“Anyone who tells you we blew it,” Maureen said, “Drayton or anyone else, is either misinformed or a fucking liar. We did it right, me, Quinn, Ruiz, all of us.”
“I spoke to Quinn,” Preacher said. “He told me you mentioned your traffic stop to Drayton.”
“That was before I knew y’all had let Gage go,” Maureen said. “No one had caught me up yet. Had I known he’d never been arrested, I’d have kept quiet from the beginning.”
“What did Drayton say?”
Maureen chuckled. “Nothing. He ignored me. I don’t think he heard a word I said about it. It was then that Quinn pulled me aside and recommended I drop the subject.”
“And did you?”
She felt ashamed in front of Preacher. Not because she’d sided with Quinn, but because she’d done so out of fear of being rejected, of Quinn turning against her. Because she wanted even the burning-out, tainted cops to like her, to think of her as one of them. “I did. And I haven’t spoken to Drayton since.”
“And whatever happened to the woman?” Preacher asked. “The one who was in the pickup?”
“You told me to give that up.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“Why am I not surprised? Well, then. Out with it.”
“Sheriff took her over to the hospital as a medical,” Maureen said. “She had some kind of breakdown or seizure while they were processing her at intake. She never even made it into the parish records. There’s no record of her. No paperwork, nothing in the computer. She’s gone, like a ghost, like she was never there to begin with.
“The sheriff’s deputy, a guy named Theriot, he lied to me about how Leary got over there. He told me she went in an ambulance, but I found out when I followed up on his story that he and another guy dropped her off in the waiting room on their own. Left her sitting there and didn’t even point her out to anyone. She recovered after they left, or she was acting the whole time, and she got up and walked out. A gunshot came in right on their backs. Leary disappeared in the chaos.”
“So this mystery person who Drayton might need,” Preacher said, “this direct connection to his dead guy, who he doesn’t know exists because nobody told him about her, she’s in the wind now, she’s gone. They fucked it up at the jail and the hospital. Incredible, even for this sheriff’s department.”
“That’s correct. Though I have to say, I don’t know how much of an asset she’d be to an investigation.”
“We tend to let the detectives decide who’s an asset to their case and who isn’t,” Preacher said. “Usually.” He wiped his hand down his face, blinked a few times. “And this follow-up visit to the hospital you made, that would be why I’m getting phone calls from security guards at LSU Public. It would be why I’m getting screamed at about rogue platoon officers threatening subpoenas and property seizures and such.”
Maureen said nothing.
“Wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t know if rogue is the right word.”
“Holy shit, Coughlin. Do I sound concerned with semantics right now?”
“No, sir. Yes, sir. That visit by me would be why hospital security is calling you. He gave me a hard time about the security footage.”
“So we’re clear,” Preacher said, “there is a record of this Leary woman. Unofficial, but a traceable record that leads back to you. It’s the trail of people you’ve pissed off trying to keep track of her. People are much more likely to forget you if you’re nice to them. Feel free to use that knowledge in the future.”
“Theriot lied to me, sir, about custody of a prisoner. That’s illegal.”
“So the fuck what?” Preacher said. “What makes you so special that people gotta tell you the truth when you ask for it? You lied to me when it came to Leary. By omission, at least. You disobeyed my orders. I told you to forget about that woman, didn’t I? I told you not to play social worker. You told me you wouldn’t anymore.”
“They threw her away like trash,” Maureen said. “The deputies, they may as well have thrown her in the fucking gutter.”
“And we’re lucky they did,” Preacher said. “Face reality. She’s a missing link to the traffic stop that needs to stay missing.”
“Stray dogs get treated better than she did. And what about us? We let the guy who put her in that truck, who was taking her God knows where, we let him walk. All I asked of those guys is that they do their fucking jobs, so that I can do mine, like you asked of me outside the jail.”
