“Um-hum,” he hummed, clench-jawed. He didn't dare speak for fear the blade's tip would slide deeper into his throat.
“I got the tape for you. Now I am done. Straighten out the rest by yourself. The girl can identify you, so you find her and kill her. I'm sure you won't lose her, like I did. I am going to take a nice long vacation. Alone. Maybe I will come back to attend your funeral after Bennett has killed you. You are such an expert that you can handle this simple matter all by yourself.”
“Um-hummm.”
Marta took the knife from his throat and wiped the blade off on his cheek-purposefully smearing it on like rouge. She snapped it closed, then dropped it back into her jacket pocket. Arturo's right hand sprang to his throat, the other tugged a tissue from the package on the console. He pressed the tissue to the wound, took it away, and stared in disbelief at the blood.
“I was only joking, Marta!” he blurted. “What is your problem? You ruined my shirt. It's silk.”
“I was joking too,” she said as she started the car. “Wipe your face before somebody thinks you are a whore.”
“Why do you insult me like that? You know that I am a man. I have no fear.”
“I know,” she said, laughing. “But you are a macho dog, such an easy target.” She waved her hand. “Turo, I have bigger stones than ten men.”
“Then you aren't going away?”
“It depends,” she said as she turned in her seat and backed out of the space.
“On what?”
“On many things. I'll make you a list after…”
“After what?”
“After I have destroyed this tape.”
Marta put the car into gear and rolled toward the exit. She checked her rearview to make sure there was nobody following. She made a mental note to ask Tinnerino for details on the two agents.
71
Nicky called to say that when he got to the landing, the ferry was already on the return trip to Canal Street, that he never saw her, so he was waiting for them. Winter called Manseur but got his voice mail and left a message.
He said simply, “Call me.”
Winter told Adams, “Suggs has been a cop for a lot of years, probably a crooked one for that long. He's smart enough to have made it through the anticorruption sweep back in the nineties.”
“We ought to keep the pressure on him.”
“He is going to figure out pretty fast that the best way to cover his ass is to hand this mess over to Manseur and get as far away from it as possible. He can say he misinterpreted the crime scene evidence and that he saw the error of his ways and brought Manseur back on. I'm figuring he'd rather look incompetent than conspiratorial.”
“At his level, incompetence is a job requirement.”
“Every time you dropped another piece of this on him, he about pissed his pants.”
“He could see the writing on the wall. That's for sure.” Adams laughed out loud. “Man, you know he thought he had this thing locked until we showed up. If he was helping Bennett, I doubt he's going to be much help from this day forward. You reckon Officer Gale and Beaux-Beaux will come back out today?” Adams added, bringing more laughter.
Winter's cell phone rang. It was Manseur's name and number. He put the phone on speaker so Adams could listen in.
“Detective Manseur,” Winter answered.
“Man alive,” Manseur said. “After you left, I had the strangest conversation with Captain Suggs I've ever had with anybody. He was going around in circles. When he said he knew about the connection between Trammel and Porter, I thought he was going to accuse me of holding back information. Instead he said he spoke to you and Adams and told me there was a federal task force on this already. Man, he was spooked. He said that I might have been right about some aspects of the evidence against Faith Ann. Why did you leave?”
“She was no longer there,” Winter answered.
“Did you get her out?”
“She got herself out. I'll explain it later,” Winter said. “Face-to-face.”
“I'm on my way to meet the chief at the office to discuss this.”
“Faith Ann told my son that a cop killed her mother and Amber Lee, which is why she is running from you guys.
“She said a cop? I think it's more likely a professional hit,” Manseur said. “The silencer, the precision of the shots. Maybe it was a cop…”
“Get Faith Ann reclassified as a material witness only, and get the word out to the cops and the media. Let the patrolmen and detectives all know that she should be located and held for her own protection. Make sure you are the contact person. If Suggs gives you any crap at all, we'll toss another grenade under his chair.”
“By the way, I'm waiting for a match on the partial prints on the corpse in the Rover. The sheriff who found the Rover said that someone near there saw a black and white taxicab with two people in it enter the highway from that dirt road. There aren't any cabs out there, but there was a taxi stolen in New Orleans last night two hours before the accident. It was recovered locally this afternoon. Wiped clean inside, mud on the underside, wheels. I'm waiting for tire tread impressions from the sheriff to see if they match the ones at the bayou, but they will. There were two empty five-gallon gas cans in the dumpster near the cab, so I'm pretty sure it was how the perps got back to town.”
“Maybe Tinnerino and Doyle?” Winter wondered.
“Could be.”
“Maybe the corpse they put in the Rover was supposed to lead any investigation down a blind alley. If the corpse had a criminal record, the investigation would stop there. Or the couple in the Lincoln could have helped,” Winter said.
Winter told Manseur about seeing the same couple leaving Bennett's, and Nicky following them to the parking lot. He told him that Nicky spotted the male outside Canal Place.
Manseur said, “Green get a tag number?”
“Good question,” Winter said. “Give me a sec.”
He picked up his radio and called Nicky. “Nicky, you happen to get the tag number on the Lincoln?”
