Mac pulled into the parking lot of the LDWF regional office in Thibodaux, just down the street from the Mudbug Brewery, which they’d all visited more than a few times when they were up this way on the weekends. King Cake Ale with cinnamon sugar on the rim was Jena’s favorite of the local brews, and everyone made fun of her for it.
Maxie Renaud met them in the lobby of the building. There had been no need for them to meet in person, so Jena suspected the woman wanted to reconnect with Mac. The forensic biologist was petite and blond—which seemed just her partner’s type—so Jena saw why he’d hit on her. And after hearing her sum up the preliminary findings about the odd contents of the blood in Alligator mississippiensis 232D, as their gator had been named, she also understood why they’d flamed out so quickly as a couple. Dr. Renaud was smarter than Mac and probably not afraid to show it. He’d be just the guy to find that annoying, if not intimidating.
Or maybe she was selling Mac short. He’d surprised her this week with a perceptiveness and sensitivity she hadn’t expected.
“Anyway, our gator was only about five or six years old,” Maxie said, leading them back to the biology wing and into an office just off the double doors. She pulled a couple of sheets of paper off the printer. “You got that list of Black Diamond’s chemical structure and components?”
Jena pulled out the DEA printout and handed it to the toxicologist. Maxie scanned it and whistled. “Your gator was definitely flying on Black Diamond. No wonder this stuff is so nasty. The difference between a pleasant high and full-out crazy would be minuscule.”
“It’s one of the bath salt drugs,” Mac said. “I’ve been reading about them. They’re synthetic versions of this amphetamine-like plant product sold legally in Asia and parts of Africa. They ship ’em over here and head shops sell them disguised as bath salts or plant food—at least until they kill or injure enough people for the politicians to get involved.”
Maxie nodded. “They’re also mixed with stuff like formaldehyde and—bingo—trouble, especially if the user’s also been drinking. It’s a lot cheaper than heroin or cocaine, doesn’t show up on standard drug tests, and creates instant addicts. It’s the perfect drug. We found something more weird than just the drug, though. It’s why I wanted to talk to you in person.”
They settled into chairs in the office, and Maxie perched on the edge of the desk. “Okay, first of all, we found this in the gator’s belly.” She handed over a clear plastic bag that looked to be about a foot square in size. Inside it, in a standard sandwich bag, was a large amount of black powder. Jena held it up: maybe as much as ten or twelve ounces of the stuff.
“This isn’t a recreational amount.” She handed the bag to Mac. “It’s a shipment.”
“Exactly. How the alligator got it is beyond me.” Maxie took the bag from Mac and pointed to a bottom corner, where a few grains of black powder had escaped. “The gator’s stomach acid could have started eating into the plastic or, more likely, it snagged on something in its belly. The poor guy was carrying a couple of small hooks where someone had tried to catch him.” She held the bag up to the light. “The hooks weren’t big enough to have killed the animal, but any one of them would have been big enough to tear a hole in that bag.”
“Let me look at it again.” Jena took the plastic bag and studied the small hole in the corner. “Any way to tell how much escaped into the gator’s system through this hole?”
Maxie shook her head, retrieved her evidence bags and the DEA report, and locked them in a case on wheels. “I’ll take this back to Baton Rouge and see what else I can find. We won’t be able to pinpoint a precise amount, but now that I have the exact makeup of Black Diamond, or at least this iteration of the drug, I can give you a better idea of how much was in the gator’s system.”
Jena’s biggest question was how the gator got the drugs in the first place. “Any way to tell how long the bag had been in his system? Wouldn’t his stomach acids have started breaking it down pretty soon after swallowing?”
Maxie shook her head again. “Hard to say, but my guess is no. Human stomach acids won’t eat through plastic; chances are, neither would an alligator’s or, if they did, it would take so long he’d poop it out beforehand.”
“Even what little he ingested was enough to make him sluggish and not too worried about a crazy woman, a barking dog, and being poked with a table leg,” Mac said. There wasn’t an ounce of flirtation in his voice—or his face. Jena finally saw the agent beneath the flirtatious exterior. “What was the other thing you found so interesting?”
