A Quiet Vendetta (8 page)

‘Okay, I understand that, but—’

The line went dead in Fraschetti’s ear.

He waited a second, two, three, and then he was standing in the doorway of his office screaming for the result.

‘Call box,’ Danziger shouted from the other side of the main office. ‘Call box on Gravier . . . got two units on the way there now.’

The same place
as the car, Fraschetti thought, and he knew, he just
knew
once again, that by the time those two units reached Gravier they would find absolutely nothing.

The Washington units arrived a little after seven. It was raining. Leland Fraschetti had not slept for the better part of thirty-six hours. Governor Charles Ducane had called the attorney general himself, figuring, perhaps, that as far as the legal and judicial system was concerned he couldn’t get much higher, and the attorney general had called the director of the FBI personally and told him to get his ass in gear.

This is a governor’s daughter we’re talking about, Bob
, Attorney General Richard Seidler had told the director.
A goddamned Louisiana governor’s daughter, and we have a bunch of half-assed kindergarten cops meandering all over the countryside with their thumbs up their asses waiting for someone to tell ’em the game is already in the third quarter. This is your nightmare, Bob, and believe me we better wake up in the morning all relieved and ready for breakfast or the shit’s gonna fly six ways to Sunday
.

FBI director Bob Dohring listened and acknowledged. He did not retort in an antagonistic or challenging manner. As far as he was concerned, he had already sent two units down to New Orleans and that was as good as it was going to get. Attorney General Richard Seidler could fuck himself right in the ass, but then again Dohring figured the guy’s dick was too short.

Fraschetti was thanked for his work and sent home. Agents Luckman and Gabillard were thanked also, and temporarily reassigned to a field office in Metairie. Washington unit chiefs Stanley Schaeffer and Bill Woodroffe relocated everything from Baton Rouge FBI Co-ordination and set up camp in the New Orleans Field Office on Arsenault Street. They rearranged tables and chairs. They put up whiteboards and city maps. They listened to the call Fraschetti had taken over and over again, until every man present knew it verbatim. They processed every full and partial print from both the callbox and every coin in it near Gravier, and came away with two minor felons, a guy on parole after four and a half years in Louisiana State Pen. for molesting a fifteen-year-old cheerleader called Emma-Louise Hennessy, and a man called Morris Petri who, in August of 1979, had mailed a box of human faeces to the governor of Texas. Every other print was either too incomplete to process, or was a non-person as far as the federal government was concerned. No-one who fitted their profile had used that phone. Woodroffe and Schaeffer had known – even before they’d begun the exercise – that they were doing it for no other reason than form and protocol. In the final analysis, if everything went tits up and the girl died or was never found, their careers would be on the line for the slightest omission in procedure. They sat up ’til three on Thursday morning brainstorming, and came away with nothing but migraines and caffeine overdoses.

The baton had passed. The new runners were fresh and watered and willing, but the race had no apparent beginning and the end, if indeed there was an end, was nowhere in sight.

The track seemed circular, and even when Criminalistics came back with a third repetition of the autopsy results, with chemical formulas and blood types and hair samples and fingernail scrapings, it seemed they had all run like fury after their own tails and wound up back at the starter’s gate.

It was what it was, and what it was was a bitch.

Morning of Thursday the twenty-eighth. It was now four days and some hours since Jim Emerson had peered down into the darkness of the Cruiser’s trunk and spoiled his appetite. The city of New Orleans was going about its business, the press had been shut down on any reports regarding the kidnapping of Catherine Ducane, and folks like Emerson, Michael Cipliano and John Verlaine were spending their daylight hours looking at other bodies and other rap sheets, the car wrecks and Vietnams of entirely different lives.

