Dark River Rising Page 2

  Earlier today, he had watched from a discreet location as Ronnie Overman stepped out of the back of an SUV, then turned to help a smoking-hot young lady out after him. She had working girl written all over her, and Overman seemed to be enjoying her company.

  Two Saturdays ago, he had watched them go through almost the same routine but he had lost the trail. He followed them into the lobby of a down-at-the-heels office building, and watched as Overman said something to the girl, pointed toward a sign for the restrooms, and then pointed at the elevator, as if to say I gotta take a leak, I’ll be right back, then we’ll go up. But Overman never came back. The girl made a quick call, and after a few minutes another girl showed up and the two of them left the lobby and disappeared into the sidewalk traffic. By then, it was obvious the drug peddler had probably slipped out the back of the building.

  Today, though, he ignored the girl. Assuming things would go as they had two Saturdays before, he drove into the alley behind the building in time to see Overman walk out and slide into the driver’s seat of a car. In an attempt at cleverness, Overman had altered his appearance a bit, but the walk was the same and that gave him away.

  From there, he tailed Overman to the edge of a light industrial warehouse district, where Overman parked and then started walking. Once the destination became obvious he too parked, and watched his quarry disappear inside the warehouse. As he moved cautiously around the building, trying to assess the situation, he heard the prissy whine of a two-stroke engine fade rapidly into the distance.

  It would have been nice to know how many others were already inside the building, but as he arrived at the door he had seen Overman enter through, the slippery devil was already coming back out. So he made his move.

  All in all, things had worked out well, which he attributed entirely to the fact that he was a compulsive planner, yet willing to alter his plans to meet changing circumstances. Today’s operation had been a particular challenge, though, because he had never killed before. Dispensing misery was nothing new. In fact, it was a particular interest of his, as any number of luckless young men and women had discovered when they slipped between his sheets expecting bliss only to find agony instead. But killing was different from hurting and he had forced himself to respect that difference.

  Dealing with the snake had proved a bit tricky, but he quickly figured out how to handle the uncooperative reptile without getting bitten or losing his grip. He also spent time poring over anatomical diagrams of the human abdomen, so he could slice into Overman’s body cavity without opening a major artery. Coaxing the balky creature inside had tried his patience, but its effect on Overman’s reluctance to give up valuable trade secrets had been more than worth the trouble.

  To his surprise, the only resistance his conscience offered to the whole business sprang from having to weigh the likelihood of getting what he needed against the prospect of being caught and killed. The twinge he expected when he pictured the actual bloodletting simply wasn’t there. Maybe the possibility of great wealth blunted his feelings. Or perhaps he had stumbled into a hitherto undiscovered room in his emotional mansion—one which just happened to be a rather congenial place.

  Forcing his thoughts back into the present, he threaded his way through the thicket of rotting crates and pallets behind the warehouse. The officers canvassing the area for leads were loud and easy to avoid, and he briefly entertained the idea of approaching them, posing as a stumblebum who had seen something, so he could send them off on a wild goose chase. But those games were best reserved for situations where the police approached him. Little would be gained by engaging them and risking later recognition, just for a few seconds of fun, especially since it was unlikely that anyone was aware of his presence in the area. No one had reason to be—yet.

  He paused to use his reflection in a van window to straighten his clothes and fluff out his curly red hair, which had become matted with sweat while he waited in the sweltering air shaft.

  As he made his way to his rental car, he contemplated the future. His visit with the now-deceased drug dealer practically confirmed that a serious development, something he had anticipated for a long time, had finally arrived. He still had to take possession of it. But that would be easier, thanks to the terrified yet very talkative Ronnie Overman.

  Just having it, though, wouldn’t be enough. It would also have to be put to work. Whether he could do that and live to tell the tale was not a given. One thing was certain, though. The bag of cocaine he had taken from Overman carried a kind of weight that went beyond its actual mass.

  TWO

  8:30 P.M.

  Instead of going directly home after meeting Overman at the warehouse, Matt Gable had come to his lookout point along the trail that ran through the wooded area between his house and the lab where he worked. He came here after every meeting because he knew there was always the chance someone—a confederate or even a competitor of Overman—might try to follow him. But Matt couldn’t afford to have anyone discover his identity or his base of operations. During his years at the lab, he had worked out a pathway that led from the back of his yard, through the woods, all the way to the lab’s access road. On fair-weather days he would run to and from work along the challenging trail. And on meeting days, like today, he used it as a way to check for, and if need be, shake off any pursuers. So far, he had been lucky and no one had tried to follow him. But something was not right. From his lookout point at the crest of a rise, he could see his house burning in the distance. He lowered his binoculars and considered his next move.

  It was always possible that the blaze had been started by a frayed wire or an airborne cinder from some redneck’s burn barrel, but it might also have something to do with the red-haired man he had seen entering the warehouse as he had sneaked away. The burn triggers he had installed inside his house were designed to go on active alert if his regular security system was disabled. Once that happened, the triggers would ignite in the event of an unauthorized entry.

