Chapter Forty #2
Walker ran his fingers through his freshly cut hair. “Thanks?” he ventured.
Below them, the washing machine in the garage hummed and churned.
“Looks like we missed that one,” she said, pointing at a piece of flannel shirt in a Ziploc bag.
“That’s something else.”
“As in?”
“I’ll explain later.”
“We need another seat,” Belle said, already halfway out the door. “Be right back.”
Walker moved a wooden spindle chair to the desk, its legs uneven on the warped floorboards.
The lamp cast a warm cone of light over the workspace, illuminating Connor Staub’s battered Moleskine journal and Walker’s typewritten pages, smudged Courier font on crisp paper, punched out by his Royal De Luxe on the van’s swivel table.
Belle returned with a folding chair, set it up, and sat forward, inspecting the pages Walker had laid on the desk.
“So,” she said, “you’ve cracked Connor’s cipher?”
“That would be overstating it,” Walker replied. “But I’ve definitely made progress.”
He tapped the edge of the journal, then gestured to his typewritten notes. “Connor used a Vigenère cipher. It’s an old-school polyalphabetic substitution with extra letters thrown in. Looks random unless you know the key word.”
Belle leaned in. “And you figured out the key word?”
“I figured out part of it. He embedded clues in the margins with little marks, almost like typos. Turns out they weren’t. They correspond to phrases his father and I used back in the SEAL Teams. Figured that out thanks to you.”
“What phrases?”
“Old mottos like the only easy day was yesterday. I tried that as a key, and a few of the entries started to make sense. He’s got others, but I’m still working out the phraseology.”
She raised an eyebrow. “So what did you get from the bit you’ve decrypted?”
“Fragments. Enough to confirm that he thought the cops were dealing Snowball and that a cop named ‘Slate’ and another named ‘Chestnut’ were involved. Slate has the same number of letters as Rayne, and Chestnut has the same number of letters as Hendrick. Rayne and Hendrick are the two dirty cops from the trap house. There are three other code names here. At least two appear to be higher up the chain than Rayne and Hendrick. Five letters, seven letters, and six letters.”
“What’s your IQ? You some Mensa genius or something?”
“I just connect dots.”
Belle’s eyes narrowed. “All these guys cops?”
“Unclear. The cipher’s still holding back the rest. I think Connor layered it by using multiple keys. Maybe even used a book cipher on top of the Vigenère. He was smart.”
“You mean paranoid.”
“Not paranoid enough.”
Belle dropped her head.
“I’m sorry, Belle. That didn’t come out the way I intended.”
“Forget it. So, we have the names of two dead cops who we confirmed were the two Connor had identified as being tied to the drug trade.”
“For now,” Walker said. “But there’s more, and in this case, I think we need an internet connection to figure it out.”
Paladin remained curled near the door, his head resting on his paws, nose twitching. Belle glanced at the bed, then at the dog.
Walker studied her in the lamplight. She was tough but there was something beneath it. Not weakness. Just wear.
“I screwed up the buy, my one job,” she said. “Instead, I became a hostage, a liability. That wasn’t the plan.”
“You kept your head.”
“You saved my life, Chris. I’m in your debt.”
Favors. Just like with Staub.
“Let’s review. That’s always important after a mission.”
“Sounds good. What would you have called this meeting in your SEAL Team days?”
“An AAR. After action review is the formal report. A hotwash is what we would do right after a mission while it was still fresh.”
She offered a crooked grin. “Love it. Let’s hotwash the shit out of this.”
“Okay. We can start at the beginning. I heard most of what the guy in the yard said to you. He refused to sell you Snowball.”
“It wasn’t just a refusal. He wanted to know exactly who I was and where I lived.”
Walker went to the bed and retrieved his duffel. Next to the flannel in the Ziploc he had laid out a white plastic trash bag. He returned to the desk, opened it, and carefully removed some of the contents, placing them on the desk: pills, capsules, and half a dozen clear packets.
“So that’s the drug haul,” she stated. “Eclectic mix.”
Walker nodded. “Let’s go back to the point where you spoke with the guy sitting next to the cooler in the yard. He asked you where you were from. I don’t think he did that to the guy in the Jeep.”
“So?”
“The Jeep had Arkansas plates.”
