A Quiet Vendetta (7 page)

This was Monday 25 August, and already the world was beginning to collapse.

For these men, though New Orleans was their home, understood all too well that this was a city like no other. Dirty Creole kids in Nikes and grubby shorts, wise-mouths backflashing words that shouldn’t have come from the lips of those so young; the smell of a city cooking inside its own sweat; beyond the limits the sprawling outgrowths of Evangeline, domain of the Ferauds and their ilk; gang wars and drug busts and liquor stills, moonshiners brewing twenty-five-cents-a-bottle rotgut that would strip the paint off a car and eat holes in a pair of good shoes; smack addicts and hopheads and folks mainlining amphetamines like there was no time to look for tomorrow; the sounds and smells of all of this, and you just
had
to live inside it to even have an inkling of how it was. New Orleans was the Mardi Gras, it was finding serpents and crosses in the same cemetery on All Saints’ Day, the spirit of loa Damballah-wédo walking there beside you as you crossed the street; it was Easter Souvenance, the Festival of the Virgin of Miracles, the celebration of Saint James the Greater and Baron Samedi, it was inscribing the floor of sanctuaries with vévé to summon the ritual spirits. New Orleans the beautiful, the majestic, the passionate, the terrifying. And no matter the training programs, no matter criminal profiling and VICAP reports, no matter gun ranges and Quantico and sitting three exams a year, there was nothing that could take into consideration the mores and ethics of the society within which they lived. New Orleans was New Orleans, almost a country all its own.

*

Cipliano seemed relieved that Luckman and Gabillard were taking his John Doe away. They told him that an FBI vehicle would be arriving within the hour to collect the body.

‘Got a freakin’ leaper,’ he told them while chewing a toothpick. ‘Head like sidewalk pizza if you know what I mean.’

They did not, and did not pretend that they did. People like Luckman and Gabillard dealt with serious business, not the inconsequential deaths of junkie suicides.

They left quickly and inconspicuously, as inconspicuously as two dark-suited, white-shirted, clean-cut men could manage, and drove back to the Field Office on Arsenault to begin the unenviable task of profiling a kidnap of Governor Ducane’s daughter.

They took their time reading the reports they had collected, and here they learned of such things as the severed vena cava through right and left ventricle at base, severed subclavian veins and arteries, jugular, carotid and pulmonary; of seventy percent minimum blood loss, of hammer-beatings, of lesions and abrasions, of freezing a man’s skin in order to scrape it away from the trunk of a stunning burgundy car with rivet scratches on the wing. They learned also of a constellation drawn across Gerard McCahill’s back, the constellation of Gemini, the twins Castor and Pollux, the third sign of the zodiac. They read these things, and once again silently marveled at the sheer madness of humanity.

‘Where to from here?’ Gabillard asked when they were done.

‘Kidnap procedure,’ Luckman said. ‘Take the fact that she’s a governor’s daughter out of the loop, that’s irrelevant right now, and we run a routine kidnap procedure.’

‘I don’t think that Ducane would be happy with that.’

Luckman shook his head. ‘Don’t give a rat’s ass what Ducane thinks or doesn’t think. Truth of the matter is that there’s a standard kidnap procedure and we have to follow it.’

Gabillard nodded. ‘You wanna call it in to Baton Rouge?’

‘I call it in to Baton Rouge and they’ll take the case as well as the body.’

‘You got a problem with that?’

Luckman shrugged. ‘I got no problem with it. You?’

‘I got no problem,’ Gabillard said. He reached forward and lifted the receiver. He called Baton Rouge and spoke to Agent Leland Fraschetti. Agent Fraschetti, a veteran of twenty-six years, a man with a head as hard as a baseball bat, asked that one of them accompany the body from New Orleans and bring all available documentation with them. That, Gabillard said, he would willingly do. He figured it would pretty much kill the day stone-dead; when he got back it would be closing time.

Luckman chose to go with him. They drove back to Cipliano’s office and waited for the vehicle from Baton Rouge.

Two miles away John Verlaine looked from his window and tried to erase the image of McCahill’s body, the strange glowing lines across the skin, the sensation of disturbance that these recent events had instilled in him.
This is no work for a human being
, he thought, and once again managed to convince himself that were he not there the work would not be done.