Maxie reached behind her on the desk and handed them another evidence bag, this one with a small metallic rectangle in it. A light in the middle of the device blinked orange in a slow, steady rhythm.
Jena examined it and handed it to Mac. “So this was in the gator’s belly too?”
“No, embedded in its right front foot, between two toes. That one’s out of my field of expertise to examine, so I thought you could take it back to the Terrebonne Sheriff’s Office since the gator was in your parish.”
Mac leaned toward the window to get more light on the device. “It looks like it could be a receiver or transmitter of some kind. Any way the gator could have stepped on it accidentally?”
Maxie thought for a moment, blew out a frustrated breath, and shrugged. “Anything’s possible, but I don’t think so. It was embedded too far between his toes, for one thing, plus your ordinary transmitter probably wouldn’t work underwater and, as you can see, that one’s still blinking.”
She stood up and grabbed the handle of her rolling case containing the Black Diamond. “Anyway, that’s what I have for you. I want to get this printout back to Baton Rouge and officially get your gator on record as a Black Diamond user.”
They walked back to the lobby with her, Mac distracted and still looking at the tiny metal box with its blinking light. He glanced up at Jena. “I got a buddy down around Bourg who knows a lot about electronics—he’s into all these remote-control toys and stuff. Mind if we make a detour on the way home?”
“Fine with me.” Jena had plenty of time before picking up Ceelie for dinner. Plus, the whole idea of a shipment-sized bag of Black Diamond inside a gator bothered her. Either they had a really careless drug supplier who’d lost a big chunk of his shipment somewhere in the water, or it was intentional.
Could an alligator be used as a drug mule?
CHAPTER 13
Mac had met Jerry Pourfon the first night after completing his six months of training in the LDWF Academy. He’d been sore, exhausted, and ready to chill out in some way that didn’t involve trekking through mud weighed down in heavy boots and a ton of gear, or driving dirt roads in the middle of the night with his lights off, looking for illegal hunters or poachers.
He’d stopped in the Bayou Honey, an absolute dive in the worst sense of the word, somewhere between Houma and Thibodaux. The only other customer that Tuesday night had been a commercial fisherman home off a long run and trying to shake off his own exhaustion.
Except where Mac was thinking beer and the company of a woman, Jerry had been thinking bourbon and the slow, meticulous dismantling of the remote control for an Air Hogs toy helicopter.
Since the bar had no women in it other than a middle-aged brunette with silver roots and dark circles of exhaustion under her eyes, Mac asked the bourbon drinker if he could join him. They’d both slowly gotten drunk—well, it hadn’t taken Mac very long—and talked about remote controls.
As a means of celebrating his graduation from his grueling enforcement training, the night sucked. As the beginning of a friendship, it was stellar. Mac could indulge his secret passion for dismantling things and reassembling them around Jerry as often as he wanted, comforted by the knowledge that he’d never reach his friend’s level of geekitude.
“Who is this guy, anyway?” Jena stood by the truck with her arms crossed, studying the assortment of rusting robots, tin men, flamingos, and yard art that littered the front of Jerr
y’s double-wide.
“Don’t judge.” Mac grinned and stepped around a metal squirrel the size of a kid’s tricycle, orange with rust and wearing a hollow-eyed expression worthy of a Stephen King novel. “You’ll love Jerry.”
Actually, she’d probably leave Jerry’s with an urgent desire to take a shower, but the place wasn’t dirty—not like Ray Naquin’s house had been. Jerry brought hoarding to a whole new level. His house might look like chaos on the inside, with stacks of parts and tools and unidentified-but-possibly-useful-someday objects, but he could lay his hands on a particular item in seconds. He was infallible in a filing system only he could understand.
Mac deliberately avoided looking at Jena when Jerry opened the door and welcomed them in. If she’d had any reaction, she’d gone back to a pleasantly bland expression by the time introductions had been done.
