Chasing Justice

by H. Terrell Griffin

  J.D. smiled, “Please call me J.D. I think we’re going to be good friends.”

  Michel laughed. “I hope so,” he said. “I’ve only been with the agency for a year. I’m mostly an errand boy at this point.”

  “What were you doing before?” I asked.

  “I was in the navy, and before that, college.”

  “What’d you do in the navy?”

  “I was a SEAL.”

  “I’m impressed,” I said.

  “I checked you out, too, Mr. Royal. You were Army Special Forces. I always liked those green berets you guys got to wear. They’re cute as hell.”

  I laughed. “Spoken like a true swabbie. So, what can you tell us?”

  “The director said that his orders included you, Mr. Royal, but that I had to extract a promise from you that none of this would go further.”

  “We’ll be discreet,” I said. “And call me Matt.”

  “Katrina is fully briefed on these cases,” Michel said, “and she’s been with the agency longer than I have. She can fill in any blanks.”

  Katrina nodded. “Some of this is black ops.”

  J.D. and I nodded.

  Devlin Michel took a deep breath. “You’re actively looking for Jim Favereaux, right?”

  “Yes,” J.D. said. “Do you have any ideas about his whereabouts?”

  “We have him.”

  “Homeland Security?”

  “Yes. He’s one of ours.”

  “That’s going to take some explaining,” J.D. said.

  “He’s one of our deepest cover agents. He’s been with one or another intelligence agency since he got out of college, starting with the Defense Intelligence Agency.”

  “I thought he was an entrepreneur,” J.D. said. “That’s what’s in our files anyway.”

  “Part of his legend. He’s been living rich for quite a while now.”

  “Tell us about him.”

  “I guess you saw that he pulled a lieutenant out of the line of fire and saved his life in Vietnam.”

  “Yes,” said J.D. “He got a medal for it. Was that true?”

  “It was true. Did you get the lieutenant’s name?”

  “That wasn’t in the file, or if it was, it didn’t mean anything to me.”

  “Does the name Zebulon Etheridge ring any bells?”

  We both shook our heads.

  “He was the Army Chief of Staff at the time Favereaux saved that lieutenant’s butt. The lieutenant was Zebulon Etheridge, Jr. He wasn’t quite a year out of West Point, and his dad was very happy that Jim Favereaux saved his son’s life.”

  “So that’s how Favereaux ended up working for the government.”

  “In a roundabout way. Jim had grown up in New Orleans, in one of those horrible neighborhoods that kids don’t usually escape from unless they hook up with criminals. Jim got out of the army and went to LSU on the GI Bill. Got a degree in business administration.”

  “That was in the file.”

  “He picked up the legend about the time he graduated. In other words, that’s when we started manufacturing his life.”

  “Homeland Security wasn’t even in existence then,” I said.

  “No. By the time Jim graduated, General Etheridge had retired from the army and become the civilian head of the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency.”

  “Could the government function without acronyms?” J.D. asked.

  “Probably not. There was a lot of stuff going on in New Orleans that had some bearing on defense issues. Some very bad people were using the port of New Orleans to ship arms and ammunition to Central and South America. Jim managed to infiltrate one of the biggest of the gangs. He had contacts in his old neighborhood and he called on his friends and let them know he was looking for a job. Turns out a lot of the bad guys were excited to have a college grad and bona fide war hero in their crew.

  “He rose quickly in the organization, and pretty soon, he’d accumulated a small fortune. When the DIA took down the bad guys, they made sure to leave Jim alone. There was some subterfuge that allowed him to escape. The DIA let him keep the money and stay in place in New Orleans. He built up quite a reputation among the darker elements over there, and he was willing to use his funds as seed money for some of the criminal enterprises. The DIA took down some very dangerous people because of Jim Favereaux.”

  “I’m surprised that DIA would let him keep the money,” J.D. said.