“Of course I did. Louisiana DX-2088.”
“I'll run it,” Manseur said.
“Don't waste your time,” Adams told him. “Let the FBI do the walking through the yellow pages.” He pulled over to the curb, reached down beside his seat, and flipped open a laptop computer. He started typing, and within seconds he had a Louisiana DMV screen. He entered the license number.
“Registered to the House of Antiquities, Box 2233, New Orleans, Louisiana. The address is 2231 Magazine Street,” Winter read to Manseur from the screen.
“Let's see who owns it.” Adams brought up another Web page. This time it was for the Secretary of State. He typed, and the screen showed the incorporation information for the antique business.
Winter read it to Manseur. “The owner is Marta Ruiz. The other two corporate officers are attorneys.”
“Marta Ruiz? I'm not familiar with the name,” Manseur said.
Adams was already typing, and suddenly the screen was filled with a driver's license picture.
“I've got her. Our Jane Doe is in fact Marta Ruiz. Address is Route 2, Box 223, Covington, Louisiana. Five-four, hundred and ten pounds, black hair and brown eyes.”
“Does the FBI want to run her for a record?” Manseur said.
Adams was already typing. “Not so much as a parking ticket,” he announced.
Winter said, “All it takes to keep your record clean is being connected to the right people.”
“Around here, the art of back-scratching is a science,” Manseur said sadly.
72
Suggs looked down at the caller I.D. and shoved the unit into his desk drawer. Bennett!
Jerry Bennett had called Suggs while Massey and Adams were inside Canal Place, to see if the girl was in custody, but the nightclub owner hadn't bothered to mention that an FBI agent and a deputy U.S. marshal had been to his club minutes earlier. They had dropped that little bomb on him at Canal Place. Suggs had told Tin Man to g
et word to Bennett that he would get back to him when he could. It was bad enough that Bennett was in the Feds' sights, but that arrogant little bastard had implicated Suggs when there was no imaginable reason to have done so. God knows what that suicidal idiot said to them.
If they took Bennett down, that little prick would turn on Suggs, dragging in Tin Man, Doyle, and God knew who else up the ladder. Suggs had never liked Bennett, had never trusted him, but he had never before seen their mutually profitable arrangement as a threat to his freedom. Over the past twenty years Bennett had paid him a tax-free fortune, but not enough to go to prison over. In his career, Suggs had seen scores of his fellow police officers go to jail, and it wasn't going to happen to him.
Mike Manseur had control of both cases, and he would have to say that Suggs gave him everything he needed to solve them. Any evidence was open to interpretation, and he could justify taking the case from Manseur to his superiors.
Suggs had never killed anybody for Bennett-if you didn't count framing Horace Pond for two murders Bennett had committed. And Pond had been a nobody, human refuse, whose only accomplishment in life had been using his dick to add to the numbers of snot-nose nigger kids on the welfare rolls or populate the jails and prisons.
The only thing that Suggs had to do now was to make Bennett vanish so he could never talk. Suggs would have to do that deed himself, and in such a way that it would never point back to him.
That settled, Suggs felt the hollow burn in his stomach receding, cooled by the knowledge that all he needed was to calm down and devise a simple plan that would tie up the loose ends.
73
Thanks to Adams's amazingly efficient FBI computer hookup, which saved Manseur a couple of hours on his NOPD computer, Manseur knew that the woman in the Lincoln was Marta Ruiz. Now he needed to find out who her male partner was, which might explain how the pair had gained access to the investigation. They were clearly connected to Bennett and Tin Man and Doyle, but he needed to figure out exactly what that connection meant before he confronted Tin Man or Doyle. He had an idea on how he might discover who the man was, but his ringing phone interrupted him.
“Mike, Captain Suggs.”
“Yes sir?”
“Can you join Detectives Tinnerino and Doyle in the conference room?”
“Sure.”
The two detectives sat like surly schoolboys behind the boxes containing the assembled Porter/Lee evidence. Suggs sat at the head of the table and indicated that Manseur should sit opposite the other two-exactly where he belonged.
“Mike,” Suggs started, “I have just informed Tony and Clint that you are going to be the primary on both the Trammel and Porter/Lee cases. I've explained the connection between the two cases, and they have agreed to work with you to solve them. When will Larry Bond be back?”
“He's supposed to be back tonight. He might be back already. I was planning to call him.”
“Excellent,” Suggs said. “Whatever you need, I'll okay. Manpower, overtime, whatever. Just ask.”
Doyle's and Tin Man's resentful eyes bored into Manseur.
“First off,” Manseur said, “I have issued a new bulletin on Faith Ann Porter listing her as a material witness pickup, and I removed the armed-and-dangerous tag. I also took the liberty of changing the contact number to my own.”
Tin Man shook his head rigidly.
“Problem, Detective?” Manseur asked.
“Just that there's no evidence that she didn't clip her old lady and Lee.”
“Detective Doyle, do you agree with your partner?”
“Absolutely. She did it. Look at how she slipped out of Canal Place. She ain't like any twelve-year-old I ever saw.”
Manseur's phone rang. He looked at the I.D. and saw Massey's name and number. “I need to take this,” he said.