“What’s up, dude? You get dat Swiss Army knife taken apart and put back together yet?” Jerry’s shoulder-length gray hair, with only a few strands of black to hint at its original color, had been pulled back into a ponytail, and his solid-gray beard, which hung halfway down his chest, was braided and tied at the bottom with a blue ribbon.
“You take knives apart and reassemble them?” Jena wrenched her gaze away from Jerry’s surroundings, which she probably equated with a warehouse for scrap metal, and raised her eyebrows at Mac.
“Just a hobby.” Mac had always been secretive about his fascination with moving parts and how they fit together. Everybody needed a hobby. “Jerry, I have something that Jena and I wanted you to take a look at.”
Jena reached inside her pocket and pulled out the plastic bag containing their mystery metal. She held it out to him. “Can you tell us anything about this?”
Jerry took the bag and held it up to the light, frowning. “Okay if I be takin’ it out and lookin’ at it?”
“No!” Jena and Mac reacted at the same time, which raised Jerry’s antennae.
“Okay den, no problem.” He held up the bag. “How ’bout you at least tell me what it is dat I’m supposed to be looking for?”
Mac looked at Jena and nodded. He trusted Jerry, but not enough to interfere with what she thought qualified as shareable.
“It’s evidence in a case we’re working, and that’s about all I can tell you,” she said. “Sorry. Mac thought you might know what it was.”
Jerry’s dark-brown eyes crinkled. “I done got an idea, me. Let’s see if I’m right.”
They followed him into what was probably supposed to be a dining room, but it held a broad, rustic worktable littered with all kinds of gadgets. Mac picked up a tiny spring. “Hey, this looks like what I need to finish rehabbing my knife. You using it for anything?”
Jerry had knelt to pull a box from beneath a table and glanced over his shoulder. “Nah, help yourself. Found another old knife on da table next to it if you want it.”
Mac peered into a cardboard cigar box, its original bright cover faded and scratched. “This looks like an old Robeson. I’d love to have it. Sure you don’t want it?”
“Nah. I like electronics more’n mechanics, me.” A stack of books and papers toppled to the floor when Jerry pulled out the box. No, Mac decided, what Jerry pulled out was not a box, but an amplifier.
From a top shelf, Jerry retrieved a wire basket holding an assortment of microphones. He picked through them and finally selected a large handheld model, its black cord trailing like a snake as he pulled it free from the basket. “Yep, I think dis should work.”
“What are you doing?” Jena’s brow wrinkled in concern. “It’s not going to mess up our evidence, is it?”
“No, ma’am.” Jerry grinned at her. Mac watched to see if she reacted to his friend’s front teeth, one of which had been broken halfway off when he got hit by a runaway winch on the shrimp boat a few weeks ago. Mac had been on the lookout for a dentist who offered a pro bono day since Jerry didn’t have insurance. Mac made a decent salary with the state, but not enough to pick up a big dental bill.
Jena had no reaction to the tooth-impaired grin. She was too busy frowning at the sight of Jerry as he plugged the portable amplifier into the wall, then plugged the speaker into the amp.
“Okay, let’s have a listen.” Jerry sat at the table and motioned the others to join him. Mac pulled out a chair and settled in. Jena hesitated but eventually climbed on a nearby stool.
Jerry held the mic close to the bag. “It’s gonna be muted, so I’ll make some adjustments, me.” Reaching behind him, he turned a couple of knobs on the amp until an unsettling electronic hum—almost white-noise static but not quite—filled the room. Mac shivered at the sensation, which felt like nails running across the tops of the nerves that ran down his arms.
Finally, Jerry held the mic against the bagged object again. A ping sounded with each blink of the orange light. “It done be a transmitter of some kind,” Jerry pronounced, turning off the amp and leaving the room blissfully quiet. “My guess is dat somebody has a tracking device what’s done set for whatever frequency dis transmitter is set to—it’s low, so maybe it’s meant to be used in da water. I don’t have anything to measure underwater signals, but it could be somethin’ like dat.”
“Like for a kid’s remote-controlled boat or something?” Although Mac didn’t figure a child’s toy would require anything so elaborate.