“You gotta show more respect for people outside the department,” Preacher said. “I know it’s hard for you out there. You’re from out of town. You’re new. You’re female. It’s a ballbusting trifecta. But you can’t go around like you’re the varsity QB and everyone else who’s not a cop is the JV goddamn water boy. People resent it. People who resent you won’t help you. They look to get even, to fuck you, in fact, and not in the good way. Nobody likes a crusader. The moral high ground gets pretty fucking lonely. And as cops, we’re useless on our own. We need all the help we can get from other people. Understand?”
“I do,” she said.
“At least pretend to care how other people feel,” Preacher said. “Even when they piss you off, especially then, in fact. You’ll get more done. Who else knows about this mix-up with her?”
“In the department,” Maureen said. “Me, and now, you.”
“It is a shame about her,” Preacher said. He thought for a long moment, collecting himself. “For the record, I don’t condone how she was treated. I’m not unsympathetic.”
“Why is it so important,” Maureen asked, “that Madison stay lost, and that Drayton not learn about that traffic stop?”
She knew Quinn’s answer, that Gage was somehow, in some shady way, connected to Caleb Heath, a connection that Quinn was motivated to keep hidden. She wanted to hear Preacher’s explanation. She hoped it was better, or at least different. She didn’t want to hear that even the irascible, proudly selfish Preacher Boyd was beholden to the mighty Heaths.
“This Clayton Gage she was with,” Preacher began, “the feds got a hit on him. Drayton has to meet with the local FBI in the morning, and the U.S. Marshals are waiting in the wings to talk to him, which is why he’s reaching out to you suddenly tonight. They’re only interested in Gage as far as I know, but Drayton’s worried it’s more than that, and that the Gage investigation is a pretense to get him in a room where they can hit him with something else.” He paused, thinking, Maureen could tell, about how much further he should go. “I’m not saying Drayton’s got reason for the feds to make him nervous, far be it from me to make aspersions, but, you know, it is what it is. He’s pissed as a wet cat that Gage led the feds to him. Don’t count on him being a reasonable man.”
“I knew it,” Maureen said. “Didn’t I tell you? Gage’s a kidnapper, right? Or some kind of serial killer.”
“He’s on the federal terrorism watch list,” Preacher said.
Maureen was taken aback. She hadn’t seen that coming. “Another one? Jesus, he’s got to be connected to Cooley.”
“Gage was a wanted man in Tennessee and North Carolina. For gun crimes and threats and assaults against law-enforcement officers. They’ve been looking for him for over a year and a half. They’re thinking he might have been down here running with the new offshoot of the Louisiana chapter of the Sovereign Citizens, but they couldn’t get a solid line on him. They were looking for him out in the river parishes when he turned up dead in New Orleans.”
“LaPlace,” Maureen said, “the town on Gage’s driver’s license, and where his truck was registered, that’s out that way, correct?”
Preacher nodded. “Two federal fugitives with hate-group connections dead within a week in our district? Can’t be a coincidence. They’re thinking maybe Cooley was connected to the Citizens as well.”
“I’m not familiar,” Maureen said.
“Sovereign Citizens is an antigovernment thing, mostly they work in the courts, bizarre privacy
and antitax stuff, lots of paperwork and protest, but there’s a history of violent, militant offshoots growing off the main branch of the movement. Seems we have one of those here in Louisiana, a gun-happy splinter group called the Watchmen Brigade. These militant groups share a particularly violent attitude toward law enforcement. We’re a favorite target.”
“Cop haters? That’s nothing new.”
“Cop killers,” Preacher said. “To hear the feds tell it.”
“A cop-killing hate group? How do I not know about this already?”
“We haven’t had them here in Orleans Parish, not that anybody knew about till Gage got his throat cut. A Sovereign Citizens militant wing killed two cops in West Memphis three years ago. Another killed two in South Carolina over some land about a decade ago. Now they’re moving into Louisiana.”
“So it’s a Deep South thing?” Maureen asked.
“The Citizens are nationwide,” Preacher said, shaking his head, “as is the devil’s work that comes with them. The feds busted some nutbag in Alaska planning on going after cops and judges. He had grenades. One of them pulled a gun on a cop in Ohio, got himself shot dead by the side of the road.” Preacher puffed on his cigar. “When you searched Gage’s car, you check the glove box?”