As he listened, the other three men talked about Faith Ann's escape from Canal Place. Manseur listened to Massey, let him know that he couldn't answer his questions, and told the deputy he'd have to call him back. What Massey had asked him had put a hot, hollow burn in his stomach.
“I think Mike is on track,” Suggs said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “We can charge the kid after we interrogate her, if it is warranted.” He rose. “Gentlemen, I'll leave it with you. Whatever you need, Mike. You're in complete charge.” With that, Suggs walked from the room.
“How do you explain the evidence we found?” Tinnerino demanded.
Manseur said, “Maybe it was planted there.”
“By who? Nobody else was there between when she was and we were.”
“I wasn't suggesting that you planted it, Detective. Might be that the killer, or killers, did. Maybe they came before you got there.”
Tinnerino clenched his jaw.
“Faith Ann Porter told a federal officer that a policeman killed her mother and Amber Lee. It will be interesting to learn how she came to believe that.”
“That evidence wasn't planted in that hamper,” Tinnerino argued.
“Then maybe she picked the gun and empty brass up, in shock, and took them with her. Unless one of you saw her put the evidence into that hamper, it is possible someone else did it. Hand me over the firearms files on the murder weapon.”
Tinnerino looked in the stack and pulled out the files. Manseur flipped through them, scanning them while the other detectives sat silently.
“The. 380's barrel is threaded on the inside. The M.E. found steel wool in the wounds. What does that say to you?”
No answer.
“The Taurus. 380 was one of twenty stolen from a dealer in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, nine months back. Two from that robbery have been picked up at crime scenes since. To me that indicates they were either sold by the dealer under the table or hijacked and sold to criminal types. That points to a professional. Not a twelve-year-old who merely witnessed the murders.”
“That's bullshit,” Tinnerino said.
“I say it isn't. And I am running this. If you want, I'll relieve you from the team. In light of the insinuation of there being police involvement in these homicides, it might be best to bring in all new people who have open minds.”
“No,” Tinnerino said, too quickly. “No, you're the primary. If that is how you want to read the evidence, that's cool with us. Right, Clint?”
“Sure,” Doyle agreed.
“If you say she was framed, she was framed,” Tinnerino said.
“Who ransacked the Porter house?” Manseur asked.
“Did what?” Tinnerino said. He and Doyle exchanged looks of surprise.
“You didn't?” Manseur asked.
“Of course not.” Tinnerino was indignant. “We searched. Who said it was ransacked?”
“Adams, the FBI agent,” Manseur said. “You met him at Canal Place.”
“Then I bet it was some of those porch chimps that hang out at that basketball court behind the house,” Doyle said.
Manseur ignored the slur. “I need to go over the evidence you've collected,” he said. “I'll need your notes and the report you've written so far.”
“We have a problem there,” Tinnerino said.
“We had a detailed report all typed up,” Doyle started. “But.. ”
“But what?” Manseur asked, bracing himself.
Manseur left the conference room bothered by Winter Massey's call. He had given Tin Man and Doyle busywork, and they would be at their desks retyping the missing report for some time.
Massey had mentioned Horace Pond, a name that filled Manseur with anger. Pond was guilty, and Manseur didn't believe this had anything to do with him. It was a troubling direction that Massey was walking in, and he had to nip it in the bud. He spent ten minutes calling up and reading through the police files on Pond's case on his screen. After that, he looked up Doyle's and Tinnerino's service dates. Neither of the detectives had been involved with the Pond case. Doyle hadn't even been on the force then, and Tinnerino was patrolling in the Quarter.
Satisfied, he remembered to find out wh
o Marta Ruiz's male partner was.
74
Faith Ann reached into her jeans and took out the envelope and the audiocassette she had taken from her mother's office. She tore open the corner just enough so she could slip the cassette inside.
Looking around, she spotted her hiding place. She wedged the envelope between a folded canvas fire hose in a frame and the steel wall behind it.
While Peter, the Bible bee boy, stood outside the van and engaged the driver in conversation, she slipped up the steel ladder on the van's rear, then onto the roof of the vehicle.
Faith Ann nestled among the duffel bags and equipment cases. When the ferry slowed a couple of minutes later, she heard people leave the bow to get into their cars or go back upstairs to the passenger deck.
She felt the van rock as the teenagers climbed back inside.
As the van drove off the ferry, Faith Ann looked up at the darkening sky. If the cops caught her before she got to Mr. Massey, and even if they killed her, Peter knew where the envelope was. She had told Peter just enough so that if anything happened, he would seek out Mr. Massey and tell him where she had left the evidence. Justice will be served, Mama. I promise you.
75
Marta put the batteries in the cassette recorder she had bought at an electronics place on Canal Street. She rewound the tape while Arturo blew smoke rings out of the open window of her Lincoln. The cassette was a ninety-minute version, forty-five to a side.
The tape player made a loud snap to alert Marta that the tape had rewound. Holding her breath, Marta pushed the Play button.
“I'm recording,” a woman's voice said. Marta turned up the volume to hear better.
“And you fixing to die in a minute, bitch,” Arturo muttered.
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