PART IV A SUDDEN DEATH #2
Those Allied soldiers—aghast at the emaciated prisoners they’d found in the camps—had tried to feed the starved prisoners, only to be ordered to stop. To feed a person in such an advanced state of starvation risked overloading their glucose systems and sending them into cardiac shock.
LaToya Martyn had been seriously starved when we had found her.
Refeeding her—even via a modern intravenous drip—was a -deli-cate matter that had to be done with great care.
Mrs Kecia Martyn said, ‘It was horrible. One second, it was all quiet. We were here. LaToya was in her coma and the shift-change nurse was refilling the IV, then suddenly all the monitors were screaming and a whole bunch of people were in the room, shouting and hollering. LaToya—well, her body—was convulsing and spasming. They brought in crash carts and those electric paddle things—’
Defibrillators, I thought.
‘—and they zapped LaToya. Zapped her so hard, her body jolted up off the bed and dropped back down. Oh, my baby. To survive all that horror in that swamp and then to die like this . . .’
Darnell said, ‘They tried everything, more CPR, more of the paddles, but they couldn’t get her heart started again. She’s dead. Our little girl is dead.’
‘I’m so sorry for your loss, Kecia and Darnell,’ I said.
And I was. I really was.
Emotional reactions from people can be difficult for me to process sometimes but here I knew exactly what they were feeling.
Darnell said, ‘After all she went through . . . held captive by that bastard in the swamp, having a child by him . . . to die like this . . .’
Kecia hugged me tightly. ‘Mr Speedman, thank you for finding her. At least we got to see her and hold her one last time before she passed, even if she never woke up. Not knowing where she’d got to was worse than this. At least we know for sure that she’s with God now.’
I left the hospital and sat in my car in the parking lot, trying to digest all this.
This pretty much tied it all up.
LaToya Martyn had been found on Eli Gage’s barge, near where the baby Eli Gage had fathered with her had washed up.
We’d confronted Eli Gage.
We’d killed Eli Gage.
Eli Gage’s DNA was also found on Harriet White’s clothes.
Everything had pointed to Eli Gage.
Case closed.
And LaToya Martyn—rescued from her awful seven-year -captivity—had never woken up to tell her story.
Now she was dead as a result of a mundane hospital error. The shift-change nurse had probably just increased the dose in the IV by a few milligrams and that had been enough to send LaToya’s starved body into cardiac distress.
And Audrey and I—our heroic efforts obviously noted from on high—had been rewarded with offers of our dream jobs.
Tied it all up . . .
Nice and neatly . . .
As I sat in my car and prepared to drive home and continue with my life, I frowned.
Something was bugging me.
It wasn’t just the neatness of it all.
It was something that I’d learned that didn’t compute.
Something about Eli Gage . . .
Something Audrey had said . . .
Then I got it.
It was what she’d said about Eli’s DNA.
‘They found Eli Gage’s DNA—the same autosomal DNA that was found in the baby by the way: it was his child—on Harriet’s clothing.’
That wasn’t right.
I’d seen the dead baby in the morgue at Lake Charles—illegally, thanks to Rodney Lowdon, my opiate-addicted contact there.
And Rodney had told me that the DNA results had been unable to identify the father of the child because the father didn’t have a criminal record.
Eli Gage had a record as long as your arm.
A paternity DNA match for him would’ve made every law enforcement computer in Louisiana light up like a Christmas tree.
But it hadn’t.
Yet now all of a sudden his DNA was linked to the baby.
As far as everyone else was concerned, the case was over, finished.
But because of my illegal visit to the Lake Charles morgue, I knew something that no-one else did.
It wasn’t over.
Not at all.
Still sitting in my car in the hospital parking lot, I called Rodney’s direct line at the morgue.
‘Lake Charles morgue,’ a young woman’s voice answered.
‘Yeah, hi, can I speak to Rodney Lowdon, please?’
There was a pause.
‘Uh, Rodney’s not—Rodney doesn’t work here anymore. He, well, died a few days ago.’
I blinked.
‘He what? How?’
‘Sorry, I can’t say, sir. Privacy and all that.’
I rang off, jumped on my laptop, linked it to my phone’s hotspot and quickly found Rodney’s official death notice in the Lake Charles online public records system.
Rodney had died all right.
Three nights ago, on October 6th, of an opioid overdose. They’d found him dead in his apartment.
I frowned.
This was getting very strange.
The next thing I did was venture digitally into a very non-public database in Lake Charles.
The law enforcement DNA database.
It took me a bit, but soon I found the file I was looking for: the DNA results for ‘Unnamed infant found in Acheron River, Oct 1’.
The mother: LaToya Patrice Martyn.
The father: Eli Clyde Gage.
Then I did one extra thing: a keystroke check of that file.
