“Lower Ninth Ward.”
Beau dropped the wallet and contents in a brown paper bag, writing his name and unit number on the outside, along with Freddie London’s name, and passed it back to the pathologist, who would send it along with the cadaver.
Cruz followed Beau into an office where a computer actually worked. The NOPD and Louisiana State Police computers were down, but the FBI was up. Freddie London, same DOB and SSN, had fourteen arrests, from rape to armed robbery, extortion, burglary, and two heroin busts.
“Jesus, what’s he doing on the street?” Cruz said as Beau reached into the small NOPD file on the desk to pull out a printout of NOPd’s Most Wanted. Freddie London was number twelve on the list.
Beau sat in the gray metal chair behind the gray metal desk and looked out the small window at the bright sky outside. He pulled his shirt away from his chest and fanned it. There was some sort of air conditioner working in the hangar at least.
“What are the mathematical probabilities?” he said. “Two of our most-wanted stone-freakin’ criminals are found a short distance from one another with holes in their heads, bullet trajectories nearly identical, through-and-through wounds so we can’t compare bullets.”
Cruz shrugged.
“Who is Sting?”
“You gotta be kiddin’.”
Beau shrugged.
“You didn’t have MTV in that cabin?”
Copeland peeked in and said, “They’re bringing in six more.”
Floaters. Three black, two white, one Asian, a teenager. Beau and Cruz watched Dr. Sumner examine them, keeping as far away from the stench as possible.
Beau found Copeland later, napping on a cot.
“You awake?”
“Huh?” Copeland blinked open his eyes and yawned. “I am now.”
Beau pulled up a folding chair and took out his notepad. “Describe everything, will ya? The area, how the bodies were lying, everything.” He handed Copeland a fresh Mountain Dew.
Juanita Cruz found a CD player and a Led Zeppelin CD and began playing one particular song over and over again, letting it reverberate through the hangar. After the first fifty times, Beau’d had enough of the little ditty called “When the Levee Breaks.” He hoped someone would complain. No way he could tell a partner who had lost everything that the high-pitched male voice bemoaning that when the levee breaks he’ll have no place to stay was getting to be too much. The electric guitars just kept groaning and the man kept singing about how crying won’t help you, praying won’t do you no good, ending with the refrain “going down, going down.” He watched Cruz and knew she was listening intently, but her face revealed no emotion. It was creepy.
During that shift nine bodies were brought in, all natural deaths. Drownings, classified accordingly by the pathologists, using the NASH classification system. Humans died a natural death, accidental death, suicide, or homicide. In New Orleans, where things were done differently on purpose, Beau had seen deaths listed beyond the NASH system. “Death by Misadventure” was the most common. Nearly everyone in Louisiana knew someone who’d died that way. Usually it was preceded by the victim calling out to friends, “Hey, y’all, watch this.” The victim would then jump off a roof or dive into a sluggish bayou that looked deeper than it was.
Beau thought “Death by Stupidity” would be more appropriate. That evening as the pathologists, Sumner and two others, examined the bloated bodies of these latest Katrina victims, Beau exchanged stories with them. Stories of weird deaths, morons playing chicken with trains, idiots playing Russian roulette, one particular cretin who told his buddies he was going into the house next-door to investigate a bad smell and lit a match in a house with a gas leak.
Cruz gave Beau a pained expression when the stories stopped and he had to explain. “The more of this you see, the more you need to laugh. Release the pressure. You should know that.”
Just before dawn, Copeland brought in a third body with a bullet wound in the forehead. He looked at Beau and said with a sly grin, “You been sneaking out and popping these dudes?”
Beau gave him a long, withering stare, the stare of the plains warrior, unsmiling, unemotional. Copeland shuddered, maybe teasing, maybe not, and stepped away. John Raven Beau had a reputation. He was a killer, plain and simple. Since joining NOPD he’d gunned down five men, the most infamous in the Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge, the only living swamp within the city limits of a major American city, 23,000 acres’ worth. Beau tracked a cop killer through the swamp through the night and left his body next to a railroad trestle.
In the eyes of every rookie he met, once they realized who he was, Beau saw the recognition, the morbid fascination, and the distancing, because Beau was a dangerous man, no doubt. It kept Beau on the outside, kept him separate from the brotherhood of cops, kept him isolated and alienated as he’d been his entire life from his first day in kindergarten when the kids stared at him as if he came from an alien world.
Beau moved to the body bag and waited for Dr. Sumner. Cruz came out of the office, carrying her CD player, the taller of the Oregon cops in tow. His name was Al and he seemed smitten with Juanita Cruz or was just simply on the make, big-time. He spent a lot of time schmoozing with her and Beau couldn’t think of a better way to distract her.
She turned on the CD and the wailing guitars and driving beat of the levee-breaking song echoed through the hangar. Dr. Sumner shook his head as he unzipped the body bag, which held a dark-skinned man with long black hair and a bullet wound in his forehead.
“This one’s older.”
Up closer, Beau saw the man had some gray in his hair and obvious age lines on a face flaccid in death. The man was wet, but hadn’t been in the water long. Sumner found a wallet with three Louisiana driver’s licenses with three different names but the same face on them. The oldest license had the man’s real name, one familiar to everyone in the NOPD. Abdon Jeffries, listed as an AA — African American — by NOPD, although Abdon was a mulatto with a white mother. Some things never changed in the South. If you were part African, you were African. A convicted felon with thirteen arrests, Jeffries was number three on NOPd’s Most Wanted list.
“Wound’s perforated, right?” Cruz asked as she stepped closer.
Sumner lifted the head, felt under it, and said, “Yep.”
Through-and-through, like the others, round, neat, clean. “Straight path,” Beau added. “How do you do that?”
“Sniper?” said Cruz.
“Have to be dead-on perfect.”
Beau stepped over to where Copeland sat with one of the triage nurses from the next hangar, where they worked on the injured, and asked the sergeant, “Where?”
“South Shore Harbor. Next to the capsized casino.”
Cops didn’t believe in coincidences, even if the word was in the dictionary.
“I didn’t recognize him,” Copeland said. “Abdon Jeffries, right? That’s the bastard who shot that Seventh District cop. Crippled him, remember?”
Beau closed his eyes for a second. Yeah, he remembered. Jeffries hired a sharp lawyer and then the D.A. went in unprepared and Jeffries walked. He’d seen the crippled cop in a wheelchair getting into the “police only” elevator at headquarters, going up to the radio room where he worked as an operator. A desk job for a paraplegic.
Beau let out a long breath, opened his eyes, and spotted his lieutenant entering the hangar. He went straight to him, about to tell him about the three men with holes in their heads, but Merten shook him off, heading over to a pair of men standing in the far doorway.