CHAPTER FIVE
Sergeant Larry Fields was a brick wall of a human being, and Ella’s hand looked miniscule in his when she shook it.
They were in the lobby of the Field Operations Bureau, the division of the New Orleans Police Department responsible for patrol operations and inter-agency assignments.
They were the ones who had been tasked with the hands-on work of the Creed transfer.
‘Good to meet you both,’ Fields said to Ella and Ripley. He had a well-trimmed grey mane on top of his boulder of a head, but he had a teddy bear smile that seemed at odds with his mountainous build. Ella took an instant liking to him.
‘You too,’ Ella said. ‘You’re in charge of the Creed situation?’
‘For my sins. I was also the unlucky one who got to raid Lindsey Doyle’s house a few weeks back.
Creed was the responsibility of Investigation and Support, but since the FBI thinks it’s all connected, they lumped the Creed and Doyle business together.
With this luck, I’m not expecting a Powerball win any time soon.
You two are both connected to the case?’
‘More than I’d like to admit,’ Ella said. ‘Has our director been in touch?’
‘Yup, been talking to him this morning. The same goes for Terrance Dever. Once they give me the all-clear, we’ll be in Louisiana State within a few hours. It’ll probably be late at night too, so be ready for that.’
Unlike civilian arrests, prison extractions were best done at night when energy levels were low and inmates were already tired from the day. Most prison stabbings happened in the early morning when tensions were high and people were alert enough to act out.
‘Does Creed know we’re coming?’ Ripley asked.
‘His lawyers have told him the deal, but he doesn’t know he’s being transferred. Dever doesn’t want to risk that.’
Ella nodded. If Creed let slip to another inmate that he was being transferred, word would spread. Someone might decide they wanted to be the one who shivved him before he left. Killing Austin Creed would make for a hell of a milestone on a prison resume.
‘Anyway, not much is going to happen for a few days, so if you ladies want to explore NOLA, go ahead. It’s only-’ Fields checked his watch - ‘2PM, so go hit up the Italian place down the block. I’d come with you, but I’m up to my neck in dead women in alleyways.’
‘Yeah, come on,’ Ripley said to Ella. ‘I haven’t eaten since I left the house, and that feels like days ago.’
Ella looked at Fields. ‘Actually, do you have the case files on Doyle? Anything the NOPD put together?’
‘Sure, but it’s a mess. Creed and Doyle got folded into the same pile when the FBI took an interest. You want to go through it?’
‘If you don’t mind.’
‘Not at all. Take a seat in one of the side offices. I’ll bring everything through.’ He turned and started down the corridor. ‘Follow me.’
Ripley waited until Fields was four steps ahead, then turned to Ella with a look that could have stripped paint. It was the specific expression of a woman who had been promised a meal and had it snatched away, and who wanted that fact acknowledged before she was willing to move on.
Ella mouthed later and gestured after Fields.
Ripley’s expression didn’t change. She held it a beat longer to ensure the message had landed, then followed.
***
Ella sat in a side office with two folders in front of her. The NOPD had been thorough with their documentation of Lindsey Doyle’s house. There were over 300 shots covering every room, close-ups of surfaces, backs of cupboards and spaces under beds.
But it was all a load of nothing. Or rather, nothing that told Ella anything she didn’t already know about Lindsey Doyle, which was that the woman had been meticulous about leaving as little of herself behind as possible.
She set the Doyle photographs aside and picked up the Creed file.
Ella had never been to Austin Creed’s alligator farm.
She’d built the entire case against Austin Creed based on behavioral profiling and had never once set foot on his property.
Looking at the photographs now, she felt the strange disjunction of seeing a place that had been central to her professional life and finding it completely alien.
The farm was about twenty miles outside the city.
The NOPD shots showed a property that had been left to nature quickly and without ceremony.
The holding pens ran along the left side of the main compound; long, low concrete enclosures with rusted gate hinges and standing water gone dark and still.
A chest freezer sat outside the nearest pen with its lid propped open.
Beside it stood a row of feeding poles stacked against the fence like javelins.
There was a skinning table under a corrugated iron lean-to.
Heavy wading boots, size twelve or thirteen, were still parked at the back door as though their owner had just stepped out of them.