It seemed to run its own relay: from Verlaine to Emerson, Emerson to Cipliano, Cipliano to Luckman and Gabillard, and when the body arrived in Baton Rouge, Luckman clutching the files and thinking of the game he would not now miss that evening, Leland Fraschetti was waiting there for them, his eyes wide with anticipation, ready to take his place in this bizarre concatenation of events. Leland Fraschetti was a dark-minded man, a cynic, a natural pessimist. A loner and a failed husband, he was a man who watched Jerry Springer just to remind himself that people –
all
people – were fundamentally crazy. Fraschetti was also a man who went by the letter of the law and, once Gabillard and Luckman had closed the office door behind them, he pored over the reports and summarized his findings, penning extensive notations regarding the errors the local police had made in their handling of the investigation thus far, and when he was done he e-mailed his proposal to the Field Office in Shreveport where local agents would handle the governor’s demands to be updated constantly on the progress they were making. The truth was, bluntly, that they had nothing, though Leland Fraschetti, pessimist though he was, would have been the last to admit such a thing.

By the early evening of Monday 25 August, twenty-seven local FBI agents from New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Shreveport were assigned to the standard kidnap protocol. Governor Ducane’s phones were tapped, his house was under twenty-four-hour watch; the Mercury Turnpike Cruiser was driven on a flatbed truck to Baton Rouge and housed in a secure lock-up where Criminalistics went over it time and again with infra-red spectrophotometers, ultra-violet, iodine and silver transfers. The plates were traced to the ’69 Chrysler Valiant, now rusted and broken and lying on its roof in a wrecker’s yard in Natchez, Mississippi, and thirty-eight vehicle storage units – including Jaquier’s Lock ’N’ Leave, Ardren & Bros. Rental Carports Inc., Vehicle Warehousing Corporation (Est. 1953), Safety In Numbers (Unique Combination Vehicle Storage) – were checked to see if any of their respective owners remembered the Cruiser residing there at any time in the past. No-one remembered anything. No-one, it seemed,
wanted
to remember anything, and by the time Tuesday the twenty-sixth rolled around, a frustrated Leland Fraschetti stood in the doorway of his office in the Baton Rouge FBI Coordination Headquarters and felt his heart sink. He had taken three Excedrin and still a migraine pounded through his skull and threatened to vent itself through his temples. He had unit chiefs calling from Shreveport and Washington DC, he had agents on double shifts and late hours, he had a task force mobilized that was costing something in the region of twenty-three thousand dollars a day, and still he had nothing to take to the High School Show ’n’ Tell. Criminalistics and Forensics had come back with almost the same report as had been prepared by Emerson and Cipliano, and there seemed to be no links between this case and anything from the past despite rushing a profile through Quantico. The thing sucked, sucked like a whirlpool, and Leland – he of the dark moods and lonely cynicism – was right in the vortex waiting to drown.

They went through McCahill’s records with a fine-tooth comb, they checked his ex-wife, his present girlfriend, his drinking buddies, his mother. They searched his apartment in Shreveport and found nothing that in any way indicated he had been forewarned of the events that were to befall him and his charge in New Orleans. There was no shortage of people who would have been more than happy to upset Charles Ducane, but that was standard fare for any politician. The returning Christ would have prompted public protests and harassment lawsuits. That was just the way of the world.

Tuesday afternoon Leland Fraschetti put an A.P.B. through the system for McCahill’s car. Every police officer in Louisiana would now be looking for it. A description and photograph of the girl was processed through the same system, and four thousand hard copies of that image were distributed through the ranks. But the truth of the matter was that the kidnapper had already gained six days on them. McCahill had been dead by midnight on Wednesday 20 August. It was now Tuesday 26 August. Catherine Ducane could have been in Paris by now, and they would have been none the wiser.

