PART IX INTO THE DARKNESS #6
Little Kecia was cute as a button, with curly hair and big eyes. She was also confused and scared as hell since—as she told me earnestly—her mama had gone away a couple weeks ago and apparently died. This must have been when the Kingmans had planted LaToya in Crazy Eli Gage’s barge for us to find.
I made sure the FBI people took special care of Kecia and when all the chaos had died down, I accompanied the agents who had been tasked with taking her to her new home: that of her grandparents, Kecia and Darnell Martyn.
They wept as they clutched her in their arms.
They’d lost their beloved daughter but I’d brought them the next best thing.
Among the freed captives, I also met Nia Carter, the young woman whom Art Hillerman had been hired to find.
I told her about how her family had hired Art to find her and how he’d been murdered while doing so.
Nia had been with LaToya the night they’d been hired to attend Tad Jr’s bachelor party.
‘It all started out as usual,’ she told me.
‘We was dancin’ topless, in high heels and thongs and then fucking Tad and his buddies.
There was drugs and booze, but at a bachelor party, that ain’t strange.
But then, as it wound down, they brought out a new round of drinks and after we drank ’em, we blacked out.
Woke up in that cave—underground, in cells in the dark, not knowing where we was. From then on, we was slaves.’
I asked Nia about LaToya Martyn.
‘LaToya, man, she never gave up. At first, she always talked about escapin’. Got caught a few times trying to get out of there, so they reduced her rations, starved her so she didn’t have the energy to do it again.
‘But then she got pregnant with little Kecia and she couldn’t do it no more.
That was a few years ago. Then she got pregnant again, but she was so thin and starved, the baby never took and was stillborn.
Then the storm came and she ran out into it with her dead baby in an old doll rigged up to a wooden cross.
If she wasn’t going to get out, then she’d try to get some kinda word out. It was her last bid for freedom.’
I nodded. ‘It worked.’
Other things came out, too.
LaToya’s sudden death at Houston Methodist Hospital was reinvestigated.
Security footage was found showing the female shift-change nurse who had refilled LaToya’s intravenous drip just before she’d died.
This ‘nurse’ was seen in the footage slipping away as a bunch of doctors and other nurses descended on LaToya’s room when LaToya began crashing out.
No-one, however, could identify the suspect woman since she’d been wearing standard hospital scrubs, rubber gloves, a sterile hat and a face mask.
No-one, that is, until I saw the video and froze it on a frame clearly showing the five earrings in the suspect’s ears.
Mary Beth the bodyguard—now dead, shot by Audrey—had done the Kingmans’ dirty work there.
The death of Rodney Lowdon, the attendant at the Lake Charles morgue and my key contact there, was investigated further, too.
It was confirmed that Rodney had indeed died of an opioid overdose, but even though the timing of his death was suspicious, it couldn’t be proved that anyone had forced the drugs on him and killed him.
The Catholic Church’s role in the matter became fodder for some elements of the media, but it was soon discovered that any Catholic officials who had been involved with the old mansion near Delacroix had either died or been reassigned to the Vatican where they were unavailable for comment.
DNA tests were done on the bones Audrey and I found at the base of the semi-flooded elevator shaft in the abandoned mine in Florida.
While most of them were too degraded to return viable DNA matches, a few returned criminal matches for Black men who had been jailed for crimes in the 1980s.
All prison records for them had been conveniently lost and it was presumed that they had been sent down into the mine as leased convicts and simply never come out again.
Of course, as the media descended on the story, they soon found out about Audrey’s and my roles in it.
We were interviewed on a bunch of news channels and finally on 60 Minutes.
During that interview, I took the host to Victorville and down the Acheron River to Dead Man’s Creek, to the spot where it had all started: where LaToya Martyn’s baby had been discovered by some kids inside an antique doll, washed up on the side of a dere-lict house after a hurricane.