  “It was all aboveboard. Jim reported all the funds, and his accounts were audited closely by DIA. He needed to have the appearance of a man getting rich on criminal enterprises, and he needed money to invest in new ones.”

  “Nobody ever got on to him?” I asked.

  “No. Well, not until a couple of weeks ago, anyway. But DIA was very cautious and loaned him out to the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency, so he worked deals that wouldn’t have excited the DIA, or in any way connect Jim to the DIA. The agencies kept moving him around the country. He became a criminal entrepreneur and was crucial in shutting down a lot of operations. Finally, he moved to Homeland Security because a lot of his contacts in the underworld were involved in things that touched on our responsibilities, such as drugs, guns, money laundering, and moving terrorists about the world.”

  “You’d be surprised at how many things we keep our eyes on because of the threats to our security from terrorism,” Katrina said.

  “You think somebody recently figured out who he really was?” I asked.

  “We’re not sure,” Devlin said. “Jim had set up here to burrow into a large drug-importing business. We think the drug sales were being used to support a terrorist group working out of South America. Getting Jim involved was a slow process, but he had made a lot of progress. We were getting close.”

  “What happened?” J.D. asked.

  “He sent a coded message about three weeks ago saying he thought he was being followed. We sent in another agent to follow the follower, but we were never able to find anybody that seemed too interested in Jim. Then early Monday morning, Jim called our duty officer and told him that Linda had been killed and he needed to come in. He’d be leaving Tampa International with a false ID and would fly to Atlanta. It was a prearranged escape route. One of our people met him in Atlanta and took him to a safe house in the North Georgia mountains.”

  “I’m surprised he’d run off and just leave his wife dead on the floor of his mansion,” J.D. said, the sound of contempt creeping into her voice.

  “She wasn’t his wife,” said Michel.

  “What was she?” J.D. asked. “Just part of the cover? A trophy wife to enhance the image? Kind of a throwaway doll that if necessary would be sacrificed on the altar of national security?”

  Michel’s face suddenly looked hard, as if anger was creeping up on him and he was fighting it off. He stared at J.D. for a moment, and then, his voice tight, said, “Linda wasn’t Jim’s wife. She was his daughter.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  “Oh my God, Devlin,” J.D. said. “I’m so sorry. Sometimes my mouth overloads my brain.”

  “It’s okay, J.D.,” Michel said. “You couldn’t have known, but Jim is devastated. He really loved Linda. And I mean he loved her in a fatherly way.”

  “Linda was his daughter?” I asked. “She was also the daughter of a woman in New Orleans named Connie Pelletier.”

  Now, Michel looked surprised. “How the hell did you know that?”

  “Didn’t you know we went to see Connie?” I asked.

  “I did. But how did you make that connection?”

  “After Connie was killed,” J.D. said, “I asked Brad Corbin to send me the results of her DNA. We compared it with Linda’s and got a hit. Connie was definitely Linda’s mom. You didn’t know that?”

  “We’ve known it for years. Linda was one of our agents, too. I thought we’d covered her tracks so that her old identity was pretty much buried.”

  “Darlene Pelletier?” J.D. said.

  “Yes. How did you get o
nto her?”

  “We got the fingerprint hit. When we ran Linda’s prints the first time, up popped a New Orleans arrest twenty years ago of a young woman named Darlene Pelletier. Then the DNA connected Darlene and Connie.”

  “You ran them twice?”

  “Yes,” J.D. said. “You caught it the second time and blocked the identification. Instead, you called me.”

  “Geez. I thought we’d cleaned up all of Darlene’s history. Her prints are supposed to be flagged and if somebody comes looking for them, they won’t show up in any database. I know the Sarasota PD and FDLE ran her prints, but we caught that, just like we caught your request. I didn’t know you’d had another request. Somebody’s going to catch hell about those prints.”

  “I can’t imagine that had anything to do with Linda’s death,” I said. “Somebody with access to the law enforcement databases would have to have a reason to check Linda’s prints against Darlene’s. That’s a big stretch.”