“They only sell to people out of state? We’ve had deaths from Snowball in Louisiana.”
“Connor’s journal says not in New Orleans. It also says that opioid overdoses are climbing around the country.”
“That’s true but that’s not attributed to Snowball.”
“Based on what Leigh Ann said, labs have a hard time attributing overdoses to any specific opioid.”
“Meaning?”
“They were trying to distance themselves from it. Maybe that’s what Connor was trying to crack; connecting the cops to the next level in the network.”
“The smugglers? You get all that from a dealer asking me where I was from?”
“He sold to someone with out-of-state plates and not to you with Louisiana plates. I’m just saying I think that could be significant.”
“Maybe he was just sexist.”
“Money has a way of overcoming prejudice.”
Belle picked up one of the packets, turning it in the light. The label was as plain as a condiment package: “FENTANYL.”
“I didn’t realize until recently that fentanyl is an actual drug name,” she said. “I thought it was some deadly poison the Chinese make.”
“Check out the small print from the manufacturer.”
“Prelaxo,” she read.
“Fentanyl brought to you by the biggest pharma company in the world, right out of Minneapolis.”
“Hang on,” Belle said. “Let me check the web.”
She thumbed her smartphone and read through a Wikipedia article.
“This says that fentanyl is a legit treatment, been around for fifty years. It’s an opium derivative used for stage four cancer patients in hospice. Look at this image,” she said, turning her phone so he could see the screen. “Some of what you picked up are dermal patches. Peel and stick.”
“That trap house had quite the selection,” Walker said.
He flipped through his typewritten pages, selecting one and placing it on top of the pile. “Connor referenced a ‘corporate-sponsored hospital’ in his journal. Did he ever mention that?”
Her eyes softened the way they always did when they discussed Connor. “He asked his mother questions about hospital procedures as background research.”
“What did she tell him?”
Belle pressed her lips together tightly, shaking her head.
“I got the idea that Connor didn’t speak to Leigh Ann much.
” She paused for a few seconds. Walker waited.
“To be honest,” she continued, “Connor avoided talking about Leigh Ann with me. We both knew she didn’t approve of us.
His mom was kind of a forbidden subject. ”
“Well, what we know for sure is that Connor wanted to expose opioid abuse. Maybe he was starting with fentanyl origins in New Orleans? Like, who’s really behind the trafficking.”
Belle typed on her phone, studying. “Connor might have been trying to protect me, but he didn’t mention fentanyl often. And, according to this, fentanyl-related OD deaths are down over the past year. Connor would have known that.”
After reading her phone for a few more seconds, she went on. “I got the sense he was tracking an emerging epidemic. That was more his style. That would be Snowball, which isn’t fentanyl.”
“Drugs get laced with fentanyl. Maybe Snowball did too,” Walker said.
They looked at the fentanyl packet on the desk, a narrow strip of foil wrapper separating them from the contents.
“Quite the selection,” she said.
“Yeah, I’d guess the white pill packets are ‘Snowball.’ ”
Belle frowned at her phone screen, still reading.
“Most of the media coverage on fentanyl is about precursor chemicals from overseas and how those chemicals are laced into street drugs. Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid. The variability is what makes it so deadly. Just a little too much and it deadens the respiratory system, stops your heart.”
“Raw, hospital-grade fentanyl in the kitchen. Maybe it was a pill factory, going about the work of lacing pills. Makes economic sense for them to do something like that.”
“Remind me, it was dark and I was a little traumatized at that point. Did the kitchen look like a lab?”
“No. It was filthy. Garbage everywhere. I only saw it through night vision and we were in a hurry. I took what I could. Standard SSE.”
She lowered her phone. “Jargon, Chris.”
“Sorry. Sensitive site exploitation. That’s where we grab everything after a raid: phones, computers, thumb drives, notes, whatever.” He nodded at the pills. “I’ve documented everything I could about the cop identities and the drug haul.”
Belle leaned in, reading Walker’s typewritten pages carefully. “You put a ton of work into this. Are you trying to get into journalism school too?”
“I want to assemble everything into a logical package. We used to call them target packages. Connor’s dad knew a guy in the DEA back in Afghanistan.
After we build this out and make a few more connections, I’m going to take this to him.
I’m not sure how to get in touch with him yet, but I’m working on it. ”
“Why not now?”