“No, more like if you wanted to fill a bottle with water and set it loose in da Gulf with one of dem little transmitters inside,” Jerry said, handing the bag to Jena. “Den you could sit on your boat and tell exactly where it was. Maybe one’a them scientists is tracking da tides or something.”
Or tracking an alligator being used to transport drugs? Even as he entertained the idea, Mac thought it sounded nuts. Why not just bring in the drugs and leave the gators out of it?
Which is exactly what he shared with Jena once they were back in the truck and headed for Chauvin, where he planned to drop her off at that white travesty she called home.
“Well, except our units and the sheriff and the Coast Guard are all over every vessel coming up the main bayous right now. Everything’s being searched, even people we know.” She spoke slowly, reasoning it out as she talked. “Then again, so what if you get caught illegally setting bait for or catching a gator? You get a fine. Only reason we knew about this gator was because his haul sprang a leak and he got stoned in sight of Doris Benoit.”
Seemed to Mac that it was still pretty far-fetched. “Maybe whoever was running the drugs into the parish accidentally lost a bag and Doris’s gator found and ate it.” He thought that more likely. Much more likely. “Gators aren’t picky eaters, after all.” They even ate each other, which made them the badasses of the swamp.
“Yeah, you’re probably right. Setting up that kind of trafficking system would take a lot of coordination and a lot of money—and would need to make sense, which it doesn’t.” Jena’s brows were knit into a frown when she turned away from Mac to stare out the window at another picture-perfect orange sunset gathering in the west. “But that doesn’t explain the transmitter.”
CHAPTER 14
Cole had driven into Houma for the afternoon. He’d stopped by a generic megastore on the edge of town and bought food to supplement what he could produce. Mostly milk and eggs, which he packed in the ice-filled cooler in the back of his truck.
He’d passed a farm with a CHICKENS FOR SALE sign stuck next to a dirt driveway, and stopped to explore the idea of buying his own chickens. As much as he liked the notion of fresh eggs and the challenge of building a coop that would allow the birds to range when they wanted, after talking to the farmer and watching the birds in their habitat, he decided a backyard full of squawks and chicken shit held little appeal.
He’d picked up a few tools at a hardware store outside town, even though he didn’t need them. One could never have too many wrenches, right?
He’d gone by the parish library, using their free Internet access to do faster research on Black Diamond and the
whole class of drugs called “bath salts” than he could do with his own slow mobile-service Wi-Fi and outdated tablet. Those drugs hadn’t even been on the scene when he’d decided to leave society to its own devices.
He had stopped at a mini-mart and pumped the old red-and-rust Ford truck full of gas. He’d gone inside and bought one of those snack cakes he used to love, but had to spit it out after one bite. Years of living on real food had made it taste to him like chemicals and sugar. Had they always been that sweet? He used to put away two or three of the things at a time.
What he had not done was sell the hide, the head, or the feet of Big Bull, as he’d named his alligator find. Yeah, he liked things to have names, maybe because he knew so few people’s names now. Big Bull had earned his moniker because of his size, that blinking light in his front foot, and the bag of powder Cole had found in his stomach, along with the human arm. A gator that size would’ve been king of the swamp—until he swallowed the wrong thing.
He’d thought a lot about Big Bull as he’d tossed and turned all night, wondering what really killed the big gator. Was it the treble hook or had some of that powder leaked out of the bag and been enough to kill him?
He’d wondered if the powder he’d found was Black Diamond, as he feared, or was something as innocuous as he’d originally thought.
He wondered if there was any relation between Big Bull and that crazy little gator that had wandered into the neighborhood and had the misfortune of running into Doris Day, as he’d renamed his neighbor. That had been a Doris kind of day when the gator had been caught, after all, and he still didn’t know her real last name.
He wondered what the state wildlife biologists had discovered about Doris’s gator and whether they might have found something similar from Big Bull if Cole had turned him in instead of trying to turn him into a profit.
He wondered why he couldn’t just let the whole thing pass. Why he couldn’t throw away or bury the rest of Big Bull and be done with it. It was none of his business, and he wouldn’t dare eat the gator meat now that there was a possibility that drugs had been the cause of death.
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