  “It should have been caught,” Devlin said. “It’s a very important part of how we protect our agents.”

  “Why was Linda posing as Favereaux’s wife?” J.D. asked.

  “Twenty years ago, when Linda was still Darlene, Jim came across some information that a contract had been put out on her from Los Angeles. When he saw the name, Darlene Pelletier, he got to thinking about a girl from his old neighborhood, Connie Rohan. He’d had a short affair with her when he first returned to New Orleans after college. He was aware that Connie had married a lowlife named Bobby Pelletier and wondered if Darlene could be Connie’s daughter.”

  “Why would somebody in Los Angeles put a hit on Darlene?” I asked.

  “Darlene was a mess. She’d been raised by her grandmother, Connie’s mother, in a shack down in the delta. When Connie married Bobby, he wouldn’t let the little girl stick around, so Connie’s mom took her in and moved south to the area where she had grown up. The grandmother died when Darlene was fifteen, and she came back to live with Connie and Bobby. She took the name Pelletier, although she was never adopted or legally changed her name.”

  “No wonder we couldn’t get hold of the adoption records,” J.D. said. “There weren’t any.”

  “No,” Michel said. “Darlene just moved in, and Bobby started having sex with her. He was keeping her doped up and even pimped her out a few times. It got to be too much for Darlene, and she left with a creep she’d met in a bar. The creep was a drug runner from Los Angeles, and off they went to California. Six months later, the creep was murdered by his own people, and Darlene witnessed it. She knew the killers. Somehow she survived the murder and got back to New Orleans. The people who killed her boyfriend put the hit on her.”

  “So what was Favereaux’s part in this?” J.D. asked.

  “He looked up Connie and offered to provide protection for Darlene. Connie told Jim about the sexual abuse from Bobby and said that Darlene needed to get as far away as she could. Jim thought he was just doing her a favor. He asked Connie if she wanted him to take care of Bobby. Told her the incest alone would be enough to send Bobby away. That’s when Connie told him that he was the father, not Bobby.”

  “Jim accepted that?”

  “No, but he took Darlene in and had DNA tests run. The tests weren’t as precise back then, but they were good enough to convince Jim that he was Darlene’s father. Jim was either going to leave the agency or get some help from DIA. The agency accepted Jim’s assurance that the test results were positive and decided to give Darlene a new identity and move Jim out of New Orleans. He was ready to move on, anyway. The DIA set him up in Atlanta.”

  “Do you think that old contract got executed?” J.D. asked. “That somebody found her and killed her this many years later?”

  “No. Jim took care of the contract. He knew where it came from, and let’s just say that the ones who put out the contract don’t exist anymore.”

  “You said Linda was an agent,” I said.

  “Yes. Jim thought the best way to cover her trail was to marry her. He wanted her to have a rock-solid legend. DIA got her a new name, new documents, and even carried out a sham wedding. It always seemed like overkill to me, but I was in grade school when all that was going on.”

  “What if Jim ever decided to get married? For real. How would that have worked?” J.D. asked.

  Michel looked at Katrina. “I guess the agency would have cooked up a divorce and moved Linda into other operations,” she said.

  “Anyway,” Michel said, “it turned out that Darlene was a very smart young lady. With Jim’s help, she kicked the drugs and got her life straightened out. Jim thought she had the potential to be an agent and convinced the bosses that she could be a big help to him. So they sent her through the whole training course, and she and Jim have worked together all these years.”

  “You said they were getting close on the drug group here. How close?”

  “Jim hadn’t gotten to the top yet. He had worked his way into middle management, mostly by throwing money around, paying for drugs, that sort of thing. He set up a shell company that could launder some of the drug money, and the bad guys were warming up to him. We figured he’d be another year getting to the top.”

  “What was Linda doing?” J.D. asked.

