PART II SWAMP COUNTRY #3
‘Ever met a woman named LaToya, Eli? LaToya Martyn?’ I said. ‘She’s a prostitute from Houston.’
‘Couldn’t tell ya the last time I went to Houston,’ Eli said. ‘Golly, it musta been back when that dumb negro Obama became president. Say, is he still president?’
I saw the woman in the suit roll her eyes.
I turned to her.
‘And who are you, ma’am?’ I found myself asking.
(This surprised me. I had no pressing reason to know who she was at all, but I found that I wanted to know. This had never happened to me before. I’d have to tell Dr Lucy about it.)
‘Special Agent Audrey Mills, FBI,’ she said.
I must say I was rather thankful for the presence of Audrey Mills of the FBI right then, for if she hadn’t been there, it might have been easy for the sheriff and the deputies of Victorville to have some sport with me.
If they’d been in on the dead-baby-in-the-doll mystery, they could’ve easily made me vanish and invented whatever story they liked.
Special Agent Mills added, ‘I’m with the Victim Services Division at the Bureau’s Dallas office. What do you know about the newborn baby that was found here?’
‘A few things,’ I said.
‘A few things?’ Sheriff Thompson spat. ‘Maybe like whose baby it was and who killed it, Mister Fancy Private Eye?’
‘It wasn’t killed, Sheriff. The baby was stillborn.’
Sheriff Thompson’s face went red.
Audrey Mills cut in, jerking her chin at me. ‘Are you done here, Mr Speedman?’
‘Well—’
‘Why don’t you and I head back to town and let the sheriff and his deputies talk with Mr Gage here and seal off this area so no more out-of-town private detectives can contaminate the crime scene? Then you and I can have a little chat.’
‘Okay, sure,’ I said.
I climbed across onto her airboat and hauled my little kayak into it, glancing back at the other two boats as I did so.
Throughout the whole encounter, the man in the private security outfit never took his eyes off me.
I sat opposite Special Agent Audrey Mills in the only diner in Victorville.
‘Okay, Mr Speedman, time to tell me everything you know about this—’
‘Do you think LaToya Martyn was trafficked?’ I said, cutting her off.
‘What?’
‘It’s either that or you’re operating out of your authorised area within the FBI, so I figured I’d be polite and assume it was the former.’
‘I’m sorry, say that again?’ Audrey Mills said.
I said, ‘The Victim Services Division at the FBI supports victims of federal crimes, makes sure they know their rights and get psychological support. The only area where it participates in investigations is in human trafficking and even then that’s only in an advisory capacity.
So, do you think LaToya Martyn was trafficked? Or are you going rogue?’
She looked at me again with her hard gaze.
It seemed like she was thinking carefully about what she would say next.
‘A friend of mine, a fellow agent, went missing in these parts seven years ago. Special Agent Harriet White. She was searching for a sex worker named Renata Long who went missing back in 2018. Now this baby turns up, so I decided to come by and take a look.’
‘I know about Renata Long,’ I said. ‘Worked in Sunnyside for a pimp named Tyrone Brown, just like LaToya Martyn. They both went missing at the same time.’
‘Renata Long was Harriet’s second cousin, so when Renata went missing, Harriet took an unofficial interest in the case.’
I nodded.
This explained why I’d never heard of anyone named Harriet White being on the case—I mean, here was another missing investigator and one from the FBI, no less. But since she’d been working on it on her own time, off the clock, there’d been no official record of her investigation.
Audrey said, ‘Then for some reason back in 2018, Harriet came out to Victorville following a lead on the Renata Long case and died in a single-car accident.’
‘A car accident?’
‘According to the autopsy, she didn’t die in the actual crash. She drowned. You saw that bridge on the outskirts of town, the one with the warning sign?’
‘Sure.’
‘Harriet missed the turn, skidded off the road. Her car careened down into the water and she got tangled in her seatbelt. Drowned in ten feet of water.’
‘You think that’s untrue?’
‘It’s fucking horseshit, is what it is. Harriet was the most cautious driver I ever knew. She never took a turn at speed in her life.’
I nodded. I hadn’t either.
But I knew what Audrey Mills was getting at.
‘You think it was a New Jersey skinny dip?’ I asked.
‘A what?’
‘It’s a hit technique that the New Jersey mob used to do all the time. They’d drown someone in a river or lake, then they’d put the victim in their own car and shove the car into the river or lake. Single-car accident; cause of death: drowning. It’d be easy to make that fly down here.’
Audrey Mills looked at me strangely again. ‘You’re kinda different, aren’t you?’
