River of Secrets

by Roger Johns

  “Only partly excellent,” Melissa said. “Without the camera and the photographer, Joe said the image and the data file are vulnerable, because there’s no way to know if the camera’s internal clock and calendar were set to the correct time and date.”

  “Terrific,” Wallace said.

  “If you need any more technical help while Mason is in exile, he said you can go straight to Joe.”

  Wallace scribbled down Joe’s number and address as Melissa read it to her.

  “Is there anything you need me to do?”

  “Tell Mason I miss him too, and that I love him.”

  With the new information from Melissa, some things were starting to fall into place. Colley Greenberg had drilled it into Wallace from the beginning: If A is connected to B and B is connected to C, then A is connected to C. The connection might be murky and it might not even be useful, but it was there, and high-grade police work demanded that it be examined.

  Eddie Pitkin’s picture on the memory card, whenever it was taken, connected him to Peter Ecclestone. And Ecclestone was connected to Oliver Harpin by the image of Harpin in the boat near Craig’s dock and by Harpin’s fingerprint on the glove box latch in Peter’s SUV. So, Pitkin was connected to Harpin.

  And assuming the data file was correct and that Eddie was at the lake when Marioneaux was killed, the hair and insulation fibers at the crime scene had to have been planted as part of a frame-up. From there, it was a short jump to the inference that Peter had disappeared because he could spoil the plot by providing an alibi for Eddie.

  Any remaining doubts about the existence of a plot were put to rest by the inconsistencies she had discovered in the senator’s calendar and the attempt to cover them up—not to mention the dense knot of pain in her head.

  With Eddie safe in the hospital, the pressure was off to deliver her newfound discoveries so that the charges could be dropped and Eddie could be set free. With the possibility of the leak still in play, showing her cards now would let the conspirators know exactly how much she knew.

  Clearly, Eddie Pitkin was connected to Herbert Marioneaux by their long-ago fights in the media over issues of race and segregation and, more recently, by the planted evidence found on Marioneaux’s body. And the late senator was connected to Garrett Landry by employment and personal history.

  The chain of connections led clearly from Harpin to Ecclestone to Pitkin to Marioneaux to Landry. And based on the information Mason’s FBI contact had passed along, Carlton Lister was connected by way of Harpin.

  There would be others. Individuals she had not yet encountered, with roles she did not yet understand. And someone had to be the mastermind.

  Garrett Landry had the brains, but Wallace didn’t like him as the shot caller. He had panicked at the mention of Lydia Prescott’s name—the wrong temperament if you’re the one with your hands on the levers.

  If she was right that Landry might be protecting Glenn Marioneaux, then perhaps Glenn was the man with the plan and all of his emotional displays were just so much blather intended to confuse the issue. And with Dorothy protecting Glenn, perhaps she too was part of it.

  Wallace pulled herself up from the floor and sat in Marioneaux’s massive desk chair. The maroon leather squeaked as she shifted around, trying to find a comfortable position.

  The most intriguing connection she saw was between Herbert Marioneaux and Lydia Prescott, the dead campaign consultant. Given their linkage, it seemed probable that whoever had killed the senator was responsible for Lydia’s death, as well.

  The big question that all of this raised was why any of this was happening. The connection to Carlton Lister implicated issues of race, but how and to what end?

  Landry had been hiding more than the fact that Marioneaux was planning a new campaign. He had also hidden the fact that it wasn’t going to be a campaign to remain the senator from no-place-important, as Landry had called it.

  The trajectory of Marioneaux’s career made Wallace fairly certain he’d be aiming for higher office. Congress was a possibility, but elections for the U.S. Senate were too far in the future to be gearing up for now and the House seat in his district was in the hands of a shoo-in incumbent.

  Wallace was willing to bet a lot of money that Marioneaux was getting ready to run for governor. But being electable in the sparsely populated southeastern rural districts of the state was not the same as winning in the more politically and racially diverse urban precincts—areas he would need to carry if he intended to make a serious run for the governor’s mansion.

