Dark River Rising

by Roger Johns

  “That’s absurd.” A faint echo of her earlier hostility had crept back into her voice. “He could never do anything even remotely like what you’re saying.”

  “I hope you’re right. But that will be determined by the evidence.”

  “I know you’re just doing your job,” Carla said after a long pause. “It’s just that a few days ago everything seemed just about right. Now my whole world has been turned inside out. And not because I’ve done anything wrong. It’s just not fair,” she said, finally winding down.

  “Listen, while we’re on the phone, I need to ask you something. The stuff that was just seized from Matt’s lab is on its way to the state crime lab in Baton Rouge.”

  “So?”

  “We need your help to reassemble it.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Carla said. An ugly chill edged into her voice. “Let me see now—you get me fired from my job, you ruin my career, you all but accuse my boyfriend of being a murderer involved with drug dealers, yet you still have the nerve to ask me to help you?”

  “You would be helping us find Matt, or at least find out about Matt,” Wallace said, immediately regretting her ham-handed attempt at leverage.

  “You’re a real piece of work, Detective.”

  “Please,” Wallace pleaded, brushing past Carla’s whine. “I’ve got a dead body and a scientist missing under suspicious circumstances. I hate the way things have turned out for you, but I can’t not follow the trail where it leads me because of your, or anyone else’s, bruised feelings.”

  “You said, a minute ago, that a connection between Matt and this drug dealer was looking more likely. How much more likely?” she asked, her tone thawing a few degrees.

  “I don’t know. Cases evolve. Assumptions change. All I can say is that when I first started down this path, it looked like a real longshot. Now, my instincts are telling me otherwise.”

  “If something concrete has changed your thinking, I’d like to know what it is. That’s only fair, after what this is costing me.”

  “I’m telling you what I can,” Wallace said, trying not to sound evasive. “Look, we’re letting precious time slip away. Will you help, or won’t you?”

  “I can try,” Carla said, sounding defeated. “That’s assuming my labels haven’t been removed. But I’m getting the distinct impression you’re not really telling me anything.”

  “At this point, there’s no way for me to know what information might be dangerous for you to have. If Matt’s disappearance is connected to something he knew, your knowing it could endanger you as well.” Wallace waited to see if Carla would push for more, but she didn’t. “Do you want me to pick you up? I can take you to the lab.”

  “Just give me the address of this place where you want me to go. I’ll drive myself. I don’t want to go with you and then be stuck there when you get called away on something else.”

  The moment she ended the call her phone rang. She almost didn’t want to look at it, afraid it might be Carla, again. But it was Mason.

  TWELVE

  THURSDAY 11:00 A.M.

  “Detective Hartman,” she answered, not wanting Mason to know she had programmed his name with his number.

  “Hey. It’s me. We’re done at Tunica, and the evidence is on the way to the crime lab.”

  “I know.”

  “You’ve heard from Carla.”

  “Boy, have I. And you owe me big-time for taking all the shit for both of us. Her career is toast, and she’s angry and confused.”

  “Typical informant’s remorse,” Mason said.

  “That’s nice. When you put a name on it, it makes it so neat and clean. I’m already feeling ever so much better about the wreckage,” Wallace shot back.

  “Great. Well, listen then, the marshal tells me he’ll be there in about forty-five minutes, give or take, depending on traffic,” Mason said.

  “I’ll be waiting for him,” she said, irritated that he could remain so composed when she was so determined to provoke him.

  “So, how is Colley?” Mason asked, catching her completely off guard.

  “He’s putting a brave face on a dismal situation, as usual.”

  “I’d like to hear the story, later.”

  “Alright,” she said, unsure if he was really interested or just trying to make nice. “I need to make a call before I get to the lab. I’ll see you in Bayou Sara in a bit.”

  As she pulled into the parking lot at the lab, Wallace called Carla to let her know when the material from Matt’s lab would be arriving.

  * * *

  Connie Butterworth was a senior analyst in the Drug Analysis Section at the State Police Crime Lab. She and Wallace had been pretty good friends in high school. Because of her wild-child lifestyle she was regarded as the most likely to die young in pursuit of better living through chemistry. Some thought it odd when she chose a career analyzing drugs instead of consuming them. She might have drunk her weight in alcohol during the latter part of her high school days, and she might have been more than just a bit friendly with more than just a few of her classmates, but Wallace knew to a certainty that Connie had never been a drug user. Connie had not discouraged the rumors, but she hadn’t invited any monkeys onto her back, either.

  Wallace occasionally needed a favor from the crime lab and she had asked Connie a few times. But she kept her requests rare and never liked to ask by telephone. She felt like she needed to go the extra mile and ask in person if she wanted Connie to do something special.

  Besides, Wallace liked driving around the area where the lab was located. It was part of the main campus of the State Police Headquarters, situated next to a park that sprawled on the site of the old Downtown Airport. The area formerly occupied by the runways and taxiways was mainly tennis courts and ball fields now. The control tower was long gone, but one of the original Quonset-style hangars was still standing. It had been turned into an office building, though, and a new façade made its original shape and function difficult to discern. Over the years, thousands of kids, Wallace included, had played thousands of innings on the softball fields, then snuck across the street to do the mall-rat thing. The place was soaked with memories.

