Chasing Justice: A Matt Royal Mystery (20 page)

“I can’t imagine that had anything to do with Linda’s death,” I said. “Somebody with access to the law enforcement databases would have to have a reason to check Linda’s prints against Darlene’s. That’s a big stretch.”

“It should have been caught,” Devlin said. “It’s a very important part of how we protect our agents.”

“Why was Linda posing as Favereaux’s wife?” J.D. asked.

“Twenty years ago, when Linda was still Darlene, Jim came across some information that a contract had been put out on her from Los Angeles. When he saw the name, Darlene Pelletier, he got to thinking about a girl from his old neighborhood, Connie Rohan. He’d had a short affair with her when he first returned to New Orleans after college. He was aware that Connie had married a lowlife named Bobby Pelletier and wondered if Darlene could be Connie’s daughter.”

“Why would somebody in Los Angeles put a hit on Darlene?” I asked.

“Darlene was a mess. She’d been raised by her grandmother, Connie’s mother, in a shack down in the delta. When Connie married Bobby, he wouldn’t let the little girl stick around, so Connie’s mom took her in and moved south to the area where she had grown up. The grandmother died when Darlene was fifteen, and she came back to live with Connie and Bobby. She took the name Pelletier, although she was never adopted or legally changed her name.”

“No wonder we couldn’t get hold of the adoption records,” J.D. said. “There weren’t any.”

“No,” Michel said. “Darlene just moved in, and Bobby started having sex with her. He was keeping her doped up and even pimped her out a few times. It got to be too much for Darlene, and she left with a creep she’d met in a bar. The creep was a drug runner from Los Angeles, and off they went to California. Six months later, the creep was murdered by his own people, and Darlene witnessed it. She knew the killers. Somehow she survived the murder and got back to New Orleans. The people who killed her boyfriend put the hit on her.”

“So what was Favereaux’s part in this?” J.D. asked.

“He looked up Connie and offered to provide protection for Darlene. Connie told Jim about the sexual abuse from Bobby and said that Darlene needed to get as far away as she could. Jim thought he was just doing her a favor. He asked Connie if she wanted him to take care of Bobby. Told her the incest alone would be enough to send Bobby away. That’s when Connie told him that he was the father, not Bobby.”

“Jim accepted that?”

“No, but he took Darlene in and had DNA tests run. The tests weren’t as precise back then, but they were good enough to convince Jim that he was Darlene’s father. Jim was either going to leave the agency or get some help from DIA. The agency accepted Jim’s assurance that the test results were positive and decided to give Darlene a new identity and move Jim out of New Orleans. He was ready to move on, anyway. The DIA set him up in Atlanta.”

“Do you think that old contract got executed?” J.D. asked. “That somebody found her and killed her this many years later?”

“No. Jim took care of the contract. He knew where it came from, and let’s just say that the ones who put out the contract don’t exist anymore.”

“You said Linda was an agent,” I said.

“Yes. Jim thought the best way to cover her trail was to marry her. He wanted her to have a rock-solid legend. DIA got her a new name, new documents, and even carried out a sham wedding. It always seemed like overkill to me, but I was in grade school when all that was going on.”

“What if Jim ever decided to get married? For real. How would that have worked?” J.D. asked.

Michel looked at Katrina. “I guess the agency would have cooked up a divorce and moved Linda into other operations,” she said.

“Anyway,” Michel said, “it turned out that Darlene was a very smart young lady. With Jim’s help, she kicked the drugs and got her life straightened out. Jim thought she had the potential to be an agent and convinced the bosses that she could be a big help to him. So they sent her through the whole training course, and she and Jim have worked together all these years.”

“You said they were getting close on the drug group here. How close?”

“Jim hadn’t gotten to the top yet. He had worked his way into middle management, mostly by throwing money around, paying for drugs, that sort of thing. He set up a shell company that could launder some of the drug money, and the bad guys were warming up to him. We figured he’d be another year getting to the top.”

“What was Linda doing?” J.D. asked.

“She was mostly playing the trophy wife. She’d hang out with some of the wives of the people Jim was sucking up to, picking up what gossip she could.”