“No, I did not,” Maureen said, her mouth dry. “I saw the handbags. I got distracted. Christ, he reached for it at one point. Said he was going for paperwork. I feel sick.”
“The feds are feeling pretty queasy about the whole thing, too. Get pulled over and open fire, pull the pin on a grenade when the officer is alongside the car, that’s the MO. Total ambush. They’ve done it before. Like a fucking suicide bomber at a checkpoint. It’s what happened in West Memphis and Ohio. Idaho and New Hampshire, too. Personally, I think these guys count on lowered suspicions from cops since they’re white. I heard they put bounties on specific cops in certain departments—minority officers are a favorite target.” He stopped, patted his caramel forehead with a handkerchief. “I spent some time catching up on the Internet while trying to contact you. This is why I hate computers. They’ve been more busy than ever since we got us a black president.” He wiped the corners of his mouth. “Seems we got white boys turning Taliban all across the country, including right here in the sportsman’s paradise. And now these trailer-park Taliban are turning up dead in New Orleans. Crazy times.”
This news about Gage explained the gun-show ticket, Maureen thought, and the business cards. She was willing to wager every one of those dealers exhibited at the local gun shows. Gage was a local boy who knew his way around the southern part of the state, and who knew which dealers didn’t run background checks. There were two gun shows a month in the New Orleans area alone. He probably had a whole network set up from New Orleans to New Iberia. That made sense. He’d be the perfect point man for a group looking to arm themselves to the teeth on the QT, as long as he didn’t do anything stupid like drag strange women out of bars. But they always did, didn’t they? Cooley would fit into this somewhere, maybe as Gage’s point man in New Orleans, maybe as an assistant of some kind. Maureen figured that whoever had killed them knew how the two men fit together.
Maureen also knew she had to make sure Drayton had found those business cards and the ticket, and was making use of them. He could lead the feds back to a whole network of illegal gun dealers. Goddamn, she thought. How did a murder this important land on Drayton’s plate? She’d have to talk to Atkinson, who, as far as Maureen was concerned, needed to take over the Gage investigation posthaste.
“Wait a minute, let me get this straight,” Maureen said. “We had a guy involved in a potential cop-killing conspiracy, a federal fugitive, a fucking terrorist, in the backseat of one of our cars, and instead of taking him to lockup, where the feds would’ve found him when he hit the system again and been able to use him against a domestic terrorist organization, an organization that’s maybe out to murder New Orleans cops, we let him go.”
“Not the NOPD’s best day,” Preacher said. “I’ll grant you that.”
“And now that the wannabe cop killer got murdered,” Maureen said, “we’re covering up the fact we ever knew him?”
“Forget you and me, what do you think this would mean for the NOPD if word got out we had him and let him go, without even bothering to run his name through our computer? We’re talking national humiliation. Again. Just when the department’s getting Katrina behind them. You didn’t run his ID, did you?”
“I did not,” Maureen said. “I left it to Quinn, who obviously never followed through. I fucked this up. Did I? Did I fuck this up? I got distracted by Gage’s tough-guy attitude, and then Leary and the handbags, and then you guys showed up. We had this motherfucker. We had him. Oh my God, I fucked this up.”
“Not that it would matter if the shit hits the fan,” Preacher said, “but none of us thought Gage was anything more than a drunk coon-ass when we had him by the side of the road. The Superdome and the French Quarter were full of ’em all day. And, don’t forget, nobody knows we had him but you, me, Quinn, and Ruiz.”
Maureen looked up at the sky, biting down hard on her bottom lip, trying to blink her vision back into focus, her heart racing. I told you so, she wanted to scream. It was not none of us who had underestimated Gage. She’d said he was dangerous. Who cared if she was wrong about exactly why he was trouble? She’d insisted they needed to hang on to him. I told you, I told you, I told you. I told you he was trouble. She also knew that if there was one thing Preacher didn’t want to hear right then, it was I told you so from her. There was no point to it. She’d accomplish nothing by reminding him of her suspicions.