  Given the stubbornness of his early reputation and the persistent skepticism of the pundits, Marioneaux would have needed a lot of help to convincingly rebrand himself. Enter Lydia Prescott, political consultant.

  Of all the names floating through her head, Garrett Landry and Oliver Harpin seemed to be the most strongly connected to the plot and reasonably findable. If they didn’t pan out, Glenn would be next on her list.

  Wallace stood. Her head ached and her back was still sore where she’d been kidney-punched. She looked around the office, wondering if she was about to do the right thing. She flipped open her little notebook to the page where she had written the home address and tag number for Oliver Harpin—information she had gotten from the DMV the day she tracked him to the cemetery—and committed it to memory.

  She checked her weapon. It was time to enter the belly of the beast.

  * * *

  Wallace headed south out of the front doors of the Capitol building, then turned east at the lowermost boundary of Spanish Town. She was walking a big loop through the neighborhood, approaching her car from the east—the opposite direction from which she had left it.

  The opening vocals of “Doolin-Dalton” floated low and plaintive from the open window of a passing car.

  From behind a tall hedge, a little girl shrieked and then laughed and shrieked again, like she was suddenly it in a game of chase.

  Wallace was hungry and her head was killing her and she was almost too tired to keep worrying about whether anyone was dogging her trail. But this was the wrong time to get careless. If there was a leak in her department, then it was possible whoever might be following her was a fellow officer—someone trained to avoid being seen.

  But, given the events of the last few hours, she was no longer opposed to being followed. She just wanted to know if it was happening and, if possible, who was doing it.

  As she hiked deeper into the part of the neighborhood that was close to the freeway, the foot traffic thinned to almost nothing. About a block from her destination she found herself alone on the street. Moving slowly, she dragged her gaze in short, deliberate arcs across everything ahead of her and she stopped abruptly at random intervals to check her back trail.

  She turned the final corner, onto the street where her car was parked, and felt very smart for having taken such an indirect route. In this rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, the car parked at the curb, about fifty feet ahead, looked very out of place with its bad paint and extensive dent collection. Maybe it was nothing—just the vehicle of a poor relation come for a visit or a holdover from Spanish Town’s less prosperous days.

  But the car was pointing away from her and in the low light from the streetlamp she was just able to make out the tag number.

  Harpin.

  A tremor of fear skittered up her back. She slid into the shadow of a tree overhanging the edge of the sidewalk.

  Her mind struggled to understand Harpin’s presence here and now, less than half a block from her rental car. It couldn’t be a coincidence. How had he known where to find her?

  After a few moments of reflection, it was as if the helter-skelter strands linking remote parts of a spider’s web lit up and the connection from Harpin to Landry became clear.

  During her first visit to Landry, he had texted someone, telling her he was letting his ride know he might be late leaving the office. He had actually been alerting someone to her presence in his office—signaling that t
he scare job at Mason’s apartment hadn’t worked, that she was still pursuing the investigation.

  If that had brought Harpin onto the scene, he would have seen her leave the Capitol earlier today and he would have followed her to Davis’s office. A rush of alarm caused her breath to catch when she realized Davis might be in danger.

  If she had led thugs such as Oliver Harpin and Carlton Lister to Davis’s doorstep, she could never forgive herself. And it would break her mother’s heart.

  She backtracked a few steps, then turned around and walked toward the corner, pulling her phone out as she went. She called Davis’s number. It went to voicemail. She left a message, telling him the situation and insisting that he get someplace safe. She prayed he was already at home, in his gated community that had enough security to protect an embassy.

  Wallace stowed her phone and looked up the street, calculating her next move.

  As she approached Harpin’s car again, she reached inside her jacket and unsnapped the strap on her holster. She wrapped her hand around the grip of her gun.