Leland Fraschetti did not sleep. He was a man who had never suffered from insomnia; it was not in his nature. He knew his place in the grand scheme of things, and he knew everybody else’s place too. He did not, as a general rule, take his cases home, but this one was different. It was not merely the fact that Catherine was a governor’s daughter. It was not the clamorings of the vulture press. It was not that the upper ranks were hollering all the way from Washington, threatening to send down one of their own details and get this mess fixed up. It was something else entirely. Fraschetti, never one to trust anything so abstract and unreliable as hunch or intuition, nevertheless
felt
that there was something else going on here. He did not think there would be any ransom demands. He did not believe that the tap system now wired into Charles Ducane’s house would record the electronically-altered voice of any kidnapper. He did not imagine that at any time a single finger belonging to a pretty nineteen-year-old girl would be delivered in a jiffy bag to the doorstep of Ducane’s mansion. Leland, ascribing his perception to nothing other than gut feeling,
knew
that there was a great deal more going on than the evidence suggested.

Had you asked him for his rationale, his reasoning, his motivation for this belief (and oh, how Leland snatched at
any
opportunity to detail such things), he would have shrugged his shoulders, closed his eyes for just a moment, and then looked you dead-square in the face and told you he didn’t know. He didn’t know, but somehow he
knew
.

Wednesday morning came and went. A little more than twelve hours and it would be four days since the discovery of the body, and though the immediate news flashes and guesswork reports had died their thirty-six-hour death in the journals and on the tube, still the fact remained that a governor’s daughter had seemingly vanished from the face of the earth. Ducane was already threatening to come down personally, but had been dissuaded from such a course of action by his advisors and legal briefs. Ducane’s presence, more as a father than a politician, would have stirred up the press all over again, and press attention was the very last thing in the world the FBI wanted. Not only would it generate the usual seven and a half thousand crank calls, every single one of them presenting another lead that would have to be followed up, it also – and perhaps more relevantly – would serve to highlight the fact that the most powerful internal investigative body in the country had accomplished nothing.

A little after two that same afternoon, as Leland was once again staring at a detailed map of New Orleans, its brightly-colored map pins indicating the route McCahill and Catherine Ducane had taken from the point they entered the city, an agent called Paul Danziger stepped through into the office and told Fraschetti there was a call he should take.

Fraschetti told him to deal with it himself.

Danziger insisted.

Fraschetti, on edge, frustrated more than he could ever remember, turned and snatched at the receiver.

‘Yes!’ he barked.

‘Agent Leland Fraschetti,’ a voice on the other end stated calmly, matter-of-factly.

‘It is. Who is this?’

‘Did you know that Ford only ever built sixteen thousand hardtop versions of the Mercury Turnpike Cruiser?’

The hairs on the nape of Fraschetti’s neck stood to attention. ‘Who is this?’ Fraschetti asked again. He inched around the desk and sat down. He looked up at Danziger, raised his eyebrows. Danziger nodded, confirming that they were tracing the call even as he spoke.

‘Shame of it is, I really loved that car. I mean I
really
loved that car, you know?’

Fraschetti’s negotiator training kicked in on automatic. Say nothing negative. Everything positive, everything reassuring. ‘I can only imagine. It is a truly beautiful car.’

‘Uh-huh, sure as hell is. I trust you and your colleagues are taking good care of her. You never know, I might need her back someday.’

‘Yes, we’re taking very good care of the car, Mr . . . ?’

‘No names yet, Leland. Not just yet.’

Fraschetti could not place the accent. It was American, but there were undertones . . . of where?

‘So how can we help you?’ Fraschetti asked.

‘Be patient,’ the voice said. ‘There is a reason for all of this. A very good reason. In a little while, perhaps a day, maybe two, it will all become apparent. You’re gonna need the girl back, right?’

‘We sure are. She’s okay?’

‘She’s fine, a little temperamental, a little headstrong, but then you only have to look at her background, her family, and you could guess she was gonna be something of a handful.’ The voice laughed. There was something intensely disturbing about that sound.

‘So, as I was saying, you’re gonna need the girl, but in order to get the girl you’re gonna have to trade her for something.’

‘Of course,’ Fraschetti said. ‘Of course we understood all along that there would have to be a trade.’

‘Good enough. So I’ll be in touch. I just wanted you to know that you were doing a fine job, and in all honesty I wouldn’t feel the same way if someone else was handling things. I’m keeping tabs on everything that’s going on. I understand it must be somewhat stressful, but I wouldn’t want you guys to be losing any more sleep over this. This is a personal thing, and we’re gonna get it all figured out in a personal kind of way.’