Upside Down Page 7

  For ten minutes, he and his boss discussed the collected evidence and how it fit or didn't fit into each man's theory. There was no cassette tape on the desk, which Suggs said didn't mean one had been in the machine at all. Everything was supposition, but it occurred to Manseur that Suggs was systematically closing the doors that didn't mesh with his own interpretation of the homicides.

  “I tell you what,” Suggs said finally. “I'll make this easy for us both.” He held out his beefy hand. “Notes?”

  “I'm sorry?” Manseur said, confused.

  “I want your notes.”

  “My notes?”

  “You're not thinking right, Mike. You've been working a lot of cases and your partner is out of town. I'm assigning this one to Tinnerino and Doyle.”

  Tinnerino and Doyle? “It's my case.”

  “You're done with this one, Detective. I'm making it a direct order. Don't make me write you up for insubordination. You'll take the next case.”

  Manseur had no hope of winning. The thought of Suggs taking this case away from him was stunning, and his mind reeled from the blow. “You can't do that. I'm the primary. If I need a partner, I can work with Lieutenant Caesar.”

  “Can't spare her.” Suggs smirked. “I think I understand why you are looking at this from a skewed perspective. You have two daughters. It's difficult for you to imagine a daughter could murder her mother.”

  Suggs intended to give the case to two of the meanest, least intelligent, and most incompetent detectives who had ever carried a shield in New Orleans. The team of “Tin Man” and Doyle had the poorest clearance rate in the department and more complaints lodged against them than the rest of the squad combined.

  “You can't do this,” Manseur said.

  “I sure as hell can. One more word and I will suspend you for insubordination. You want a vacation that badly?”

  Manseur slammed his murder book on the table and stormed out of the office and down the stairs to the lobby. He went outside, climbed into his Impala, twisted the key, jerked it into gear, and punched the accelerator, squealing the rear tires.

  11

  The eavesdropper, Paulus Styer, had shed the hairpiece with its long gray ponytail and the loose-fitting clothes designed to hide his physique. He drove to Greensboro and flew to New Orleans first class, getting onto the airplane before the Trammels, who were flying coach.

  Before boarding, Styer had taken a seat next to the couple in the terminal and had planted the C-13A long-range transmitter in the band of Hank Trammel's Stetson. Styer had asked the old guy if he might have a look at the hat, saying that he wanted to buy one like it for his father. As he had talked to Hank, Styer had slipped the tiny bug in place. The gray C-13A was smaller than an aspirin tablet and a quarter as thick, and Styer was sure Trammel would wear the trademark hat in New Orleans.

  The Walkman in Styer's carry-on was turned to the transmitter's frequency. The receiver was armed with a Beatles tape in the event that the security officers wanted a demonstration. The officer had merely looked at the Walkman, asking him only to turn on his laptop.

  Even if the Trammels had noticed Styer earlier in the restaurant they would not have recognized him at the airport. Now his hair was short and he was dressed in an expensive and professionally tailored suit. A driver's license identified him as Phillip Dresser, a thirty-eight-year-old from Chicago. His business cards, gold American Express, and MasterCard, supported the fact that he was the CEO of a company that sold commercial fire protection systems.

  Of all the numerous characters he had created over the years, Dresser was a favorite, because Dresser traveled first class all the way. He often hired limousines, ate in the finest restaurants, and stayed in the best hotels. Most of his other covers made less money and lived closer to the bone than Dresser. All of the identities he had would hold up well enough under police scrutiny. In the unlikely event that he did get into a sticky legal situation, his organization would free him by whatever means required.

  When the plane landed in New Orleans, Styer was among the first off. As he strode into the baggage area, he spotted his contact near the terminal doors holding a hand-lettered sign that read DRESSER. The man was short and stocky and wore a cheap dark blue suit. His square face sported thick lips, a nose that was no stranger to being broken, and eyes with irises like bullet holes. His white shirt looked as though it might have recently been stored in the glove compartment of a car. The knot in his too-short tie was the size of a lemon.