  The resulting fire would eliminate all evidence of the things that needed to remain secret. But it would also be a sign that his luck had finally run out and that he should probably do the same. Shit. He had the sinking feeling that a lot of difficult and dangerous work—not to mention an amazing piece of good fortune—was teetering on the edge of the abyss.

  On the other hand, perhaps the fact that he was standing here watching the blaze instead of being caught up in whatever had started it was, itself, a piece of good fortune. It had taken nearly four hours to deposit all the cash he had driven away from the warehouse with. In order to avoid the federal scrutiny that always came from triggering the currency transaction reporting regulations, he had to break up the cash into numerous small amounts. For this, he had had to open several accounts, at banks scattered around Baton Rouge, all in the names of different businesses. Dividing the money into random, under-the-limit amounts and then going to ATMs and night deposit drops all over town to make the deposits was something he normally considered a huge pain in the ass. But today it might have actually saved his ass. Maybe there was value in the growth of the bureaucracy after all, he thought.

  As he watched the fire, he tried to use his phone to check on his regular security and his other safeguards, but the security company website wouldn’t load. The high droning wail of a fire engine drifted in on the evening air. He would assume the worst and find out the facts later.

  There would be no time to cover his tracks at the lab, but his precautions would make it nearly impossible for anyone to figure out what he had been up to. Kevin Bell, the director of the lab, and his army of small-minded dorks would know something was going on, but Matt doubted they would ever figure out what. They were people who lived to think inside the box—not true scientists, just overtrained technicians who assumed the empire of truth was confined by the limits of their puny imaginations. Theirs would be careers of record-setting insignificance, with contributions too trivial to see except under the extreme magnification of a
n academic résumé.

  There was no time to cover his tracks with Carla either. As if the thought had summoned her into the moment, his phone vibrated. He let it go to voicemail, like the other calls she had been pestering him with. She’d been a decent ride for a while, but her extra-eager-to-please attitude had moved at a fevered pace from entertaining to annoying, skipping completely over the boring phase. He had managed to get her out of his hair for a few days, by sending her to a conference on protein folding and she was no doubt calling to effervesce about how awesome it was. She might still prove useful, but his immediate plans didn’t include her.

  He hated to abandon his vehicle, but he had to make a clean break. That meant he had to get to the shack before nightfall. The trail marks he had scraped into the bark of some of the trees, a couple of feet above eye level, were getting difficult to see in the fading light.

  Inside the shack he kept the untitled car he got from the kind of backwoods character one expected to traffic in bootleg versions of things that were once in legitimate commerce. It looked bad, inside and out, but Matt had restored the engine to top mechanical condition. He tossed his duffel in the trunk, then slid behind the wheel and pulled out of the shed, cruising along a pathway he had cleared to an unfenced field. From there, he drove along the edge of the field to a dirt road that eventually led him to the highway that would take him to Baton Rouge.

  The most difficult part of moving on would be replacing the lab equipment he had free access to as a scientist at the lab. None of it would be terribly expensive, but some of it was specialized enough that it would be difficult to buy as a private citizen without attracting at least some unwanted governmental scrutiny. What he couldn’t steal from the relatively unguarded research labs of small-town universities, he would worry about when the time came.

  THREE

  MONDAY 7:30 A.M.

  Wallace adjusted her car seat to a comfortable position as she watched the Staples residence. Yesterday, after her encounter with the engineer, she had tailed him from the warehouse back to his house and when he left the house after dark, she followed him into the night. He spent hours trolling through areas where street dealers and shooting galleries were common. But he never stopped and he never got out of his car. He just drove and drove, watching the street scene, always on the move. Clearly, he had been looking for something or someone. But shortly after ten o’clock he abandoned his quest and drove home. An hour after that, when the last of the lights inside the Staples’s house went out, Wallace had also headed for home. Now she was back.

  If Arthur’s nocturnal ramble was in some way connected to Overman’s death, Wallace doubted he would fess up just because she asked him politely. His attitude during their skirmish at the warehouse told her that if she hauled him in for questioning, he would probably just clam up and demand a lawyer.

  Before doing something like that, she was going to try a less direct approach. Family members were often more sensitive to police pressure than the suspects themselves, especially if they thought they could protect a loved one from unnecessary public embarrassment.

  The Staples’s home was an older, well-kept tract house, situated in one of the borderland areas. At one time, Baton Rouge had been one of those places where genteel areas sometimes butted up against less fortunate territory, where poverty and prosperity sometimes eyed each other nervously across the width of a single street. Over the last thirty years or so, she had seen many of those borderlines soften into borderlands where old patterns of skin color, net worth, and national origin were re-forming into new, more hopeful social and economic arrangements.

  Beyond some of the borderlands, though, there were still dangerous areas where street level power structures held sway and what the media reported as gang violence served as the equivalent of political campaigns and general elections.

  When Wallace was a girl, her family had lived on the white side of one of the borderline streets. For much of her childhood, she had played with Craig and Berna Stephens, the black children who lived on the other side of the street—a practice that didn’t sit well with some of the white folk in the neighborhood. The fact that Craig insisted on calling her “little white girl” hadn’t helped matters.