A voice specialist had been enlisted to analyse the recording made of the call Fraschetti had taken the previous afternoon. His name was Lester Kubis, and though he looked nothing like Gene Hackman he had nevertheless watched
The Conversation
a good two dozen times. He believed that technology would advance to the point where you could listen to the smallest intimacies of anybody’s life, and he looked forward to that day immensely. Lester sat in a small dark room with his large headphones and pored over the brief section of tape for several hours. He came back with a somewhat tentative outline which suggested that the caller had spent time in Italy, New Orleans, Cuba, and somewhere in the south-eastern states, perhaps Georgia or Florida. He estimated the caller’s age at sixty to seventy years of age. He could not be precise as to his origin, nor any other specific identifying features. This information, though it would prove immeasurably valuable once they apprehended the caller, did not in any significant way assist their current investigation. The age bracket had served to narrow the field, but with a population of something around two hundred and fifty million spread across three and a half million square miles, they were still searching for a molecule in a ballpark. The fact that the call had been made from Gravier meant that the caller, not necessarily the kidnapper, was still in New Orleans, though it was nothing more than a couple of hours to the state line either way. The girl, Woodroffe felt certain, had been spirited out of Louisiana within hours of the kidnapping. Either that or she was already dead. Schaeffer was sure there was more than one man involved. The lifting of McCahill’s body from the back seat and into the trunk of the Cruiser would not have been easily done alone, but they both knew they were guessing and fishing. Schaeffer had taken three calls from the head of operations in Washington by lunchtime, and he knew they were as desperate as everyone else. Rare it was to be assigned to a case that had involved Bureau Director Dohring personally, and upon such things a career was exalted or finished. Schaeffer knew little of Governor Ducane himself, but imagined that, much like all governors, senators and congressmen, he would believe the world and all its resources available to him twenty-four seven. Such a case would not die down or disappear. Such a case would be among the highest-profile investigations until it was finished, one way or the other. And he, too, knew it would only be so long before Ducane would appear in person. No matter the life, no matter the pressures, a father was a father when all was said and done. Schaeffer knew Ducane had already threatened to fly down there and kick some FBI ass, but Washington had assured Schaeffer they were doing all they could to keep the governor in Shreveport.

By mid-afternoon on Thursday tempers were fraying and patience was as thin as rice-paper. Woodroffe had taken six men out to Gravier to trawl the area around the site of the car and the call box in search of anything else indicative of the caller’s identity or the killer’s motivation. Schaeffer held court in the Field Office, he and five men tracking through the entire chain of events since the discovery of McCahill’s body. There were many questions, but seemingly no further answers, and by early evening when Woodroffe returned empty-handed, Schaeffer believed they had reached an impasse.

At eight minutes past seven the second call came.

The caller asked for Stanley Schaeffer by name. He told the field agent who took the call that
Stan would know what it was about
, but refused to identify himself.

‘Good evening, Agent Schaeffer,’ were the words that greeted Schaeffer when he took the receiver and identified himself.

It was the same voice, undoubtedly. Schaeffer would have recognized that voice a hundred years from now.

‘You are well, I trust?’ the voice asked.

‘Well enough,’ Schaeffer replied. He waved his hand to quieten down the murmur of voices around him and took a seat at his desk.

Woodroffe gave him a thumbs-up. The call was being recorded and traced.

‘I am calling from a different callbox,’ the voice said. ‘I understand it takes approximately forty-three seconds to locate me, so I won’t waste time with asking how the investigation is going.’

Schaeffer opened his mouth to speak but the voice continued.

‘I told your colleague Agent Fraschetti that a trade would be required. I am now going to give you my terms and conditions, and if they are not met I will shoot the girl in the forehead and leave her body in a public place. Understood?’

‘Yes,’ Schaeffer said.

‘Bring Ray Hartmann down to New Orleans. You have twenty-four hours to find him and get him here. I will call at exactly seven p.m. tomorrow evening and he should be ready to take my call. At this time this is all I ask of you.’

‘Hartmann, Ray Hartmann. Who is Ray Hartmann?’

The voice laughed gently. ‘That is all part of the game, Agent Schaeffer. Tomorrow evening, seven p.m., and have Ray Hartmann there to take my call or Catherine Ducane is irretrievably dead.’

‘But—’ Schaeffer started.

The line went silent.

Woodroffe was in the doorway before Schaeffer had replaced the receiver in the cradle.

‘Two blocks down and east of Gravier,’ Woodroffe said. ‘We have a unit three or four minutes away already.’

Schaeffer leaned back in his chair and sighed. ‘Won’t find anything,’ he said quietly.

‘You what?’

Schaeffer closed his eyes and shook his head. ‘You won’t find anything down there.’

Woodroffe looked momentarily irritated. ‘You think I don’t realize that?’

Schaeffer waved his hand in a conciliatory fashion. ‘I know, Bill, I know.’