“Because it will end up back here with the local cops for further investigation, which means no justice for Leigh Ann or Connor.”
Belle looked at the tops of her Doc Martens, her hair falling forward. “When Gloria said that her husband owned a bakery, she didn’t tell you everything.”
“No?”
“Back then, the Mafia moved in, forcing him to pay protection. He did it for as long as he could. Eventually, he lost the shop, turned it over to them in exchange for his life. He spent the rest of it out at the bayou cabin.”
“Did he go to the police?”
She rolled her eyes at him. “Have you learned nothing about this city?”
The washer below stopped with a buzzing alarm.
“I’ll go shove that in the dryer,” Walker said. “Look through the rest of this and tell me what you think.”
When he returned, Belle was comparing his typed pages to Connor’s handwriting.
“This is really good,” she said. “If you’re right that Rayne is Officer Slate and Hendrick is Officer Chestnut, then we know those two were part of this Snowball-dealing ring.
Would have been helpful if Connor wrote in complete sentences instead of this shorthand. ”
“Rayne and Hendrick were just pieces of what Connor was trying to uncover. You can see that, here in the back of the journal, where he set up these diagrams. He was looking for the roots of the distribution, the way Snowball was getting into the city. That all seems to come through this entity.”
“Marked by an X.”
“Right. Either he didn’t know what the name was yet, or X is the code name he gave it. Doesn’t help us much either way, as it’s just a letter.”
“Or a symbol. See, the one over here is a plus sign.” Belle pointed to another mark on the diagram.
“I think that the plus sign is likely a medical cross,” Walker said, lifting one of his typed pages. “Earlier in the translation I came across this reference to ‘corp hosp.’ I think he probably meant a corporate hospital or hospital corporation, something like that.”
“What’s this box with the arrows going in? The hospice thing?”
“I don’t know. I found another entity called ‘dorado,’ but I don’t know if dorado is another layer, like the code he used for Slate.
Not sure what it is. If it was a hospital, I would think it would have a cross.
My thought is that it’s the drug company that supplies the hospital. It could be the X.”
“If it’s the X, it sits in the middle of his diagram. Maybe it’s not a color. Maybe it’s money. My high school Spanish tells me that it means golden.” She typed into her phone. “Google Translate says so too.”
“Or the color. Could it be a pill mill?” Walker nodded toward the fentanyl patches. “That would make sense. The suspected hospital shoots over the fentanyl patches and those are converted into laced pills in a mill.”
Belle’s eyes brightened. “I once picked up a book for him at Faulkner House, a used bookstore on Pirate’s Alley.
It was about China’s involvement in the opioid crisis.
At the time, I had thought Connor’s research was leading to an exposé of China’s role in opioids, especially fentanyl.
But he looked through it and said they had it all wrong. Something like that.”
“We need to figure out what dorado is,” Walker said. “That’s the common denominator here, the known unknown.”
“Known unknown. Not sure if that’s jargon or just gibberish,” Belle said. “But let’s see what the internet has to say about dorado.” She thumbed her phone.
“You trust that thing too much,” Walker said.
She gestured to the smudged typewritten pages with a smirk. “We need to evolve if we are going to solve.” Belle tapped her screen quickly, eyes scanning. After a few minutes, she turned it toward him. A blunt-nosed fish stared back, bright, iridescent, almost cartoonish. “Check that out.”
“Your point?” he asked.
“Read the search bar. Dorado is also a fish. Gulf waters. Mahi-mahi. Like sushi.” She swiped to another page. “Dorado, as in the fish, also happens to be the logo for a freight forwarding company on the East Bank. Dorado Freight. They handle imports from South America.”
She pulled up the company’s website. A stylized fish leaped over a wave, bold and clean.
“Maybe we should get you one of these,” she said, waving the phone.
Walker accepted the outstretched device and read.
“This isn’t far from my new camp, east side of the Mississippi.”
He handed the phone back.
“Let’s go check it out,” Belle said, the enthusiasm rising in her voice.
Walker shook his head. “We’re done with joint ops.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means, get some rest, but before you do, does Gloria have a color printer?”
“Pretty much all printers are color these days, Chris.”
“How about a scanner?”
“It’s both.”
“Good.” He tossed Rayne’s badge wallet to her. “Ever made a fake ID?”