  She could still hear Craig’s mother yelling across the yard. “Craig, her name is Wallace. You call her by her name. Are you listening to me?” His response was always the same. “Okay, Momma.” Then five seconds later he’d be saying, “Hey, little white girl, you wanna play some Ping-Pong or something?” Even now, whenever their paths crossed, Craig sometimes called her little white girl.

  At precisely 7:45, Arthur stepped into the carport from the side door of his house. He climbed into his car and drove in the direction of the freeway. One vehicle remained in the carport. Wallace started her car and pulled to the curb in front of the house. She got out and walked up the steps to the front porch. She rang the doorbell and waited.

  “Who is it?” a female voice asked through the windowless front door.

  “Detective Wallace Hartman, with the Baton Rouge City Police.”

  “If you’re here to speak to Mr. Staples, he can’t be disturbed,” the voice lied. “Leave your card in the door, and I’ll see that he gets it.”

  Wallace admired the woman’s caution in making it sound like she wasn’t alone in the house. “I know Mr. Staples isn’t here. I just saw him drive off.”

  “Please face the window on your right so I can see you.”

  Wallace complied. She was waiting to be asked to show her badge and her ID, but she was startled when the door opened instead.

  “How may I help you, Detective?” the woman asked.

  She was about to deliver the standard lecture about not opening the door to someone just because they claimed to be with the police, when the woman spoke.

  “I know who you are. You’re Carol Hartman’s daughter. You look too much like her not to be,” the woman said, obviously reading Wallace’s expression.

  Even though this happened to Wallace from time to time, she still found it unnerving—but flattering, as well. “My daughter was one of Carol’s students, so I met your mother on a number of occasions. Please,” she said, standing aside, “won’t you come in? I’m Wanda Staples—Arthur’s wife.”

  Wallace took in the room with a quick scan. Wanda’s spiky hair style had been daring a few years back and her outfit looked like it stood a decent chance of coming back in fashion. There were a few bargain barn prints on the walls and groupings of mass-market figurines were staged along the mantel. Where most homes would have had a television, an elliptical trainer stood instead. The furniture was old and ugly and the muted light filtering through the thin curtains gave the place a solemn feel.

  “Why don’t we sit?” Wanda asked, closing the door and motioning Wallace toward an armchair. She took a seat on the couch and faced Wallace. “Arthur told me he found a body,” Wanda said, sounding as if they were discussing the weather. “I assume that’s why you’re here.”

  “May I ask what else he told you?”

  “That it was a murder. I know he knew more than he was telling, but he’s not exactly a chatterbox.”

  Wallace studied Wanda for any sign the woman knew more or might be hiding something—unnaturally steady eye contact, feet pointed away from the line of conversation—but there was nothing. Maybe Arthur had heeded the warning to stay quiet about the particulars of what he had seen in the warehouse. That didn’t make Wallace like him, but her respect for him did go up a notch.

  “In any event, what was it you wanted to speak with me about?” Wanda asked. She folded her hands in her lap and leaned toward Wallace, with an expectant look on her face. “Is Arthur under suspicion? Am I? Should I retain counsel?”

  Wallace waited for several seconds. If she seemed too ready to answer Wanda’s questions she would lose control of the conversation. Besides, “retain counsel” gave her away.

  “You’re a lawyer, yourself.”

  “I am. B
ut you know what they say. A lawyer who represents herself has a fool for a client. And, in any event, I don’t handle criminal matters. I’m part-time with a firm that practices public interest law. You know … the kind that doesn’t pay very well.”

  “I followed Arthur last night. He spent a good bit of time cruising some very questionable neighborhoods. He wasn’t doing anything illegal, but it was peculiar behavior, especially in light of the circumstances under which we met. I’m tempted to have him picked up so I can question him in a more formal setting. But I was hoping maybe you could shed some light on what he was doing. You know—less hassle, less of a spectacle.”

  Wanda shrugged, her gaze drifting slowly toward the floor. “I don’t know where he goes when he takes off like that. He won’t say, and I’ve given up asking.”

  Wallace could tell the woman was lying. “Well, he was moving through some pretty perilous precincts.”

  Wanda’s nostrils flared as she tried to suppress a smirk. “You are your mother’s child in more than just looks. Who but an English teacher’s daughter would say ‘perilous precincts’ when ‘shitty part of town’ would do?” She paused. “But I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Arthur can handle himself.”

  “What exactly did he do, before he became an engineer?” Wallace asked. She would come back to the subject of Arthur’s drive around later, from a different angle.

  “If you’re asking whether he could have done whatever it is that was done in this crime you’re investigating, the answer is yes, of course. But, under the right circumstances, aren’t we are all capable of terrible things? What you really want to know is whether he would have done it.” Wanda shook her head. “No. I don’t believe so. He’s seen enough killing and dying to last a lifetime.”

  Sensing there was more to come, Wallace watched as Wanda’s demeanor softened, changing from self-assured to distracted. “A few years ago, we lost our daughter, our only child.”