  The car was about thirty feet ahead. But something was wrong. She stood in the shadows studying the situation until she could figure out what was bothering her.

  Light shone back through the rear windshield from the streetlamp up ahead of the car. The silhouette of the front passenger seat was clearly visible. The silhouette of the driver’s seat was not—as if the driver’s seat was leaned back, below the level of the rear dash. It was a position she referred to as eyelid surveillance because, on a stakeout, reclining the seat always led to sleep and the study of the backs of one’s eyelids.

  Wallace approached the car with caution, wondering if she had already been seen. Perhaps Harpin was not even in the car but was on the street, watching her dither over what to do.

  She picked up a rock from the gutter and tossed it toward his car. It crashed onto the roof with a bang. Then she pressed the panic button on the key fob of her rental car, letting the lights flash and the horn whoop a few times.

  Nothing happened. No sudden rocking of Harpin’s car. No head popping up. No one came running toward either car. No one came out of their house to see what was going on.

  During the commotion, Wallace moved quickly to the passenger side of Harpin’s car, staying below the windowsill.

  Through the rear passenger window she saw him.

  His seat had been reclined and he lay motionless, his head slumped over to his left. Wallace crouched low and pulled open the front passenger door. A dried rivulet of blood traced a sinuous path from behind his right ear down into the collar of his denim work shirt. The window and windshield on his side of the car were clean. No exit wound. It would have been a small-caliber weapon, maybe firing hollow points. A gun, with a silencer, lay on the floor just in front of her. Harpin’s right arm had flopped, palm up, across the console.

  Wallace wasn’t buying suicide. Landry’s rash move must have triggered a tactical retreat among the conspirators and the scene in front of her was part of a cleanup operation. She wondered if Landry was also in line to be scrubbed.

  The stink from the mountain of garbage covering the backseat didn’t quite cover the sharp smell of spent gunpowder. The scratchy sound of insect feet inside the trash made her skin crawl.

  She held her ear against Harpin’s chest for a full minute. Nothing. She laid her palm across his forehead. It was cool to the touch. She tried to bend one of his fingers toward his palm, but already she could feel the rubbery resistance of rigor mortis.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Leaving the scene of Harpin’s murder without calling it in went completely against Wallace’s training, but he was beyond help and the call would expose her phone and her location to the 9-1-1 operator.

  With Harpin out of the picture, Wallace shifted her focus to Garrett Landry. She arrived at his house to find newspapers piled on the porch and his car in the carport. The hood was cool.

  She walked to the rear of his house where she assumed the bedrooms were and phoned him. He didn’t answer and no lights came on.

  Back on the front porch she sat on the cool gray-painted wood and leaned against the white clapboard wall. A velvety quiet lay over the neighborhood, but in the far distance, at the edge of her hearing, she caught the warble of police sirens and the grating claxons of fire trucks. The sounds came from several directions at once.

  She felt her phone vibrate. It was a text from LeAnne:

  Glenn into psychiatric care facility. Dorothy less friendly than before. Where are you?

  Good question, Wallace thought. Where am I? Temporarily lost. She shoved her phone into her pocket without responding to the text.

  With no information to help her locate Landry, Wallace once again began the laborious process of reexamining what she knew.

  The image of Eddie on the dock, even though it was vulnerable, still leaned toward Eddie’s innocence. But his shaky alibi, the existence of an escape route through the attic, and the presence of insulation on Marioneaux’s shirt all pointed toward Eddie having had an opportunity. If a jury wanted a motive before they’d convict, revenge would probably be enough.

  Wallace’s mood sank further when she realized how cunning the plotters were. Marioneaux couldn’t deny being the informant. And even if he hadn’t been, the real informant would never step forward and reveal his identity. The plotters only needed to make it look like Marioneaux was the informant—and that Eddie had found that out.