  “She was mostly playing the trophy wife. She’d hang out with some of the wives of the people Jim was sucking up to, picking up what gossip she could.”

  “When we did a time line on Jim’s movements the night of the murder,” J.D. said, “it seemed pretty convenient that he was gone for just the time that it took for the murder to take place.”

  “Jim told us that he’d gone to sleep on the sofa in the living room and woke up about eleven. Said he was starving and craving a Big Mac. Linda was soaking in the hot tub when he left. Nobody else was in the house. He came back and found her dead. He grabbed a pistol and searched the house. Nobody was there.”

  “What if the killer was just after Linda?” I asked. “He was watching the house and waited for Jim to leave.”

  “We thought about that. It’s entirely plausible. We just don’t know who would have had any reason to kill Linda, other than somebody involved in the investigation they were working on.”

  “If that was the case,” I said, “I’d think the killer would have waited around for Jim.”

  “I agree,” Michel said. “So do my bosses. That’s why we need to know what you know.”

  “Who were the drug people Jim was investigating here?” J.D. asked.

  “I can give you a list, but I doubt it’ll mean much to you. Unless there’s somebody in your file who shows up on that list.”

  “What about Bannister?” I asked.

  “What about him?”

  “You brought it up when you asked J.D. if she knew anything about the case.”

  “I guess I did. Katrina probably knows more about that than I do,” Michel said.

  I looked at Katrina. “Well?”

  “When I got back from Croatia, our boss asked me to take a look at the case Jim Favereaux was working on. He thought a new pair of eyes might find something everybody had overlooked.”

  “Did you find anything?”

  “There was nothing in the information Jim and Linda had been sending us, but there were other agents working on other drug-smuggling cases in the Southeast. I went over those and started putting together a matrix, trying to plug all the facts into all the little squares and see if something we’d missed took shape. I wanted to know if anything the other agents were finding had any bearing of Jim’s case. If so, I’d alert Jim and he could go from there.”

  “Did anything pop up?”

  “Nothing earth shattering, but I did see one thing that only began to make sense after Bannister was killed.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “We have an operation being run out of Miami, trying to get to the top of a ring of drug importers. We think they have ties to other groups throughout the Southeast. One of the names that came up was Nate Bannister
. That, in and of itself, didn’t mean anything, because I’d never heard of the man. As I kept looking, the same name popped up in an investigation going on in Atlanta. I thought he might be some kind of conduit between the Miami people and the ones in Atlanta. We ran the name through our databases and came up with three or four people with the same name, but only one was in the Southeast. The one in Sarasota.”

  “Did you send that information to Favereaux?” I asked.

  Katrina shook her head. “I found it on Monday, the same day Jim called the agency duty officer from the Tampa airport. Then, I find out that Bannister was killed the same night that Linda was murdered. I began to wonder if the murders could be connected.”

  “Was Bannister mentioned in any of Favereaux’s reports?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Did you think that strange?”

  “Maybe. Jim had made some headway with the drug people in this area, but he hadn’t gotten too far up the ladder. He was salting the trail with lots of money, and was beginning to make real progress. If Bannister was involved with the local drug dealers, I would think Jim might have found that out. Then again, maybe Bannister was so far up the chain of command that Jim hadn’t run across him yet.”

  “Or,” I said, “maybe our dead Bannister wasn’t the same one who was involved with the drugs.”

  “There’s that,” Katrina said, “but if he’s involved, I think it’s on the money-laundering side. I’d think Jim’s money would have drawn Bannister out.”

  “If he was involved in the drug business,” I said, “there’d be a lot of reasons for him to be killed that didn’t involve my client or a lover’s spat.”

  “You’re right, Matt,” Katrina said. “Maybe we can work together and find out what Bannister was up to.”

  “Why would you care?” I asked. “Now that he’s dead.”

  “Two reasons. We want to shut down this operation, and if we find his killers, maybe we can get them to trade information for a lighter prison sentence.”