Chapter Thirty-Two #2
“Both, according to the tox screen.”
“Fentanyl?”
“No.”
“What drugs exactly, then?”
“Like often happens, the OD was a result of a drug cocktail. There were elements of opiate-based heroin, but also synthetic opioids. When they intermingle, the lab techs can’t attribute the lethal chemicals back to individual drugs.”
“Any of that drug we’ve been hearing about from up north? Snowball?”
“There’s no telltale chemical signature to Snowball. It reads as another synthetic opioid. I can say that there were no pills at the scene. Just the heroin bricks.”
“So, he took pills somewhere else?”
“It happens. Or he had some leftover pills in his system and shot up with heroin before he crashed and burned.”
“Track marks on his arms?”
“None noted in the ME report. But that’s not all that unusual. He could have cooked the heroin and smoked it elsewhere. Or injected it in hard-to-detect locations.”
“Can we check out the heroin stash to see how it might have been accessed?”
“We can, but I would need to get it from the NOPD evidence locker.”
“Hold on that for now,” Stanton said.
The normal way for him to handle this would have been to start a PI, a preliminary inquiry, to officially look over the NOPD’s evidence records.
But after studying the case files in his home office early that morning, his gut told him to poke around a little first, quietly.
The politics on this thing were too explosive for someone to start shouting that there was an FBI investigation in the works.
“Tell me about the mother,” he said to J.J.
She flipped a page vertically, folding it over the file folder. “Leigh Ann Staub. Forty-eight years old. Long career in nursing, some of it on naval bases in Virginia. For the past few years, she worked at the Tulane Medical Center ER as a charge nurse, a senior position.”
“Record?”
“No criminal record.”
“What about professionally?”
“She was a star, well respected at Tulane,” J.J. said. “At least with what I’ve been able to uncover so far in interviews and personnel files.”
“Finances?”
“She had a 401(k) worth about three hundred grand and thirty-five thousand or so in the bank.”
“That’s a good chunk but not enough to afford a house in the Garden. How’d she get it? Divorce?”
“This is where it gets a little murky.”
“How so?”
“Her husband had a business that did well for a few years.”
“What type of business?”
“That’s the murky part. Final Options, LLC. He was the sole employee. I did some digging. Want to know where it led?”
“I do.”
“Langley, Virginia.”
“He was CIA?”
“A contractor. Former SEAL. Worked overseas, so it looks like he collected a few years of tax-free dough that helped purchase the house. He was killed in Afghanistan in 2021. Not much information other than that. Wife got a USAA life insurance policy. Enough to pay down the home loan but not enough to be able to stop working.”
“Interesting. I may reach out to Langley. I worked with a guy there after the terror attack in the Quarter last year,” he said, referring to ISIS-inspired former Army serviceman Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, who in the early morning hours of New Year’s Day 2025 rammed his Ford truck into partiers on Bourbon Street.
He then unloaded on the crowd with a rifle and pistol before being shot by police.
Jabbar killed fourteen people and wounded almost sixty others.
He also had a detonator in his truck connected to two pipe bombs in coolers on Bourbon Street, bombs that did not detonate.
“How about media?”
J.J. set her phone on Stanton’s desk and turned the screen to face him. “This is online and will be in the morning papers.”
The headline read Massacre in the Garden.
“This the crime beat guy?”
“Evan Greer. The article says it was a cartel hit linked to the son. Greer is connecting his OD to the drug world. He doesn’t come right out and say it, but he sure connects enough dots between what happened in the Garden and Connor Staub’s OD.”
Stanton took her phone and perused the article, thumbing all the way to the bottom before handing it back.
“What’s NOPD saying about the scene in the Garden?”
“Officially? Or what I could dig up on my own?”
“Both.”
“Their story tracks with the reporter: drug hit, four dead guys in the morgue, Hispanic, John Does, zero identifying information other than a lot of tattoos. The NOPD is waiting on the coroner’s report, but that’s just to stall. One had his head almost taken off with a shovel.”