  “Hey, Wally Girl,” Connie said, as she strode across the lobby. The sound of her teenage nickname in Connie’s whiskey-throated drawl brought a girlish smile to Wallace’s face.

  “Hey, Connie. I need your help with something that’s … a bit out of the ordinary.”

  “I get off at six. I know these two guys who are into—”

  “Not that out of the ordinary.”

  “Oh, you mean forensically speaking.”

  “Bingo.”

  “And, let me guess—time is of the essence.”

  “As always. But I think you’ll at least find this one interesting.”

  They left the lab building and headed for the walking paths in the park across the street. Wallace spent the next several minutes explaining Colley’s idea about how small traces of the chemicals the cartels used to extract the powder from the leaves were like fingerprints that could identify the source of a particular batch of cocaine. She also filled Connie in on the story of the missing Matt Gable and his extracurricular science project and Mason’s theory that Matt could have developed a new extraction method.

  “If this guy Gable has developed some sort of superefficient extraction method,” Connie said, “that would mean he had the actual leaves from the coca plants. In that case, there would be no way to link his product with any of the powder cocaine coming straight from South America. His method would be different from the cartels’ and it would leave different traces. So, you could show that Gable’s and Echeverría’s products were different—you could eliminate the possibility of that kind of a connection—but you couldn’t connect them.”

  “Then let’s put Echeverría aside, for the moment, and focus on Gable and Overman. Let’s say there is cocaine in this glassware we seized from Gable’s lab. And let’s say the extraction traces from
that match the traces in the coke we seized from Overman. That would connect Overman and Gable, wouldn’t it?”

  “Well, it would establish the possibility of a connection, and you could probably get a jury to believe that it’s a pretty strong connection, but that’s all.”

  “If they match, why wouldn’t that be conclusive?”

  “Well, two batches extracted by two different people, just by sheer coincidence might have identical traces, within the sensitivities my tests are valid for. I mean, it’s unlikely, but things like that do happen.”

  “Is there a way to raise the probability that a match means two samples are from the same batch?” Wallace asked.

  “Sure. Test more than one sample from each source. It’s very unlikely that several samples over any real length of time would match exactly, unless they’re from the same source. Three samples from each source, taken at different times, should do it.”

  “We don’t have that. We just have the one batch from the Overman case, and a lot of unknowns from Gable’s lab.”

  “Well, these extraction traces would be just one marker we could test for,” Connie pointed out. “Instead of testing multiple samples for one marker, we could test the Gable sample and the Overman sample for multiple markers. If all the markers from both samples turn out the same, then the probability they’re from the same source goes up.”

  “Besides extraction traces, what other markers could be tested?”

  “Isotopes and alkaloids.”

  “I’m lost already.”

  “As the coca plants grow, they take up different amounts of isotopes from their environment and produce different amounts of alkaloids, depending on growing conditions, location, and the variety of coca plant involved.”

  “Are these things affected by different purification processes?”

  “No. They’re in the cocaine molecule itself. Changes in the cultivation practices made these markers pretty unworkable for a long time, but some new science has made them the gold standard again.”

  “So you could compare the amounts in two different samples, and if they match, they come from the same variety of plant and the same general area?”

  “Yep. And since each cartel controls fairly specific growing areas, that would also give you a pretty good idea whether they’re from the same source or not.”

  “So if you compare a sample from the Overman crime scene and the glassware from Gable’s lab and they match for all these markers, we can say they came from the same source? We can connect Gable and Overman?”

  “We can say there’s only a teeny tiny chance they came from different sources. You’re getting a whole lot closer to that legal certainty you’re looking for.”

  “The items from Gable’s lab are being set up in one of your vacant lab rooms later today. If I get you the piece from the output end of Gable’s setup and a sample from the Overman scene, could you compare them for both markers?”

  “Of course.”

  “How quickly?”

  “Actually, pretty fast.”

  “I don’t believe it. There’s no one in the entire state ahead of me?”

  “Quite a few, in fact.”

  “Won’t you get in trouble for jumping the line with my stuff?”

  “I’ve got a little bit of power,” she said, with a huge grin. “You’re not the only person around here who’s been asking me to do something out of the ordinary.”

  * * *

  Wallace walked back to the room where the glassware would be reassembled. Nothing had arrived yet, so she called Mike Harrison. He still didn’t answer, so she called the Evidence Division. Joe Lumpkin, who had been on the force nearly as long as Colley, took the call.

  “I’m stuck at the state crime lab for a while and can’t get to a department computer,” she told him. “Do you have time to check on something for me?”

  “Sure,” Joe said. “What do you need?”

  “Has anything come back on the prints or DNA in the Ronald Overman case?”

  “Gimme a sec.” After a minute he said, “Not much here. Lots of hairs were recovered from the air shaft, but unless you got somebody’s to compare ’em to, they won’t help you much.”

  “What about fingerprints?”