  As Styer stood at the luggage carousel, he spotted the private detective, chewing on a toothpick, who waited outside the gate to meet the Trammels. Styer had obtained Green's driver's license picture by hacking into the Texas DMV. Green's hand rested on an ebony cane with a brass doorknob for a handle. The private detective wore a royal-blue jacket with white piping, a cowboy hat, and boots with high, sharply sloped heels. His eyes were hidden behind sunglasses. And he was completely hairless. Styer knew that Green suffered from a condition known as alopecia. Green's lack of hair and eyebrows gave him the permanent look of a man who had just been startled out of a deep sleep.

  The intelligence file on Green was being updated now by Styer's researchers, arguably the world's best, since they had immediate access to almost any database—including channels into sensitive government agencies worldwide. The file had told him that Green had been kicked in the knee three years earlier by the enraged lover of a client's wife. The man had objected to the alienation-of-affection lawsuit that Nicky's investigation had made possible. The karate kick, delivered from the front, had destroyed his knee and given him a permanent limp, which is why he always carried a cane.

  Green had spent his tour of duty as an MP, where he had learned investigative techniques, but his service record was merely average. According to his tax returns, Green had made one hundred sixty thousand dollars the previous year; not a bad living for a single man without bad habits.

  Styer didn't expect any surprises. He could stay light-years ahead of men like Green and Trammel without breaking a sweat.

  With the Trammels standing six feet to his left, Styer plucked his leather suitcase from the carousel. He walked briskly to the short man holding the sign. “I'm Dresser,” he said curtly.

  The man spoke without looking directly into Styer's eyes as he took the suitcase from him, using English that reflected his Eastern bloc heritage. “You are having a Range Rover. Your equipment is in it.” He smiled broadly.

  “That should be fine,” Styer said in a perfect Midwestern accent.

  In the short-term parking garage, the driver placed Styer's bag into the rear of an immaculate dark blue Range Rover and handed him the key.

  The man handed over a slip of paper with a phone number written on it. “It's my portable phone number,” the man said in Russian. “The aging Cadillac you wished to locate is parked now just over there.”

  Following the shorter man's pointing finger with his ice-blue eyes, Styer easily located Nicky Green's red 1965 Cadillac convertible some fifty feet away. “I will need you later, so remain available,” Styer told him.

  A silver Lexus 300 pulled up, and the stout driver climbed into the passenger's seat. “You have our number and we will wait for your call,” the ill-dressed driver said, again in Russian.

  After Styer watched the Lexus drive away, he sat in the Rover until the Trammels and Nicky Green appeared. He doubted Green actually wore such ridiculous cowboy clothes when he was on a job, because he was utterly conspicuous—a flamboyant spectacle, a hairless decorated monkey.

  Hank carried his and his wife's suitcases. Nicky limped along using the cane to take weight off his damaged right leg. Styer took the fake Walkman out and put the earphones in place. He smiled as the voices of Hank Trammel and Nicky Green came up.

  After paying the parking toll, Styer remained within a quarter of a mile behind the Cadillac, comfortably within the unit's listening range.

  12

  Faith Ann felt safe in the cool hid
e. It was easy to understand why a sick animal would come in there to die.

  Soon after moving into the shotgun house on Danneel Street, Faith Ann had explored underneath it, and she had discovered a tin toy car and a few odds and ends abandoned in the dirt. In the cavity that had been formed when the concrete porch and front steps were poured, she'd found the mummified corpse of a small dog. She and Kimberly had dug a hole in the backyard and had given the animal a funeral, which included a hand-lettered wooden sign Faith Ann made that read HERE LIES A DOG, WHOSE NAME IS KNOWN ONLY TO GOD.

  The under-porch was in effect a steel-reinforced bunker, with a cement ceiling and walls. Unless someone with a flashlight came inside the space, they wouldn't find her. Faith Ann sat with her back pressed against a cool wall. What she had seen in her mother's office came into her mind. She pulled up her knees and rested her head on her arms. And she cried, as softly as she could manage.

