Floodgates (7 page)
Was workaholic Nina actually offering to spread some gossip? Within the past twenty-four hours, Nina had sprouted an over-charming ex-boyfriend, passionate political views, and now an unsuspected appetite for dishing the dirt. And Faye had thought the woman was only interested in dirt from an archaeological standpoint.
Faye was human, and there is a reason that people have been gossiping since somebody told Hera that Zeus was running around on her with a heifer. Other people’s frailties were endlessly fascinating.
“What did you hear? Look at that man’s baby face. He hasn’t lived long enough to have a sordid past.”
“Exactly. He hasn’t had time to build a career, either, but look what he does for a living.”
“Um…he’s a park ranger. Am I missing something here?”
“Park ranger jobs are hard to get. The pay’s good, and government benefits are amazing.”
Faye knew what she paid for the shoddy coverage offered by her student health insurance policy. “Now I’m jealous.”
“Yeah, me too. It’s not just the perks, either. Lots of people want to work in New Orleans. Rookies usually have to start at a park that’s three hundred miles from nowhere. And this job’s especially nice, because it’s not like Matt’s out hiking in the Rockies, hauling injured hikers off a mountainside. He gives short tours to lazy tourists who don’t want to walk far. There aren’t any hills to climb or wild animals to worry about. In between tours, he sits in the air conditioned visitor’s center.”
“So you’re saying that people Matt’s age have to wait in line for a job like his.”
“Yep.”
“What do you think he did? Bribe somebody?”
“Heck, no. He grew up in the same kind of middle-class neighborhood I did…well, it
was
middle-class before Katrina made it a flooded-out hellhole. You saw it. The same middle-class people are living there now, except they’re living in trailers instead of nice houses. Anyway, Matt’s people didn’t have enough money for a bribe, but it didn’t take money to get him this job.”
Now Nina was messing with her. She was spinning this story for all it was worth, egging Faye on to ask for more rumors and innuendo. But like anybody else, Faye knew how to play the gossip game. To get the good dirt, you had to make the person who held it feel important. You had to make her
want
to give it to you.
“So what did Matt and his people do? Did somebody sleep with a government official?”
There. Faye figured
that
question ought to get Nina’s gossip-spreading juices flowing. And it did.
“Yeah. Sort of. Married people sleep together, don’t they?”
“Usually.”
“Well, Matt’s father is related somehow to a woman whose step-daughter is married to Matt’s boss’ boss. Also, I think their ancestors served in the same Confederate regiment.”
Only in some parts of the American South would this statement have made any sense whatsoever. The upshot was, though, that Matt enjoyed a cushy position because of who he was and who his family knew. Family connections were important, no matter where you went, but only in New Orleans was a man likely to be acquainted with his fifth cousin, once removed.
“No wonder Matt has the face of a choir boy,” Faye observed as she lowered herself into the excavation. “He’s led a sheltered life. His family has always taken care of him.”
“Maybe a little too much.” Nina stepped into her own unit. “But they couldn’t shield him from the turmoil of the past three years. Matt lost loved ones in the storm. He almost lost his parents. He would have, if the rescuers had been any slower in coming.”
Twenty minutes later, Faye watched Matt walk back to the visitor’s center by a circuitous path that came nowhere near her work site. More than once, he rubbed the heel of his hand across his face, the way men do when they don’t want anybody to know they’re crying.
***
Faye had watched Jodi spend the past twenty minutes reading all the educational placards in the vicinity of the excavation where she and Nina and Dauphine were piling up the backdirt. It was now straight-up noon, and Faye had a sneaking suspicion that the detective wanted to talk to her and that she was just killing time until Faye sent her crew off to find some lunch.
Faye’s hunch was right. Immediately after Nina and Dauphine went to fetch their sack lunches from the project trailer, Jodi approached Faye with an invitation. “There’s a greasy spoon a couple of miles down St. Bernard Highway that has a cheap lunch plate. How do you feel about po-boys?”
“Since I got here, I’ve tried just about every variety, and I’ve loved them all. How do the bakeries around here get that crisp crust and still leave the bread soft on the inside?”
Faye was using a hose, some foamy soap, and a fingernail brush to get the worst of the dirt off her hands. It wasn’t working.
“Beats me. Something in the water, maybe? So…you wanna do lunch?”
“Police business?”