‘So who the hell is this Ray Hartmann?’

‘I’m fucked if I know,’ Schaeffer said. He rose from his chair and filled a paper cone from the water cooler. ‘I don’t know who he is or where he is, but we’ve got twenty-four hours to find him and get him here or the girl is dead.’

‘I’ll call Washington,’ Woodroffe said.

‘And give the tape to Kubis and see if he can find out anything else about this guy.’

‘Sure thing,’ Woodroffe replied. He turned and left the room.

Schaeffer drank his water, crumpled the cone and tossed it into the trashcan.

He returned to his desk and sat down heavily. He sighed and closed his eyes.

Outside it started raining, and a little more than two miles from where Stanley Schaeffer sat an elderly man, perhaps sixty-five or seventy, watched a stream of generic gray sedans invade a street not far from Gravier.

Tucking his hands in his overcoat pockets he turned and walked away. He whistled as he went, a tune called ‘Chloe’, a classic by Kahn and Morret that was popularized by Spike Jones in the ’50s, a song that told of a lonely girl searching for her lost love.

The old man had wanted to tell them more, had wanted to tell them everything, but as so many of his friends in the old country used to say, ‘A temptation resisted is the true measure of character.’ There was a time and a place for everything. The place was New Orleans, and the time would be tomorrow evening when Ray Hartmann came home.

And he would say, ‘But there never was a time when you told me exactly how you felt,’ and she’d say, ‘Even if I had told you you wouldn’t have listened anyway,’ and he would close his eyes, sigh deeply, and reply, ‘How the hell would you have known, Carol . . . I mean, tell me that, how the hell would you have known if I’d been listening?’ and then one of them – it didn’t matter who – would mention Jess’s name, and at that point things would kind of quieten down. Seemed that Jess was perhaps the only real reason Ray Hartmann and Carol talked any more, and maybe because of that there was the hope that somehow, some way, something good might have been salvaged from their thirteen years together. Spend that many years living side by side, breathing the same air, eating the same food, sharing the same bed, and separation felt like losing a limb, and though hours were spent in some vague attempt to convince themselves that the limb was diseased, that it had to be amputated, that they could never have survived leaving it where it was, the truth always haunted them. No-one else would ever feel that good, that right, that familiar. And there would always be a standard against which all others were judged, and though the sex might have been better, though the complaints might have been different, they would always be aware of the fact that this new one was not
the one
.

All their conversations went like that these days: recriminatory, bitter, resentful, sharp and to the point. And they would always talk on the phone when Jessica wasn’t there, because she was a human being too, all of twelve years old and mindful of what was happening between her parents. Carol Hartmann, separated from her husband now for the better part of eight months, always called when Jessica was out with friends or on a sleep-over, or at band practice or down at the gym. And Ray Hartmann – he of the broken heart and bloodied knuckles where he’d put his fist through the kitchen cupboard door that evening of 28 December – would take the call and sit on the edge of his bed, and he would hear her voice and believe that never in his life would he miss anything as much as he missed his wife. Three days after Christmas for God’s sake, drunk and loud and screaming some mindless crap at the top of his voice, and Jessica crying and running to her mother because daddy had gone out of the loop once again. And it was never Jessica, and truth be known it was never Carol, whom he’d married one fine February morning in 1990. It was the job, the stress of the job, the way the job carried over into everything you were, everything you ever imagined you could be, and it was a rare and special woman who could have weathered the storms Ray Hartmann brought with him, for sometimes he didn’t just bring storms, sometimes he brought Hurricane Ray, loud enough to bring down trees and take the roof right off of the eaves. But for thirteen years she had managed, and though not all of those years had been difficult they nevertheless had had their moments. Prone to mood swings and sudden shifts of temperament, Ray Hartmann had lost count of the number of times his wife had looked at him across the room with an expression of wonder and terror, an underlying sense of panic that this time,
this
time, he might just do something all of them would seriously regret. But he never did, not until that night of 28 December, and then he’d gatecrashed his way through the supposed harmony of their house, and then he’d started up again like a fire siren, and before he knew it he was standing there with blood running out of his knuckles and spotting the linoleum floor, and his wife and his daughter were both screaming at him to get out of the house and not come back. Bruised they looked;
spiritually
bruised.