“If this case somehow ties into people planning to kill cops,” Maureen said, “how can I lie about that? Why should I? We didn’t do anything wrong, not really. A couple of minor mistakes at the traffic stop, a miscommunication at the Gage crime scene.”
“No one is asking you to lie,” Preacher said. “I would never. I’m only asking for some finesse from you.”
Maureen laughed. “You do realize who you’re talking to.”
“Were it another detective in charge of the Gage murder,” Preacher said, “I might even say we should come clean. But I don’t trust Drayton, not one bit. He will hang the NOPD losing track of Gage and getting him killed on you if he can, Coughlin. He might do worse.”
“Hang what on me? I told him about the traffic stop, it’s not my fault he ignored me.”
“Anyone else witness that conversation?” Preacher asked.
“Excuse me?”
“If it comes down to your word against Drayton’s,” Preacher said, “who can vouch for your version of the story?”
“You’re not serious.”
“Who?”
“Quinn, maybe,” Maureen said. “I’m sure he was near enough to hear me talking to Drayton.”
“The same Quinn whose idea it was to let Gage off the hook in the first place?”
The same Quinn, Maureen thought, who absconded with evidence linking Gage and Caleb Heath. She knew what Preacher was asking her: was she willing to stake her career and maybe her freedom on Quinn having her back? Did she trust him?
“Wait a minute, Quinn told me it was your idea to release Gage.”
Preacher hesitated. “I approved it as ranking officer on the scene. There’s a difference. Maybe you misunderstood Quinn.”
“Maybe,” Maureen said, but she didn’t believe it.
“Drayton will blame you,” Preacher said, “for letting someone conspiring to kill cops get away. He will use you. When you get upstairs alone in a room with him, he will accuse you of queering his scene. He might accuse you of much worse. Cooley and Gage are in the system.
“Someone, a clever cop, say a thorough cop with ambitions, who crossed paths with them and knew where to look could find their names in the computer. What if that certain cop figured out these Sovereign Citizens and the Watchmen were moving into New Orleans? What if that cop decided to forgo the usual channels and t
ake matters into her own hands? These fugitives are in league with cop killers, they’re wannabe cop killers themselves. Using an untraceable weapon like a blade instead of something that leaves a trail like her service weapon would be smart. Throw off suspicion. What if she had co-conspirators on the night shift? Who wouldn’t want to help ice a bunch of cop killers and defend New Orleans?”
“Enough already,” Maureen said. “I get your point. The amount of thought you’ve put into this makes me nervous. Christ almighty, I’m half convinced I did it. Would Drayton go that far, to accuse me of vigilante murder?”
“We’ve made it easy enough for him. You said it yourself, we had Gage in the car and we let him go. He was dead less than twenty-four hours later. Now why would we do that? How could that happen? Drayton’ll make you look like a fuckup at best and a corrupt cop at worst, and he’ll leave it to the feds to figure out which one you are. He’ll hang the rest of us, too, if it makes you look more guilty. I’m convinced that’s his plan.”
“I couldn’t have killed Gage,” Maureen said. “I was at the jail looking for Madison Leary and then I was at the Eighth dealing with Marques. None of that is hard to prove. I had no idea who Gage fucking was, or where he was. I thought he was in jail the whole time.”
“So what?” Preacher said. “If Drayton needs a face for the news, it’s gonna be yours. And then he’s the one in front of the cameras as the one who caught you. By the time the internal inquiry gets around to confirming your alibi, it’ll be too late. You won’t go to jail, but you’ll be done in the NOPD. Being innocent doesn’t mean you can’t be damaged goods. I don’t know what Drayton knows, or what he thinks he knows that’s got him upset. I do know that he will toss you to the feds to get their attention away from him.”
“He’s dirty, isn’t he?” Maureen asked. “That motherfucker, he caught federal attention long before this. That’s why they’re making him squirm, not telling him what the meeting tomorrow morning is about. They want to see what he does under pressure. They want to see if he’ll give up someone worse. He’s got something to hide. He’s got a guilty conscience.”
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