‘I am a little, yes. One could say that you are, too, given that you’re a victim support specialist conducting your own unofficial investigation here.’
‘I’m operating on my own initiative,’ she said evenly.
‘Have you ever actually investigated anything before?’ I asked.
‘No, but I am still FBI and I want to know what happened to my friend, so talk to me. What do you know about what’s going on here?’
I pondered this.
Even if Audrey Mills wasn’t a fully-fledged FBI agent, I figured having some kind of FBI employee on the case could only help.
And like me, she was motivated. It’d been seven years and I still wanted to find out what had happened to LaToya Martyn.
So I told her about the DNA of the baby encased in the doll and how it showed that the dead baby was LaToya Martyn’s.
‘What’s your next step?’ Audrey asked.
‘That doll had an image drawn on it, a picture of a strange trident-shaped tree,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen that image once before and I was planning on going to see it again. Want to come along?’
‘Sure. And where exactly is that image?’
‘Angola Prison,’ I said. ‘Tattooed onto the body of a multiple murderer.’
We left Victorville in our respective cars and drove across Louisiana on the I-10.
Audrey Mills drove a grey Buick, a standard-issue FBI pool car.
I drove behind her in my bigger Minnie Winnie.
A few miles out of Victorville a black Chevy Silverado pickup with tinted windows and a large front bull bar fell in a few cars behind me.
It followed us—patiently, always at a careful distance—all the way to Angola.
At one point, we came to some roadwork and as the traffic backed up, all the cars came to a stop.
I hurried to the rear of my Winnebago, peered out through the back window and got a look at the Chevy’s plates.
Halfway to the prison, I called my office.
Heidi answered on the first ring. ‘The Detective.’
‘Heidi, it’s me. Can you do a DMV check on a black Chevy Silverado, please? Louisiana plate: XZS 661.’
‘You got it, little man. Call you back shortly.’
About ten minutes later, she called me back. Heidi is very efficient.
‘Car is registered to Mr Deek W. Hammonds of Victorville, Louisiana. No outstanding tickets or violations.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Uh, yeah.’ Heidi’s voice became serious.
‘Mr Hammonds is a piece of work. Fifty, ex-Army special forces, where he reached the rank of warrant officer. Now, co-owner and operator of a company called Southern Security Systems—they provide security guards and bodyguards to companies and high net worth individuals.’
‘Private security, huh,’ I said, thinking of the silent wiry guy who’d been with the sheriff back on the Acheron River.
‘Get this,’ Heidi added, ‘he’s also a champion hunter. He’s won prizes for gator hunts in Louisiana, Georgia and Florida. In -special ops, his call-sign was The Hammer. Why’re you asking about him?’
‘Because he’s following me right now,’ I said.
Louisiana State Penitentiary
Angola, Louisiana
The Louisiana State Penitentiary—known as ‘Angola’—is the largest prison in America.
It’s a maximum-security facility that’s overcrowded and notoriously brutal.
The land on which it stands—flanked on three sides by a wide curve of the Mississippi River—was once four slave plantations. In 1880 they were joined together to become a prison.
This was no accident.
Since the Civil War in the 1860s, slavery has been outlawed in America.
With one exception.
According to the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, slavery is banned ‘except as a punishment for a crime’.
As such, almost immediately after the South lost the Civil War, a practice known as ‘convict leasing’ began.
Under it, inmates at prisons like Angola—most of them Black—would be leased out at cheap rates to local businesses to do backbreaking labour like cotton-planting and harvesting: the exact same work slaves used to do.
In the ensuing decades, free Black men in the South would find themselves arrested on bogus charges, swiftly imprisoned and then suddenly working as leased convicts on the very same plantations they’d been freed from.
Others found themselves toiling on the railroads or in the coalmines of major corporations like US Steel.
Amazingly, this loophole in the 13th Amendment has never been technically closed. Convict leasing was banned by legislation in several states in the 1920s, but to this day it’s still in the Constitution and continues in the form of forced prison work even in states as liberal as New York.
As Audrey’s Buick and my Minnie Winnie approached the main gates of Angola, we passed a chain gang of prisoners working beside the road, digging a storm drain.
All the prisoners were Black.
All were drenched in sweat from a long day of hard labour.
The Chevy that had been following us since Victorville stopped on a rise across from the prison gates and its driver, a wiry silhouette against the horizon, watched us pull into the prison’s parking lot.
As I stepped out of my car, Audrey strode over from her sedan.
‘You see the black Chevy tailing us?’ she said.
‘I did. He’s ex–special forces. Someone at Victorville sent him to shadow us.’