“Heck, no. Working all the time makes a girl old fast. Oh, maybe I know something about yesterday’s bones that might get an archaeologist’s attention…”
She grinned at Faye’s obvious interest, and kept talking. “Besides, I can always use a good woman friend. I’ve got me a lot of friends but most of them are dumb as a post, which you’re not. I love ’em and all, but I can only spend so much of my life talking about nothing but liquor and pretty men. I mean, they’re two of my favorite subjects, but—”
Joe had been standing nearby, slowly pouring water out of the paper cup in his hand and watching where it flowed. Faye had no idea why he was doing that, but Joe had a reason for everything he did. Dauphine was standing a few feet away, too far to be standing
with
Joe but too close to pretend that she was looking at anything beyond a dark and handsome man who had a strange obsession with wet dirt. Faye wasn’t sure what she thought about that.
When Joe noticed Jodi, he turned his attention away from the mud he was making and walked over to greet her. Wiping a hand on the rag hanging out of his back pocket, he shook her hand, then turned his head to ask, “Ready for lunch, Faye?”
Jodi’s mouth was saying, “Oh, if you already have plans…”, but her eyes were fastened on Joe. He elicited that response from most women, even those who claimed they didn’t want to talk about pretty men quite all the time.
Faye had been looking forward to a few minutes alone with her fiancé, but Jodi knew exactly how to pique her interest. Faye really, really wanted to know what the police had learned about the dead woman.
She and Joe were going to spend the rest of their lives together. What was one hour more or less? Of course, that was how married couples woke up after decades together and realized they didn’t know each other any more. Her pre-wedding nerves jangled a bit, but she ignored them.
“Oh, no, you’re welcome to join us, Jodi. Let me introduce you to my fiancé, Joe Wolf Mantooth.”
Joe wiped his hand again before offering it to Jodi in greeting. “Nice to meet you. Faye told me…well, I heard you both had a tough afternoon yesterday.” He jerked his head in the direction of the parking lot. “Let me meet you two at the car. I need to wash some more of this dirt off my hands.” He moved quickly toward the park’s public rest rooms with his long, deliberate strides.
Faye needed to go wash another layer of grime off her own hands, too, but she waited to do that just long to whisper, “Yes, he’s pretty. And he’s not dumb as a post, either. But he
is
mine.”
Joe hadn’t said much during lunch. He was naturally quiet. He also liked people, and he liked hearing what they had to say more than he liked to talk. But mostly, a large portion of his attention was being devoted to ciphering out how their food was prepared.
Joe was an artist in the kitchen and, throughout lunch, Faye had enjoyed watching him tear off one piece of bread at a time, just so he could watch the crust shatter. He had put each piece in his mouth and sat there for a time without chewing, Faye figured that had been enough time for him to figure out the ingredients and their proportions. She was pretty sure that Joe had the equivalent of a gas chromatograph in his mouth.
Tearing each piece slowly gave him a good look at the texture. With Joe’s kitchen expertise, that texture probably told him how long the dough was kneaded, and how long it was left to rise. Faye was confident that, when she got home, she’d be able to have New Orleans-style French bread any time she wanted it, because Joe would have figured out the bakers’ secrets. And she expected to want some of this bread pretty darn often, because it was delicious.
Jodi had frittered away most of their lunch talking about good liquor and pretty men, without sharing whatever it was she’d learned that she thought would be so fascinating to an archaeologist. Faye hadn’t minded. Jodi wasn’t the only one who didn’t have enough good women friends in her life. Faye could use some more of those, too—the kind who could talk about science as easily as they could talk about the opposite sex, intriguing though that opposite sex might be. And Jodi could certainly steer a frivolous conversation around a hairpin turn and onto serious topics with lightning speed, when it suited her.
“I only came out to the park this morning because I wanted to talk to that cute little ranger, Matt. Well, I also had something to show you, but I’ll get to that.”
Somehow, Faye had begun to doubt it.
“I came to see Matt,” Jodi chattered on with a vivacity that shook her golden-brown curls, “because I don’t like my witnesses wandering away when I’m about ready to ask them some questions. I wanted to tell him so, face-to-face.”
Jodi always talked with her hands, but this seemed to be a point she wanted to
really
emphasize, because she put down her sandwich to free up her right hand for gestures. “Also, I wanted to ask the man those questions he cheated me out of yesterday by sneaking away. Tell you what, though—I got more than I came for. For sure. Turns out that he’s related to the dead woman we found. If I’d known that, I’d have been a little more delicate about telling him the victim’s name.”
Poor Matt. That explained the tears.
“Who was she?”
“Her name was Michele Broussard, but he told me that people called her Shelly. They were third cousins, and she was apparently several years older, but they’d spent some time together when they were growing up. Families around here sort of…sprawl. You don’t see all your kinfolk all the time, because you just can’t. Not when there’s two hundred and fifty of them. But still, you know who they are and you have a shared history. Matt took her death hard.”
Faye remembered how Matt had drifted away from the crime scene. “Do you think maybe he suspected it was her, all along?”