When the interview was done—and the host went off to her air-conditioned motorboat and the crew filmed B-roll, panning their cameras over the side-tilted house that was still there and the vast swamp that stretched southward to the sea—I gazed into the shadows of Dead Man’s Creek.
Once again I found myself thinking about LaToya Martyn’s courage.
Despite starvation and imprisonment, her last brave act of defiance—sending her baby down Dead Man’s Creek inside an old doll—had exposed the Kingmans, the Dearborns, the Fishers, and all the other families in their whole vile world.
I’d just helped.
Tad Kingman Sr would get seventy years in federal prison for each charge of human trafficking and enslavement, to be served consecu-tively, which meant he’d die in jail.
So did Beau. He went to prison in a wheelchair, his knees still broken.
Mrs Clara Kingman got sixty-five years per charge but she killed herself the day before she was required to turn up to prison. Hanged herself.
The other Southern families received similar sentences.
Their contacts in the various state police departments were all exposed—even the FBI people who had arranged for Audrey and me to get nice new jobs there, although there weren’t actually many of them: they turned out to be only a couple of recent politi-cal appointees like the new intake chair, Michael McCarthy.
The once-missing investigator Bill Brewster was exonerated and all outstanding warrants for his arrest were quashed. He was also interviewed a few times on TV.
More importantly, he was able to move to Houston, where his daughter and his granddaughters lived.
I met up with him one day as he watched the two girls play soccer in a local park.
‘I wanted to apologise again for bringing those men to your apartment in Morgan City,’ I said. ‘You’d successfully disappeared off the grid and I screwed it all up. I honestly didn’t know they were tracking me.’
Brewster shook his head as he watched the girls chase the -soccer ball he’d recently bought for them. ‘It’s okay, son. You got me my life back, so the way I see it, I came out in front.’
He turned to face me. ‘You know, I see a lot of me in you. The attention to detail. The sheer bloody-minded determination to -figure out the puzzle. You solved the case, which was further than I got. You’re a fine detective, son.’
‘Thank you, sir. I think you’re pretty good, too. You got far enough to get targeted by the Kingmans.’
He looked wistfully out over the park.
‘Which raises a new problem,’ he said. ‘Now that I’m back on the grid and back in the world, I gotta figure out what I’m gonna do with myself.’
‘Sir, I might have an answer for that,’ I said.
Houston, Texas
The bell above the door of my office rang as I opened it to leave.
‘Heidi, Bill, I’m going to lunch,’ I said.
‘Gotcha, boss, we’ll hold the fort,’ Heidi said from behind her desk.
‘Can you grab me some wings, please?’ Bill Brewster said from his desk.
As soon as Heidi had become a fully licensed private investigator, I’d invited her to be my partner in the firm.
It might have been the only time I’ve ever heard her squeal with delight.
We got rid of the old reception counter and turned the front room into an office that she shared with my other new partner, Bill Brewster.
Given these changes, I also changed the name of the business. The sign on the door now read:
the detectives
s. speedman – h. spunkmeyer – w. brewster
licensed in texas and louisiana
A few minutes later, at twelve noon on the dot, I entered the Hooters off Kirby Drive.
‘Hey there, handsome,’ Millie-Mae said with a broad smile. ‘Table for one? The usual?’
‘The usual for me, please, Millie-Mae, but a table for two today, thanks,’ I said.
Audrey was meeting me for lunch.
Not a work lunch, but a personal lunch.
A date.
(Dr Lucy had been so proud when I told her that I’d asked Audrey out for lunch. I hadn’t told her about the sex in the motel. I figured that was personal.)
After the Kingman thing, Audrey had been quickly promoted within the FBI and was now working out of the Dallas field office. I was so happy for her.
Then the front door opened and Audrey walked in.
She smiled at me in a way that no woman has ever smiled at me before.
I turned back to Millie-Mae.
‘You know, Millie-Mae, I think I might take a look at the menu and try something different today. It’d be good for me.’
THE END