  * * *

  Barging in on someone in the wee hours was not usually the way to win friends and influence people. And Mason would probably kill her for abusing his employee Joe Hanna, but she was running out of options

  “Hello?” The voice was hoarse with sleep.

  “Joe. This is Detective Hartman. Mason said I could get in touch with you if I needed any more technical help.”

  “Uhn-huh?”

  “I’m on your front steps.”

  “Seriously? You are serious. Jesus. What time is it?”

  “It’s late … or early. Listen, I’m sorry, but this is important.”

  “Gimme a sec.”

  Two minutes later he joined her on the porch. “Go back to sleep, honey,” he said before pulling the door shut behind him. “It’s just some woman who needs me and says she can’t wait.”

  The guy was a saint, Wallace realized.

  He turned to face her. “Okay, Detective Hartman. What can I do for you?”

  “I need to know how the Mixmaster anonymous remailer works, and here’s why.”

  Joe nodded as Wallace recounted what she had learned from Davis.

  “This happened years ago. So, here’s my question. With all the advances in software technology since then, could someone trace a message back to the sender now, even though it was untraceable back then?”

  “No. It can’t be done. But I’ve got a question for you. There’s more than one kind of remailer, so how do you know the originals were sent using the Mixmaster?”

  “The information I’m telling you was relayed to me secondhand, by someone I sent to interview the recipient. He was just reporting to me what the recipient said.”

  “But that’s my question. How could the recipient know which type was used? The sender would know, maybe, but there’s nothing in the message when it arrives that would tell the recipient which one was used.”

  She was confused. Why would Colin Gerard make up a story like that? Perhaps Davis had been wrong and Colin’s medical problems were affecting his cognitive abilities after all. Maybe Colin had let something slip that he shouldn’t have. Had he known who the informant was and been privy to his methods all along?

  “And yes, I’m sure about this,” Joe said. “I can practically see the question forming in your head.”

  Wallace supposed Colin could have been the one to finger Pitkin and that the whole anonymous informant story had been a charade to cover his own secret campaign to rid the city of what many considered a troublesome personality. Could s
omeone like Colin be connected to the plot to frame Eddie Pitkin?

  She had been up for more than twenty hours and had had only four hours’ sleep in the last forty-eight. The fatigue felt like a physical thing occupying space in her head. Even so, the questions and possibilities multiplied. She felt like the answer was close, like it was about to show itself. Then nothing. Without warning, the blizzard of ideas chasing around in her head ground to a halt.

  She leaned against a porch railing and dropped her face into her hands. “Thanks, Joe. I promise not to bother you again.”

  “You okay?” He ran his hands through his unruly curls.

  “Yeah. I’ll be fine.”

  “Well, if you need me, don’t hesitate.” He gave her a questioning look, then slipped back into his house.

  Wallace returned to her car, more puzzled than when she had arrived. Just let it go. Think about something else for a minute and then come back to it.

  She started driving, paying no heed to where she was going. Just turning randomly, trying to quiet her mind without falling asleep at the wheel.

  The first thought to disturb the newfound quiet took her by surprise. Besides herself, not one blessed soul on the entire planet knew where she was at this moment—in a strange neighborhood, in the middle of the night, driving around with no destination in mind, with a blinding headache courtesy of a man who had cracked her in the head and then disappeared.

  What kind of life was this that she was leading? What kind of person spent her time chasing after people who hated her, while taking elaborate measures to isolate herself from the people she loved and who loved her? The wisdom of Mason’s words from the night before, urging her to think about everything that was a stake, seemed so obvious.

  When she looked at things in that light, it seemed clear that all of the most basic assumptions about the who and the what of her life were ripe for serious reexamination.

  And with that thought, the lock in her head sprang open.

  * * *

  Wallace called Melissa Voorhees and arranged to meet her at a point halfway between Baton Rouge and Cavanaugh. Then she called Davis. He didn’t answer, so she left a message that she needed his help, that she would meet him at his office between nine thirty and ten.