Upside Down (13 page)

26

New Orleans, Louisiana

At daybreak, Detective Michael Manseur returned to the scene of the vehicular homicide and got out to walk it to look for things he might have missed. Only after the physical evidence had been gathered, photographs made, measurements collected, and witness statements taken had the street been reopened. Manseur wanted to take one more look in the light to make sure he had everything that was there to get.

On his scene schematic, Manseur had marked the point of impact to where the Trammels landed and the relative distances where incident-related objects had been found. Hank Trammel's Seiko, one of his boots, a twisted umbrella, a cell phone, a purse.

The broken turn-signal lens and paint chips were from a 2001 deep blue Range Rover, which had been traveling at approximately fifty miles per hour at impact. A matching Rover had been reported missing from long-term parking an hour before the hit-and-run. Its owner was a respected sixty-two-year-old heart surgeon with Oschner Clinic. Were it not for the Porter connection, Manseur would have figured it was most likely some joyriders, or a drunk had hit them and kept going to avoid the unpleasantness associated with bouncing people off the grille after having had a “couple of drinks.”

A physician who had been in the restaurant described a child in a yellow poncho who had witnessed the accident, and the restaurant hostess said a child of the same description had asked for the Trammels seconds before they were run over. Manseur was certain the child was Faith Ann Porter, but he didn't make a note of that in his book, deciding to keep her listed as:
kid in yellow slicker—witness?

The presence of the murdered lawyer's daughter on the scene, and the fact that the Trammels were relatives of hers, made this anything but a coincidental event. While he hadn't informed Captain Suggs of the connection, he would have to do that very soon or risk serious consequences for violating protocols. Under normal circumstances, since there was such an obvious probability of a connection, Manseur would have been involved in both cases. But there was something very abnormal about the Porter/Lee case, and if told the connection Suggs would probably hand this one over to Tinnerino and Doyle. Manseur suspected that Jerry Bennett's connection to the crime might explain the abnormalities.

Manseur read over his casebook to see if he had missed anything. He stopped at notes he'd made while interviewing a girl from the bar across the street who said she remembered the man because “that white cowboy hat and his mustache made him look like Wyatt Earp.” Manseur looked at the list of found objects again. There was no cowboy hat.

While there were no cars driving by, the detective hurried out into the intersection, knelt, and scanned under the cars parked on the street. He spotted the hat under a Nissan truck and rushed over to it. Reaching under the vehicle, he captured the pale beaver-skin hat by its brim and pulled it out. Other than being soiled from its journey down the street and smeared with grease along the crown, it was a cleaning and a steam-blocking away from looking new.

The decorative band was a simple gray cloth ribbon. As he inspected it, Manseur noticed the slightest bulge in the seam. He peeled back the band and removed a plastic disk that looked like the head of a thumbtack with a loop of fine wire sticking out from it.

He didn't have any idea what the gizmo was, but he took an evidence bag from his coat pocket and dropped the object in. One thing he did know was that it hadn't come with the hat from the Stetson Company, and the fine wire looked suspiciously like an antenna.

Before he left the scene, Manseur put the Stetson in his car trunk and slipped the evidence bag into his inside jacket pocket.

27

Faith Ann locked her bike up in the tall bushes next to a tennis club two blocks away from her house and, careful to walk quietly, cut through the basketball court, stopping at the twelve-foot hurricane fence behind her house. She waited in the dark for fifteen minutes, listening intently for the sound of anybody who might be lurking in wait. After she was sure there was nobody in the rear, she slipped under the base, where there was enough play to allow her to bow out the mesh. Two doors down, her neighbor's dog started barking its fool head off.

She crept to the house, slipped under it, and crawled to her bunker. Faith Ann took off her backpack and placed it against the wall. Taking the flashlight with her, she crawled out of the bunker and checked for cops in the front and side yards. Satisfied, she hurried back to the rear panel that swung out, climbed out from under the house, and went to the back door. She tried the knob and found that it was locked. Reaching into her shirt, she pulled out her neck chain, on which she wore her house key. Carefully she unlocked the deadbolt, eased the door open, slipped inside, and gently closed it.

The familiar smell of the house soothed the sharp edges of her fear. She didn't dare turn on any lights, but she could see well enough to navigate because of a night-light in the hallway of the shotgun-style three-bedroom house.

White-hot fear gripped her again, though, when she turned on the flashlight and looked into her room. It was in absolute shambles. Instead of a few clothes lying on the floor, which was often the case, all of the clothes she owned had been dumped from the drawers, themselves tossed around the room. Her mattress and box springs had been flipped off the frame, her clothes jerked from the closet, the plastic hangers still inside them. Glass from the broken mirror and from shattered picture frames glistened faintly from the layers of clothing.
Oh, Mama, why would they make such a mess?