By doing this, I could see every time the file had been updated or altered.
The initial entry had been created on October 1, the day the baby in the doll had been found.
The addition to the file of Eli Gage as the baby’s father, however, had been added to the file six days later, on October 7th—the day after Rodney had died.
At first, the child’s father had been unknown.
Then suddenly it was Eli Gage.
Someone had doctored the file in an attempt to conclude the matter, to tie it all up neatly, to make it go away.
I was worried they’d also killed Rodney, to eliminate the one person who knew the true original DNA results.
Except they didn’t know I’d also seen those results.
I sighed.
My jaw clenched.
I had to finish this case.
I decided the next step was to find out more about Eli Gage.
I recalled that Eli’s parole contact was his sister who lived in Galveston, an hour south of Houston.
Eleanor, that was her name.
The Saudi case could wait.
I pulled out of the hospital parking lot and swung by home where I switched out my regular car for the Minnie Winnie. Then I headed south on the I-45 to Galveston.
Galveston, Texas
Miss Eleanor Gage lived in a trailer park just outside Galveston.
I’d seen many like it before. It was populated by the usual mix of down-and-outers, the chronically unemployed and the just plain unfortunate.
It was dirty, dingy and full.
I asked the park manager which trailer was hers.
‘She’s in 14,’ he said, ‘but she ain’t here. Said she was headin’ north for a coupla days.’
‘I’ll wait,’ I said. ‘How much do you charge per night?’
So I parked my Minnie Winnie in an empty bay, hooked it up to the power system and stayed at the trailer park, waiting for Eleanor Gage to return.
As I waited, I did more research.
Now, as I said, reading about Mrs Kingman’s failed lawsuit regarding the Confederate statue in Pine Hollow had reminded me of Bill Brewster’s suppressed lawsuit against Mr Kingman: Tad Kingman.
I pulled up the entry for it on LexisNexis again:
brEWSTER V KINGMAN
DISTRICT COURT of NEW ORLEANS
JUDGE R. K. SINCLAIR presiding
Summary judgment issued in favor of the defendant
Topics: defamation, extortion, habeas corpus, peonage
Case details suppressed at judge’s orders
Looking at the brief summary, I made a call to another contact of mine.
He picked up on the second ring. ‘Heya, Sam. What’s up?’
Willy Cox was a filing clerk at the District Court in New Orleans. It was a singularly shitty job and Willy wasn’t treated well by the attorneys and paralegals who utilised his services, which made him perfect for someone like me.
In exchange for the odd favour or cash payment, Willy helped me out from time to time.
‘Hi, Willy. Need a favour. It’s a weird one.’
‘Shoot.’
‘Can you pull up a filing for a suppressed case?’
‘Hoo-ee, I can but, Sam, that could get me in a lotta trouble.’
‘I can pay.’
‘You still hanging out at that Hooters in Houston?’ he asked. ‘I’m gonna be there for the Texas Tech game in a few weeks. Think you could get me a date with that sweet waitress there? The fashion major with the big eyes and cute smile?’
‘Darla? I can’t promise anything, but I can ask her.’
‘Super. What’s the case you want?’
‘Brewster v Kingman. Judge Sinclair.’
‘Gimme a day or so and I’ll get back to ya,’ Willy said.
‘I appreciate it.’ I hung up and called Darla at Hooters and, thankfully, she said sure, she’d go on a date with Willy to help me out.
As I continued waiting, I looked up something about the Brewster v Kingman case.
Something I’d read in its topic line:
Topics: defamation, extortion, habeas corpus, peonage
I was aware of what habeas corpus was, but even after passing two bar exams, I’d never heard of the legal term peonage.
In Latin, habeas corpus means to have the body of. Legally speaking, it’s a person’s right to be in control of their own body, that is, to not be unlawfully detained or imprisoned.
It’s a rarely used legal concept but it attained some prominence when it was applied to the enemy combatants held at Guantanamo Bay.
As for peonage, I had to Google that.
The search results made me frown.
Peonage, also called debt slavery or debt servitude, is a system where an employer compels a worker to pay off a debt with work. Legally, it was outlawed by Congress in 1867.
What the hell?
The next morning, Willy Cox called me back.
‘You get me a date?’ he asked.
‘Sure did. I’ll text you her number. You find the case file?’
He paused.
‘Yeah, I got your file—found the hard copy in the cabinets downstairs—but Jesus, buddy, you sure you wanna look at this? Some of the allegations are fucking out there. Convict leasing. Human trafficking. Buying and selling people. No wonder the judge sealed it.’
‘Text me photos of it, will you?’
‘Sam, you never got this from me, okay?’
‘Of course.’
He sent me six photos of the file, one for each page.
I hung up and read it.
Willy was right. Jesus Christ.