“When we did a time line on Jim’s movements the night of the murder,” J.D. said, “it seemed pretty convenient that he was gone for just the time that it took for the murder to take place.”

“Jim told us that he’d gone to sleep on the sofa in the living room and woke up about eleven. Said he was starving and craving a Big Mac. Linda was soaking in the hot tub when he left. Nobody else was in the house. He came back and found her dead. He grabbed a pistol and searched the house. Nobody was there.”

“What if the killer was just after Linda?” I asked. “He was watching the house and waited for Jim to leave.”

“We thought about that. It’s entirely plausible. We just don’t know who would have had any reason to kill Linda, other than somebody involved in the investigation they were working on.”

“If that was the case,” I said, “I’d think the killer would have waited around for Jim.”

“I agree,” Michel said. “So do my bosses. That’s why we need to know what you know.”

“Who were the drug people Jim was investigating here?” J.D. asked.

“I can give you a list, but I doubt it’ll mean much to you. Unless there’s somebody in your file who shows up on that list.”

“What about Bannister?” I asked.

“What about him?”

“You brought it up when you asked J.D. if she knew anything about the case.”

“I guess I did. Katrina probably knows more about that than I do,” Michel said.

I looked at Katrina. “Well?”

“When I got back from Croatia, our boss asked me to take a look at the case Jim Favereaux was working on. He thought a new pair of eyes might find something everybody had overlooked.”

“Did you find anything?”

“There was nothing in the information Jim and Linda had been sending us, but there were other agents working on other drug-smuggling cases in the Southeast. I went over those and started putting together a matrix, trying to plug all the facts into all the little squares and see if something we’d missed took shape. I wanted to know if anything the other agents were finding had any bearing of Jim’s case. If so, I’d alert Jim and he could go from there.”

“Did anything pop up?”

“Nothing earth shattering, but I did see one thing that only began to make sense after Bannister was killed.”

“What?” I asked.

“We have an operation being run out of Miami, trying to get to the top of a ring of drug importers. We think they have ties to other groups throughout the Southeast. One of the names that came up was Nate Bannister. That, in and of itself, didn’t mean anything, because I’d never heard of the man. As I kept looking, the same name popped up in an investigation going on in Atlanta. I thought he might be some kind of conduit between the Miami people and the ones in Atlanta. We ran the name through our databases and came up with three or four people with the same name, but only one was in the Southeast. The one in Sarasota.”

“Did you send that information to Favereaux?” I asked.

Katrina shook her head. “I found it on Monday, the same day Jim called the agency duty officer from the Tampa airport. Then, I find out that Bannister was killed the same night that Linda was murdered. I began to wonder if the murders could be connected.”

“Was Bannister mentioned in any of Favereaux’s reports?” I asked.

“No.”

“Did you think that strange?”

“Maybe. Jim had made some headway with the drug people in this area, but he hadn’t gotten too far up the ladder. He was salting the trail with lots of money, and was beginning to make real progress. If Bannister was involved with the local drug dealers, I would think Jim might have found that out. Then again, maybe Bannister was so far up the chain of command that Jim hadn’t run across him yet.”

“Or,” I said, “maybe our dead Bannister wasn’t the same one who was involved with the drugs.”

“There’s that,” Katrina said, “but if he’s involved, I think it’s on the money-laundering side. I’d think Jim’s money would have drawn Bannister out.”

“If he was involved in the drug business,” I said, “there’d be a lot of reasons for him to be killed that didn’t involve my client or a lover’s spat.”

“You’re right, Matt,” Katrina said. “Maybe we can work together and find out what Bannister was up to.”

“Why would you care?” I asked. “Now that he’s dead.”

“Two reasons. We want to shut down this operation, and if we find his killers, maybe we can get them to trade information for a lighter prison sentence.”

“And the second reason?” I asked.

“I think whoever killed Bannister may have also killed Linda Favereaux. And there’s no walking away when you kill one of our agents.”

We talked for another hour. J.D. gave him a copy of her file and answered all his questions. They compared the names on Michel’s list with the names J.D. had turned up. There was no connection that we could see.