  “Only prints ID’d so far belonged to the victim.”

  The air shaft in the warehouse had been an intake, so over the years it would have sucked in a great deal of material. That meant there would be a lot of testable stuff, but getting through it would take time and a budget she didn’t have.

  “Anything? Anything at all?”

  “Sorry, kid. Nothing.”

  “Thanks, Joe,” she said, and hung up.

  She was about to step out for a minute when the crates from Gable’s lab arrived. Carla arrived a few minutes later and sat in the back of the room, refusing to even look at Wallace. After explaining to the evidence tech what she wanted done with the contents of the crates, Wallace left for Bayou Sara.

  THIRTEEN

  NOON

  Wallace stopped in front of Matt Gable’s ruined house. Mason and Chief Whitlock were standing next to one of the trees that held a hidden camera. A circular scaffold platform surrounded the tree and a waist-high rolling rack loaded with electronic gear was parked on the platform where a technician was hard at work.

  “Find anything?” Wallace asked, as she walked up.

  “Yes and no,” Mason said. “We know how the cameras work, but we haven’t been able to break into their cloud storage, yet.”

  “Are we certain they’re storing what they see?” she asked.

  “The cameras are sending to a website. The site is protected and it looks like the protection is pretty strong.”

  “Can your techs break in?”

  “Probably, but they’ve done all they can for the moment. They’re taking the cameras down and moving everything to a place where it’s a little easier to work. We’ve got some really talented hackers back in Washington trying to get into the website. We’ll know more when they know more.”

  “Ready for our little romp through the wilderness?” she asked, pulling her hair back into a ponytail.

  “Chief Whitlock, would you care to join us?” Mason asked.

  “No thanks. A walk in the woods without at least a chance of shooting at something edible seems like a waste of a good walk to me. Just remember our little deal.”

  “Any chance you could send someone to pick us up and bring us back to my car, when we get to the other end?” Wallace asked.

  “Yes ma’am,” Whitlock said, as he sauntered back toward the street.

  Wallace and Mason entered the woods at the place Carla had shown them. The sun was baking a clean, sharp scent out of the vegetation. As they moved deeper into the trees, the frantic rustle of small animals and the kvetching of birds in the limbs overhead grew more frequent. They went slowly, at first, but as Wallace caught the rhythm of Matt’s system of scrape marks on the trees, she picked up the pace.

  The gentle terrain was punctuated by occasional rises. In some places the trail led around the rises and at others Matt had evidently climbed over. Twice the trail ended at a stream where Matt had apparently run along the streambed before returning to dry land. At these points, Wallace and Mason were forced to use trial and error, walking some distance upstream and downstream until they found where the tree marks resumed or they could tell from worn spots on the bank where Matt had exited the stream.

  They moved without speaking, with Wallace in the lead. Their footfalls were their only contributions to the forest noises. Occasionally, instead of concentrating totally on the trail, looking for telltale signs of the missing scientist, Wallace found her thoughts straying toward Mason, just as they had the evening before. But today was different. She wasn’t having the same allergic reaction to thinking about him. And the more she thought about his request for forgiveness, after their sparring match over the materials from Matt Gable’s lab, the more it blew her away. It had been a long time s
ince she had encountered a man with enough moxie to call a foul on himself like that.

  And now, with him walking the path behind her, she was starting to wonder whether he was thinking about her. He hadn’t given off any obvious signs in that department. And she hadn’t caught him in any of those head-to-toe appraisals she knew men gave her when they thought she wasn’t watching—something she had never gotten truly comfortable with, perhaps because she had been a late bloomer. It hadn’t been until her late teens that she had completely forsaken gawky for gangly. And it had taken until her midtwenties to go from gangly to lanky. It was only now, as she navigated through her midthirties, that her corners and edges had begun to soften a bit.

  She needed to stop and refocus but as she turned to announce a rest, her peripheral vision picked up something that didn’t fit. It was about fifty yards off the trail. The space between the trees was a little darker than her eyes had come to expect. She stopped, signaling for quiet.

  As they drew closer, she could see it was a crudely built shed. Cautiously she moved toward it, unholstering her weapon as she went. She motioned for Mason to stay behind, then she began to circle the shed, darting from tree to tree. Only after the gaping doors came into view and she could see that it was empty did she reholster her sidearm.

  “Watch where you put your feet,” she cautioned, pointing at the tire tracks leading from inside the shed into the field beyond. Using her phone, Wallace took several close-ups of the tracks.

  “They go off in this direction,” Mason pointed out.

  They followed the tracks. Parallel tire-flattened furrows in the tall grass showed the path a vehicle had taken along the edge of the field.

  “Let’s go back to the shed,” she said. Using a GPS app, she texted the shed’s location to Whitlock. Her phone rang almost immediately.

  “I hope those coordinates aren’t the final resting place of Matt Gable, Ph.D.,” Whitlock drawled.

  “There’s a shed here, some ways off the trail. What look like fresh tire tracks—car tire tracks to be specific—lead away from the shed, then go around the perimeter of a nearby pasture. We don’t know where they end up.”