“No real reason for him to think so. Not that I know of, anyway. Her home address is in Lakeview. I have no idea how she—or her body—came to be in the Lower Nine. Neither did Matt. So how could he possibly have expected that skeleton to be his cousin?”
Jodi took a big bite out of her po-boy. “Still, imagine you had a family member who was still missing. How would it feel to know that there’d been a body in that house all the time that you were living in your crummy FEMA trailer, somewhere down St. Bernard Highway? You’d have to wonder if that nameless pile of bones had been your cousin Shelly. Or whether Shelly’s bones were lying in another pile of garbage, somewhere else in the city.”
“Have you found out anything else?”
“Only that you probably know more of Shelly’s friends. Besides Matt, I mean.”
Joe laid down a French fry and leaned forward, asking the first direct question he’d delivered since they sat down to eat. He didn’t like it when trouble came anywhere near Faye.
“Why do you think Faye might know the dead woman’s friends? Faye’s only been here a couple of months.”
“Because Shelly was an archaeologist, like Faye. She worked in this area—even helped out on one project at the battlefield—and New Orleans is a tight-knit place for a town this size. If Faye has ever met any local archaeologists—on this trip, at professional meetings, in school, whenever—then the odds are decent that they knew Shelly.”
“For example…” Jodi picked up her purse and poked around, looking for her wallet. “…Matt tells me that Shelly and Nina once worked together on a dig in the Quarter. They may have been undergrads together. Shelly was, oh, maybe two or three years behind Nina.”
Thinking of what it would be like for Nina when she found out, Faye had a queasy moment. She always felt like that when she was smacked up against the head by the fact that death really happened, and that it happened to people like her.
Jodi laid some money on the table, next to the bill, and Faye moved to do the same, but there was way too much money already there.
“Oh, you don’t need to cover our lunch…” Faye began, as Joe started to push Jodi’s money back in her direction. It had taken quite some talking on Faye’s part before Joe could be convinced to let Faye pay her own way. Ever. He was not going to take well to the notion of Jodi treating both of them.
The waitress walked by the table and Jodi handed her the money, saying, “I’ll need a receipt.”
Then she turned to Faye and Joe and waved a hand at both of them. “Settle down. It’s on the department. This was a job interview.”
Faye looked at Joe as if she expected him to express some kind of desire to be a policeman, because Jodi couldn’t possibly be talking about her.
Pocketing the receipt, Jodi said, “I remembered what you said about working for your sheriff friend as a consultant. Well, I don’t have any work for either of you at the moment, but it occurs to me that I might. I’ve got a dead archaeologist, who worked at the same place as you, Faye, and who knew some of the people working there with you. I don’t know diddly-squat about archaeology. My gut tells me that I’d better start filling out some consultant-hiring paperwork.”
Faye settled back in her chair. She wasn’t often completely surprised, but she sure hadn’t seen this one coming.
Jodi kept making her recruitment speech. “I don’t know quite how just yet, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to need the expertise of an archaeologist. Maybe two.” She aimed a nod in Joe’s general direction. “You are studying archaeology, aren’t you?”
Joe nodded.
“Okay, then. You’re both smart, and you’ve got experience in this kind of thing. The department don’t pay much, but it’s something. I’ve never known anybody that had so much money that they couldn’t use a few more dollars. Keep a spot on your schedules open for me.”
Faye remembered the size of the consultant’s fee that Sheriff Mike had paid her. It might not seem like much to Jodi, but there had certainly been enough dollars in that paycheck to get the attention of a poor and hungry graduate student. Faye liked getting paid for doing something interesting.
Jodi was scratching around in her purse again, even though she’d already paid the bill and tipped the waitress. It was time to get back to work, but Faye remembered that the detective had said that she wanted to show something to Faye, and she didn’t want Jodi to forget. Curiosity had kept Faye awake on many a night, so she’d learned the hard way to follow up on things like dangling loose ends.
She touched Jodi on the arm to get her attention. “Didn’t you have something you wanted to show me?”
“Several things, actually. I was saving them for last. Now I’ve lost ’em. They’re somewhere in this bottomless pit I call a purse.” Jodi’s arm disappeared into the handbag up to her elbow. “Oh, yeah. I stuck them all in my wallet…so I could find ’em.” She sighed and rolled her eyes. “I am all the time hiding things from myself.”
Jodi retrieved several pieces of paper and handed them over without a word, one at a time, with an expectant face that said she wanted to see what Faye made of them. They were all photocopies of papers that looked ragged and creased. The letters and images on them had been blurred by dampness, but they were mostly still legible.
“Did you find these with the body?”
“Yep. Damn, my people are good. Look at what they salvaged.” Jodi tucked the toothpick she’d been chewing on even further back in her mouth. She leaned forward to admire her technicians’ work a little more.