  Faith Ann jerked upright when she heard a car pull up out front and two doors slam. Her watch said she had been hiding for two hours. Curious, she slipped out of the bunker and peered through the wood lattice, painted on one side the same dark gray as the house. Two men in suits strolled up to the gate, opened it, and came into the yard. The male patrolman came around from the side of the house where the small porch and the garage were.

  “No sign of anybody, Detectives,” she heard the patrolman say.

  “I didn't think she'd come here,” one of the men said. Faith Ann decided he was a detective.

  “Maybe she's at a friend's house. Take your partner and go on,” the other detective told the policeman. “We'll make the call if we need help. We have her keys and the warrant. We're going to search inside.”

  Faith Ann's heartbeat quickened. They had her mother's key ring. The idea of these people going through their things frightened her—but it made her mad too.

  The patrolwoman came around, and the uniforms left through the gate. The detectives opened the door but didn't go inside. After several minutes, a new car, big and black, arrived and parked across the street. Faith Ann watched as the driver's door opened and a woman with long dark hair climbed out. Faith Ann was studying her when another figure came into view. Terror seized her because this man was the same man who had killed her mother. As he approached the gate, he combed his dark oily hair back. One of the detectives opened the front door as the pair approached the steps.

  “She hasn't come back,” a detective said.

  “Where else is she going to go?” the other detective said. “Any adult she turns to is going to call the authorities.”

  “That's what we're going to find out,” the killer said in his familiar Spanish accent. “To discover everything we can about her.”

  Faith Ann crept to the back of the house, fighting panic. Her chest was heaving, her stomach lurching. Above her, four sets of shoes battered the hardwood as they too moved toward the rear of the house. When she was near the grids covering the floor furnaces, Faith Ann could make out the voices, but she couldn't hear what they were saying. The killer knew she had his negatives and he was looking for them . . . and for her. And he was a cop.

  She had to get away.

  Faith Ann slipped out from under the house. Crouching low, she scooted into the open garage. Her and her mother's bikes were connected to a galvanized eyelet by a plastic-coated steel cable. Her fingers trembled as she turned the four numbered cylinders so the right combination showed. Faith Ann removed the cable and looped it around her bike's crossbar before snapping the lock in the loops to secure it. After putting on her helmet, she closed the kickstand and rolled the ten-speed slowly out through the side door, which opened directly into the backyard next door. She went around that house and, after pausing to tuck her long hair inside the sweatshirt and raising the hood over the helmet, she jumped on board and pumped the pedals furiously.

  At the corner of Marengo Street, she turned left toward St. Charles Avenue. The cool wind blew into her face. Her skin stung a little because she'd cried so much. The backpack felt as light as a feather. School would be letting out soon, she decided. The sidewalks, buses, and streetcars would be filled with kids for the cops to check out.

  When she passed a patrol car stopped at the intersection with St. Charles, she cut her eyes. The cop inside hardly even glanced at her. She guessed nobody had thought that she might be riding a boy's ten-speed.

  13

  Marta hadn't chastised Arturo for his mistakes. He hadn't had any reason to imagine that there was a young girl in the lawyer's office, and he wasn't sure the girl had seen him there. It was clear to the police that she had certainly been there after the killings, because there was concrete blood evidence of that.

  Mr. Bennett hadn't said anything about there being negatives; just eight photographs, and there was no way to be sure that Amber hadn't hidden them somewhere before she went to the attorney's office. And Bennett told Arturo that according to the cops, there might possibly be a tape recording of the lawyer's conversation with Amber, since there were scores of recorded interviews in the lawyer's desk. The thing that caused Arturo's stomach to hurt was the thought that if the killings were recorded, his voice would be on it, because Amber had spoken his and Mr. Bennett's names. If there was a tape, and it wound up in anyone's hands outside the police department, they were in the worst possible kind of trouble. If that happened, none of Bennett's precious connections would be of any use at all.