“A shovel?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s a new one.”
“The others were shot, according to the admitting tech I talked to. Three Draco AKs and one Desert Eagle were found at the scene.”
“AKs?”
“Well, AK-type pistols. They have become quite popular after their appearance in rap videos.”
“Seriously?”
“Soulja Boy? He’s not on your playlist, sir?”
“I prefer jazz.”
“Are you going to meet with DEA on this?”
“I’ll touch base with Mendez and link up with him as soon as he can cut away.”
“Want me to tag along?”
“Maybe for a follow-up. So, what’s the part that the NOPD isn’t talking about?”
“It’s more of a sense, really,” she said.
“I tend to listen to those too. Paired with data, of course. What’s yours?”
“That the NOPD is moving fast with the cartel angle. The CSIs are already done at the house. Evidence is bagged and tagged.”
“All of that in less than twelve hours, you mean.”
“Feels a little rushed. Then again, nobody wants flashing lights in the Garden.”
“The DA is going to want to put a bow on this quick,” Stanton said, tapping his fingers on his desk and thinking about Isaacson’s announcement at the gala, the run for governor, the spotless record.
The cartel message was just what she needed.
Not on my watch, she could say. This is a failure of the federal government.
“J.J., you remember in the last staff meeting, when the rook on complaint duty mentioned a walk-in at the federal building who wanted to talk to someone at DEA but left?”
She smiled and flipped another page over.
“I certainly do. In fact, I was about to mention that. I interviewed the U.S. marshal who was at the desk that day. He said the walk-in was blond, bearded, fit. Described him as a tough guy. I verified the description with the lobby cams, but there’s not a good shot of his face.
He was in a ball cap, eyes down the whole time, almost like he didn’t want to be seen. ”
“Anything we can run through facial recognition?”
“No, but we have the next best thing.”
“Tell me.”
“The marshal said he felt weird about the encounter, so he followed our mystery man out and saw him drive off in a beat-up VW camper van, eighties era, faded blue with a white roof. It caught his attention because it was raised on its tires, like a four-by-four.”
“Plate?”
“It was too far-off for him to get a plate, but he thinks the colors were Oregon.”
“So, a few days before we see a cartel battle play out in the Garden, a guy shows up, asks to talk to the DEA, and takes off because he got nervous. Pretty thin.”
“Agreed, sir.”
“Let’s look into it anyway. At least we can cross him off the list.”
“Do you want me to have NOPD put out a BOLO?” she asked, using the term for “be on the lookout for.”
“Who’s working this homicide? Kile from Sixth?”
“He should be, but because this looks gang-related it’s going to the COPE unit.”
“Bates. Direct report to the superintendent.”
“That’s right, sir.”
“And let me guess, before you look, the case has been assigned to…”
J.J.’s cheeks flushed as she flipped through her hastily assembled file.
“The officer who processed the original Connor Staub crime scene,” he continued. “Officer Tim Rayne.”
She sighed. “Yes. Rayne. I should’ve caught that.”
“You’ve been on this for two hours.”
“You’re seeing a potential conflict of interest.”
“Why assign it to the same guy?”
“Because he’s already familiar with the case?”
“Maybe,” Stanton said, tapping his fingers again.
“You’re not going to want to run the search for van-man through NOPD, are you?”
“No,” Stanton said. “Let’s take a drive.”
“What are you thinking?”
“Let’s talk to some of these neighbors in the Garden and walk the crime scene. I’d like to drop by the morgue and talk with that marshal over at the fed building. If the NOPD is going to make this federal to deflect blame from the DA, we best have our ducks in a row.”
“If we do all that, we’re going to kick up a lot of dust. NOPD’s going to know we’re looking into this. It’s going to make a lot of people uncomfortable.”
Stanton stood and put on his jacket.
“The day you get comfortable in this job is the day you should hang it up. Plus,” he looked at his watch, “I need to get my steps in.”