“How is that possible after all this time?”
“We found the originals in the pocket of her size two jeans, folded up and zipped into a plastic coin purse that turned out to be pretty darn waterproof. I’m thinking that Shelly was trying to protect them. Most everything in this town is always at least a little damp, and you can multiply that about a million times for the week of the storm.”
She pointed to blurry, discolored spots on each piece of paper. “See? A teeny bit of water oozed in around the coin purse’s zipper, and it did its damage for certain sure. My lab had a devil of a time making these things semi-legible, but they managed. If Shelly had stuck this stuff, unprotected, in her pocket, my techs would’ve been stuck working with nothing but woodpulp.”
She kept doling out the papers to Faye, one at a time. Joe leaned over Faye’s shoulder to get a better look.
The first paper was a photocopy of a list of names—apparently surnames—that had been written on lined paper. They were still decipherable, despite some serious blurring, because the handwriting had been large, round, and clearly inscribed. The first and third names on the list, Landry and Guidry, caught her eye, as did the last one, Broussard. The intervening names—Bergeron, McCaffrey, Johnson, Martin, Dupuit, and Prejean—meant nothing.
“Shelly’s name was Broussard, right? Matt’s is Guidry?” Faye searched for something familiar in the other names. “And Charles’ is Landry?”
“Yep. You’ve gotta remember that those names are all a little bit like Smith and Jones in these parts. So are some of the others. But it sure does seem like a coincidence that one of those names belongs to Shelly, and another belongs to Charles, who worked with her, and another belongs to Matt, whose girlfriend works with them both. This is a teeny-tiny town, in a lot of ways.”
“Do the other names mean anything?” Joe asked.
“Not that we can tell.”
Jodi handed over another page, very similar to the first. The original had been a piece of lined paper, just like the one Faye held. Again, there was nothing on the paper but a list of names.
Faye squinted at the list. “They’re the same names. Just in a different order.”
“Exactly. And…?”
“The handwriting is different…” Joe offered.
It wasn’t just different. It was markedly different. If Faye hadn’t just read through the same list of names, she might never have deciphered some of them, written as they were in a cramped and angular hand. She looked over the list to see whether there was an obvious reason that the names’ order had been scrambled.
Had they been alphabetized?
Johnson, Guidry, Broussard, McCaffrey, Dupuit, Bergeron, Prejean, Martin, and Landry.
Nope.
“Any ideas? Why are they different? And why did Shelly need both of them badly enough to zip them up in that little bag?” Jodi asked.
Faye shrugged. “I’ve got nothing.”
“Well, I have,” Jodi said as she triumphantly held out another photocopy, this time of a newspaper clipping. The original had been tattered and dirty. Its paper had been torn in several places and pieced back together, and one corner couldn’t be salvaged. Most of the print on the copy was badly blurred, but a photograph was featured with the article, and its bold geometry was unmistakable.
Faye scrutinized the clipping. When it was first published, this photo had cast a tragic pall on the front pages of newspapers all over the country—probably all over the world. There was no mistaking the broad curve and high contrast coloration of the Superdome. There was also no mistaking the floodwaters that surrounded it. And there was no doubt about why this bleak picture put an incongruous smile on Jodi’s face.
“She survived the storm.”
Jodi responded with a quick nod, but she didn’t say anything. She was waiting for more. What was it? Faye understood what the photo showed. But what did it mean? Then the answer hit her.
“This shows us that Shelly survived for a good while—long enough for a photographer to get on a helicopter and take this picture, and long enough for a newspaper to print and distribute it. That was a matter of several days, I’d say, and we’ll know for sure as soon as we find the newspaper where this article appeared. And she didn’t spend those days trapped in a flooded house, waiting to die. She went somewhere and bought a newspaper. Or somebody did.”
Faye drummed her fingers on the table’s wooden top. “That means that it was probably several days after the storm before she went to the flooded-out house where we found her. Then she…what? Drowned? It’s possible, if she didn’t swim well, or if she hit her head and fell in. But by that time, she wasn’t dealing with waves and wind and a deadly current. Just oily, filthy, stinking water that wasn’t moving a bit. You can drown in that, but not as easily. And if she didn’t drown, then my notion that somebody brought her dead body to that house and hid it there doesn’t seem so nutty after all.”
“Oh, she didn’t drown. I forgot to tell you that part. The medical examiner said that he could tell from the condition of the bones of Shelly’s neck that she’d been strangled to the point that her neck was broken. So you were right. That’s one reason I wanted you for a consultant—because people with your analytical skills and attention to detail are right a whole lot of the time. But what else does this clipping tell us? And don’t forget that this is still a job interview. Dazzle me with your deductive powers. No, wait. Let Joe do it.”