She spotted a cassette under her chest of drawers, the boom box shattered as if someone had stomped it. There was no label on it, but she knew that it was a tape of poems that she had written and her mother had put to music. Kimberly had often played it to hear her reading her goofy poems in a serious voice with god-awful icky romantic music in the background. She slipped the treasured item into her pocket, fighting back tears.

This chaos erased any notion she'd harbored that she could stay there. She scooped up another hooded Tulane sweatshirt and her pillow. She clicked off the flashlight.

In the kitchen she felt her way along the counter and took the scissors from the knife block. Kimberly had bought them from an eager salesman who'd demonstrated them by cutting a copper penny around the edge until he had formed a makeshift corkscrew out of it. She slipped them into her back pocket.

She went into the hall bathroom and closed the door. There was no window in there, so it was safe to turn on the light.

They had messed up that room, too. The floor was littered with hair rollers, towels, washcloths, and brushes, and they had thrown things from the medicine cabinet and the closet into the tub, breaking some of the glass bottles. Suddenly sick to her stomach, Faith Ann dropped to her knees and vomited into the toilet bowl.

Standing, she looked in the mirror and was startled by her own reflection. Her face was streaked with dirt, so she washed it. Her hair was a tangled mess. She looked down in the tub at the empty box that had contained the electric clippers that her mother had used to trim their poodle Luther's fur. Luther had wandered into the street and got himself killed weeks before they'd moved to New Orleans. Kimberly had kept the clippers promising they'd get another dog eventually. Faith Ann pulled off her sweatshirt, put a towel around her shoulders, and plugged the clippers into the outlet.

Taking a deep breath, she put the buzzing contraption under her hair at the base of her skull and slowly brought it straight up, stopping at the crown. Circling her head, Faith Ann repeated the upward strokes until only the hair on the top of her head was still long. Gathering the remaining hair together, and twisting it so she could hold it up, she was pleased that the plastic gap in the blades had left her hair a uniform one half of an inch on the sides and in the back. With only a vague idea of what a boy's haircut should look like, she set the clippers aside, got the pair of scissors from the dog-grooming box, and started cutting her way through the rope of red hair where it entered her fist.

After a few minutes hard at work with the scissors, Faith Ann figured she'd best stop where she was. Carefully she gathered up all the long strands of hair she could find in the sink, left on the towel and from the floor, and put them in the toilet. It took two flushes to clear the bowl. Turning on the tap, she carefully washed the shorter bits of hair down the sink.

As Faith Ann studied herself in the mirror, she fought back tears as she imagined how horrified her mother would be at the sight of her daughter looking like a baby chicken.

28

Marta and Arturo sat in her Lincoln Town Car, parked across the street from the Porter house. Marta was certain the Porter girl would return home, because she, like other normal children, lacked the skills to survive outside what was familiar to her. The kid had run straight to her comfort zone immediately after leaving her mother's office. Maybe she had seen the cops waiting here, but if she had, where would she have gone? Best the cops could discover, Faith Ann Porter didn't have any close friends.

There was no choice but to sit and wait like hunters in a blind. If the cops spotted the girl, they'd call the two detectives downtown and they'd call Arturo and Marta. Problem was that there was no obvious trail to follow, no list of friends and associates. Marta glanced at the sleeping Arturo and could see the golden crucifix through his open shirt.

Marta thought religion was candy for superstitious idiots. She couldn't stand nuns or priests, crucifixes, statues, or paintings of the Blessed Mother or of Jesus with His cut-out heart suspended in front of His chest. The only thing the Catholic Church had ever done for Marta was to use an ancient padlock on their poorbox. Marta had learned to pick it by trial and error—finally succeeding when she bent an ice pick tip between two bricks and used it like a key.

As a child, Marta had lived by her wits and her ability to successfully read people and situations. She had learned her lessons by trial and error, and by observation. She'd watched foraging raccoons and seen how they worked tirelessly to figure out how to get to sources of food that people had done their best to keep from them. Because the raccoons didn't understand people and were greedy, the animals left a big mess, so the people they'd outsmarted always figured out a new way to thwart further looting. For several years she had robbed the poorbox of its offerings, never taking more than a small percentage at a time. Picking that first padlock took the patience and ingenuity of a raccoon. Like the animals, Marta knew if she were found out the priests would change the lock to thwart her.

Marta had learned that often when a job went this wrong, somebody got caught, and then that somebody talked. Once people like Jerry Bennett started trying to save their own skins, they'd throw out every name they could remember to the cops.

Normally, as a matter of self-preservation, she would have already killed Bennett for his stupidity. Unfortunately, since this involved Arturo, she had amended her normal rules. She had to get the tape, which tied Arturo into this. And she would make sure there was no evidence in Bennett's possession that connected Arturo to any other wet work. Finding that out would only require having Mr. Bennett alone for a short time.

She had two methods of getting information out of a man. One was by using her sex. The other way, which involved her other skills, was infinitely faster and far more palatable.