.”
“My something trumps yours.”
“What you got?”
“Three bodies. Kind of.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Leroy Jefferson didn’t look happy. At least not the half of his body visible above the giant steel blades of the metal shredder. Jimmy Jefferson and Herbert Rondell were in even worse shape. Not that they had any shape to them anymore. Two-and-a-half men had gone through the metal shredder. Only the flies were having fun.
I had logged in to the crime scene with a uniform at the front gate. The first thing I’d noticed was the dead Doberman, shot in the head and still chained to the post in front of where the locked cargo containers used to sit. The green container had been taken to the port. But now the silver container with the doors welded shut was also gone.
The crime scene techs had arrived at the same time I did. There was no open-topped dumpster under the grinding compartment, so the body matter had splattered all over the ground under the giant machine, and the wafting stink could gag a maggot.
Honey motioned me over to the office door as the techies got busy. The squirrelly tech with the camera took a look at the mess and said, “Kind of early in the day for a gumbo party.”
Honey and I both put on purple latex gloves and entered the cool air-conditioned office. She closed the door behind us so we were alone.
“I finished my paperwork after booking the kid at headquarters this morning. Grabbed some uniforms. Came her to get the bronze plaque and brace the brothers. Gate was locked, I saw the dead dog. Climbed over the fence.”
“Are you okay?” I asked. The mound of ground bones, meat, flesh, and organs stewing in blood and other liquids under the grinding compartment ranked as the most repulsive crime scene I’d ever come across.
“It gets more interesting,” she said. “The locked filing cabinet is open. All the money you and I saw in there the other night—you figured it was about a half mil—is gone. But a package of what looks like a kilo of cocaine is in the top drawer.”
“Five hundred Gs for a twenty-five-thousand-dollar kilo of coke. That’s a nice trade for the killers.”
“And makes it look like a drug hit.”
“Why am I thinking Tan Chu didn’t want the brothers around to maybe blow the whistle on him?” I asked as I crossed toward the tall cabinet where I had planted my listening device. “And he killed Del Breaux and Ty Parks because once he had the materials sample, he didn’t need any witnesses to who bought what.”
“Maybe. But if you have an inside man in black projects? Why take him out?”
“If he was a liability, I would. Can you get a search warrant for Chu’s residence?”
“Based on what?”
“The recording I’m about to retrieve of the killers in this office.”
I pushed a chair against the cabinet to stand on.
“The bug you planted is gone.”
I looked at her in disbelief, and then checked the top of the cabinet. Gone.
“That was a thousand-dollar device. How did they find it?”
Honey shrugged. “They swept for bugs.”
“Most sweeps wouldn’t turn up that bug.”
“The computer is gone, too,” she said.
I looked around the room. “And the desk blotter, the Rolodex—so now we can’t legally establish the connection between Breaux and the Jefferson brothers.”
“We’ll have to see what the phone records turn up. This place was sanitized. Different than Breaux Enterprises, but still sanitized.”
“Good thing we have copies of everything that was here.”
“Which we need to re-check, privately,” said Honey.
“You figure this happened when they opened this morning?”
“Probably. They open at seven. They’re the only business on this block and no one lives around here. I doubt we’ll find a witness, but I got uniforms out canvassing.”
“They would have needed a roll-off truck to haul that silver container out. Wish I’d put a GPS on it. We could track it right to the killers.”
“We can do tire impressions. It’s something, anyway. How many men to operate a roll-off truck?”
“Just one,” I said.
“Footprints will be tough. Any given day they had a hundred people walking around the yard. Picking up or dropping off.”
“We’ve brought a lot of unwanted attention to Chu’s
illicit dealings here. The more I think about it, the more likely it seems he took out the brothers to keep them from rolling over, in case the National Security Investigation actually went somewhere.”
“But if the Big Fix is in like you told me? An NSI won’t go anywhere.”
“Then there’s Decon to consider. He worked here. He knows I tracked him down thanks to the Jeffersons. Leroy and Jimmy weren’t in the Buyer’s Club, but they were involved. And Harding was worried Decon would kill everyone connected to her investigation, which is turning out to be our investigation.”
“Not sure Decon could have pulled this off. Unless he has friends and resources we don’t know about.”
“You’re right. And if Decon’s motive is to put the Buyer’s Club out of business, he wouldn’t bother trying to make it look like a drug hit.”
“Generate a photo of Decon from your video. I want to put it out on the wire to bring him in as a person of interest.”
“Okay.”
“What about the laptop?” asked Honey quietly.
“It’s the mother lode. The Buyer’s Club is arms dealers, buying and selling weapons, pure and simple. Chu lives over in Harahan. If we can get something on him, maybe we couldn’t prosecute him for capital murder because of his immunity, but we could arrest him with a lot of publicity, make a big stink. State Department would be forced to deport him. And we’d shine a light on this dirty business.”
“Let’s talk about this later. I have a lot to do.”
I paused. “I’d like to get going on the Buyer’s Club. Maybe drop in on one of them.”
“Okay. But stay away from Chu for now.”
I looked at her closely. She wasn’t being herself. Something weighed on her, and it was more than simply the gruesomeness of the deaths. “You’re bothered about something.”
“We’re barely hanging on to this case. We need solid evidence before we try to chase Chu up a tree.”
“Those FBI guys have you spooked?”