The hatchery building was a low concrete block near the rear of the property. Inside, the incubation units sat empty on their shelving. A hand-drawn temperature log was still pinned to the wall. Someone had been meticulous about that, at least.
She worked through the shots one by one and spent considerable time on each. After all, she had all the time in the world.
The farmhouse interior was sparse. Austin Creed had lived alone and didn’t care about it.
His farmhouse was vast judging by how many different rooms appeared in the photos.
The kitchen had a single plate still in the drying rack.
There was a cast iron skillet on the stove still with old grease in it.
A bottle of hot sauce sat on the shelf. The counters were tea-stained, and Ella thought it was odd that her and Austin Creed could actually have something in common.
Ella worked through the other rooms. In what she guessed was the living room, a beaten-up sofa faced a television.
The hallway had a row of coat hooks and none of them were occupied.
Two spare rooms appeared to have been used for storage, both of which housed boxes and bags of animal feed.
There was a pair of thick rubber gloves on the floor beside the bags.
Then came a utility room with a chest freezer. Next to it was head-height metal shelving holding wire mesh and rolls of plastic sheeting. There were some overalls in plastic packaging, and Ella paused on that photograph a little longer than the others.
Curiosity satisfied, next up was Austin Creed’s bedroom.
His bed was still a mess from when he’d slept in it the night before she’d captured him.
On his bedside table sat a box of painkillers, a penknife, two receipts and a music box with a pelican sitting on top.
After the bedroom room came what Ella could only describe as an office, though it felt too generous a word for it.
A desk pushed against the wall, a cheap swivel chair, a computer tower that the NOPD had clearly already seized –the power cable was still there but the unit was gone.
There was a corkboard on the wall above it, the kind used for pinning invoices and delivery notes, and it still had a few on it – feed suppliers, a vet’s business card, what looked like a permit renewal from the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.
In the corner of the room, propped against the wall, was a rifle in a soft case.
Legal, almost certainly. Half the properties in the parish would have one. Ella looked at it anyway.
The office door opened. Ripley stepped in with two shop-bought coffee cups. She said, ‘Since you deprived me of dinner, this is the next best thing, even though you don’t deserve it.’
‘Thanks, partner.’ Ella took one. ‘You didn’t waste any time.’
‘Neither did you. Why do you want to look through that file?’
‘Not sure. We never went to Creed’s farm, and I was always curious about it.’
‘I’d ask if there’s anything interesting in there but I already know the answer.’
‘The place is a wreck, and it’s full of old junk and animal food. I guess Ed Gein set the gold standard for serial killer farmhouses of horror and no one is ever going to come close.’
‘Not even a single bowl made from a human skull,’ Ripley said. ‘What about Doyle’s house?’
Ella went back to the first batch of photos and slid a few across the table, but Ripley seemed uninterested. ‘Conveniently barren. I was looking for pictures of her family but there aren’t any.’
‘Because she was smart enough to get rid of them. She’d have known the cops would have descended on her house eventually.’ Ripley slid the pictures back to Ella. ‘So, we came all this way to look at pictures of an empty house and a farm full of alligator food.’
‘The Creed transfer is why we came.’
‘I know why we came,’ Ripley said. ‘I’m just noting that so far, New Orleans has given me no dinner and average coffee.’
Ella went to respond, but the door knocked and Sergeant Fields leaned in with an apologetic look on his face. He was almost too large for the doorframe.
‘Sorry to interrupt you both. Either of you got a minute?’
‘Sure,’ Ella said. Ripley gestured with her cup.
Fields slid inside. ‘We were called to a scene a couple of hours ago. Young woman, alleyway, about three miles from here. The scene’s a little weird, and the body’s still on site. I could use some behavioral eyes on it if you’ve got some time on your hands?’
Ella looked at him. ‘How weird are we talking?’
‘The victim was strangled, and she had figurine glued to her hand.
‘A figurine?’ Ripley asked. ‘What kind of figurine?’
‘A ballet dancer.’
‘And how do you mean – glued?’
‘Exactly that. Some industrial adhesive by the looks of it. We’re not sure yet.’
Ella was already closing the folder. A ballet dancer. Glued to a dead woman’s hand. There was a story in that, and she wanted to know what it was.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘We’ve got time.’