  The two detectives might have been thoroughly corrupt, but they weren't particularly energetic or enthusiastic. Having no real personal stake in this, they searched rooms lackadaisically. As Arturo was searching for information with an urgency fueled by multilayers of fear, he kept running into their backsides. As far as he was concerned, the two detectives were just unnecessary and potentially dangerous witnesses. While the short one dumped out the dead lawyer's jewelry box, the big one rifled through the refrigerator searching for a snack.

  Marta called the detectives to the bathroom to show them that she had found the girl's clothes in the hamper. She pointed out the bloody knees in the jeans, the smears of blood on the discarded shirt.

  The short detective took the jeans and found four blast-darkened .380 shell casings in the pocket. Those would match the handgun that Marta had planted beneath the clothes—the weapon which Arturo had used at the office. After noting that they had found it in the bottom of the hamper, the cops bagged it as evidence. They could collect the child's fingerprints and fix things so that a print would be discovered on the weapon.

  Since the clothes were there, they went through the house again, looking for the kid.

  Arturo and Marta searched for the negatives and the cassette tape. They found a file box filled with proof sheets and sleeves of negatives, which they took to pore over later. They found a dozen audiocassettes in a drawer. These Arturo put in the shopping bag along with the negatives. The cops collected all of the correspondence they found, including letters and bills, took the laptop computer and a lot of other odds and ends along with the girl's blood-soiled clothing, which they put in a paper evidence bag.

  As Marta and Arturo drove away down the street, Marta looked into a cluttered yard and saw a bulldog standing up on its hind legs, its forepaws on its smiling master's stomach. In her mind the dog became a rail-thin, filthy, dark-skinned waif who was kneeling to unzip the trousers of a porcine policeman while a young, hungry boy watched from the window of an abandoned car nearby. She shivered involuntarily.

  I had to do what I had to do, to survive.

  14

  Faith Ann spent three hours at the Audubon Zoo, wandering here and there, visiting her favorite animals, unable to take comfort from the familiarity. Occasionally she almost managed to forget what had happened that morning, but those terrifying memories kept returning, each time accompanied by gut-gripping fear and nausea.

  She counted the money she had taken from her mother's safe and discovered that she had a thousand dollars. She bought herself a green cap a
dvertising the zoo, curled up the bill, and kept it tugged down low to her brows. At four-thirty, as the sky turned gray and the wind picked up the scent of moisture, Faith Ann left the zoo. She put on her yellow poncho, covering her backpack. She unlocked her bike, climbed up on it, and started pedaling off just as the first drops of rain fell.

  At six o'clock, after buying a Walkman at a Rite Aid, Faith Ann balanced herself on her bicycle at the pay telephone station, the last one of three mounted on the outside wall of the drugstore, and opened the yellow pages. The overhang protected her from the rain. Her heart sank. There were pages and pages of guesthouses. She didn't have any idea which one Uncle Hank and Aunt Millie were staying at, because her mother hadn't mentioned a name to her. How could she find them? A name floated into her mind. Rush Massey. A warmth filled her as she thought about her friend—sighted or not, perhaps the best friend she had. Maybe Rush or his father knew where Hank and Millie were staying. If anybody did, she decided, they would.

  Normally she and Rush communicated via computer using instant messenger or sent e-mails. Rush's computer was set up to vocalize his messages so he could respond on the keyboard. Faith Ann had visited with him on the telephone but all she could remember now was that his area code was 704. She took out her mother's cell phone and put her finger over the buttons, trying to recall which buttons she had pressed to get him. 704 . . . 79 . . . 704–795 . . . And then her fingers remembered the entire number and she turned on the unit and pressed them for real. Leaning against the wall beside the pay phone, she listened as the cell phone rang.

  “Hello?” the soft voice answered.

  “Mrs. Massey, it's Faith Ann Porter. Is Rush there?”

  “Well, yes, just a minute, Faith Ann.”