I went over the details of the Bannister murder, as I understood them this early in the case. I told Katrina and Devlin about what seemed to be a professional hit on Bannister, and the unprofessional manner in which Linda Favereaux was killed. I also told her about my suspicions that Abby Lester was the target of a frame-up, and unless Abby was involved in the drug business, I could see no reason why anybody would want to involve her.

Finally, we called it quits. It had been an informative evening, and a pleasant one as we sat with good company under a great Banyan tree, the rays of a full moon shining through its branches, and the whisper of the anemic surf gently assaulting the nearby beach.

We were walking toward the parking area that adjoined the patio. “One more thing,” J.D. said. “I need to talk to Mr. Favereaux.”

There was a moment of silence, and then Devlin said, “I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

“We’re supposed to have full cooperation here,” J.D. said.

“We’ve given you everything we have.”

“Except Favereaux,” J.D. said.

“And we’d give him to you if we could.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s in the wind.”

“Gone?”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t know where he is?”

“No. He met our agent at the Atlanta airport and was taken to the safe house up near Blue Ridge, Georgia. When the Atlanta agent showed up the next day, Favereaux was gone.”

J.D.’s voice was tinged with sarcasm. “Didn’t that seem a little strange?”

“Of course. We’re looking for him. A big manhunt, actually, but the security is real tight on the whole thing.”

“Any sign of struggle at the safe house?”

“No. It looks like he just walked away.”

“I know Blue Ridge,” I said. “It’s kind of isolated. How would he have gotten out?”

“We don’t know.”

“Any cell phone activity?” J.D. asked.

“He left his phone in the safe house.”

J.D. was angry. “Don’t you think it would have been important for me to know about this? You said your agency had him.”

Katrina said, “I’m sorry, J.D., but the word came down from on high in our agency that we were not to volunteer that information unless you brought it up. You brought it up and we told you. We did have him, but we lost him.”

“Do you think he killed Linda?” J.D. asked.

“No.”

“Then why would he run?”

“We don’t know. The safe house may have been compromised, and he decided he had to leave,” Katrina said.

“Then why no contact with your agency?” J.D. asked.

“He might be concerned that there’s a mole in our agency, and if he contacts us, the bad guys will find him.”

“Or,” I said, “he might be a rogue who killed his own daughter rather than be found out.”

Katrina shook her head. “That’s the one that keeps me awake at night.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

“Is Favereaux the killer?” J.D. asked. We were sitting on my patio overlooking the bay. It was nearing ten, and the moon was high and full, its soft light adding a mellow glow to the mangrove islands that poked out of the water.

“Maybe, but I can’t see a man who has gone to such lengths to protect his daughter all these years killing her. It doesn’t fit.”

“Maybe somebody else killed Linda and Jim knows who it was. He may be after the killer.”

“He wouldn’t have to do that alone,” I said. “His agency would have given him all the help he needed, and would have sanctioned his killing Linda’s murderer. Those agencies take care of their own.”

“I think he’s the key to solving my case. Either he killed Linda or he knows who did. If I can’t find him, this case is going to end up in the cold case files.”

“Based on what Katrina told us, Favereaux may have some bearing on Abby’s case as well. If Bannister was part of the drug business, that might explain his murder.”

“For whatever reason, Favereaux is running from his agency. If they can’t find him, we don’t stand a chance.”

“We’ve got another big problem. What do we do about Bill Lester?”

“I noticed that you left out the stuff about the chief while we were talking to Devlin and Katrina.”

“Yeah. I don’t know how Bill fits into all this, or if he does, and I don’t want a bunch of government snoops looking into it. Not yet, anyway. I guess we could run Bill’s tag number through the bridge camera system, but I don’t really think that’s a good idea.”

“I thought about that,” J.D. said, “and decided it’s a very bad idea. Bill goes through the reports from that system every morning. He’ll know somebody was looking for his car. And even if he missed it somehow, I can only get that stuff through Sharkey. He and the chief are tight as ticks, and I don’t think Sharkey would do it.”