Chapter Fifty-Three
WALKER WOKE TO the sound of cicadas and the distant hum of a lawn mower. The guest room was dim, the curtains drawn against the sun. He sat up slowly, his body stiff, his head pounding. Paladin lay next to him, sleeping soundly under a down comforter.
Walker dressed in some of Alexandre’s old clothes that Belle had laid out for him, khakis and a soft flannel shirt that fit surprisingly well. The shirt smelled faintly of cedar and pipe tobacco. He made his way to the kitchen.
Belle was already up, a binder spread out on the table.
“How’s Paladin?” she asked.
“He’s sleeping, dry and warm. Last night took a lot out of him, though. The bone broth and gumbo were just what both of us needed.”
Belle’s jeans and leather jacket of the previous night had been exchanged for a black Fleur du Mal flared corset dress. She still paired it with her scuffed Doc Martens.
“Why are you all dressed up?”
“Dressed up? It’s hot. Found this thing at a thrift shop.”
“Well, it looks, uh… it looks nice.”
“A compliment? Thank you, kind sir,” she said with a curtsy. “You hungry? It’s almost lunch. How about Paladin, should we bring him something?”
“Let’s let him sleep. He needs rest. Any more gumbo? That was delicious.”
Belle pulled a Lodge cast-iron Dutch oven from the refrigerator and set it on the stove.
“Where’s Gloria?”
“She went to the grocery store to get some dog food for Paladin and a few things for dinner. I get the feeling she likes having a man around the house. Be careful, I think she’s writing up a ‘honey do’ list.”
“I’m happy to help.”
“She had me pull that old typewriter off a shelf in her closet,” Belle said, motioning toward the dining room table just off the small living room. “She said she got it in 1966 from a salesman who told her that it was the same one Hemingway used.”
Walker stepped into the dining room.
“Royal Quiet De Luxe,” he said, reading the faded emblem. “Same as mine.”
“She says the keys stick but that you are welcome to it if you can get it working.”
Walker’s eyes scanned the table. It contained the SSE binders from Dorado Freight and the security server he had yanked from the wall. It was attached to Belle’s laptop.
Belle leaned against the archway between the kitchen and the dining room.
“I’ll walk you through what I found after you eat,” she said, her concern for him evident.
“Belle, I can’t be here. It’s not safe.”
“We can talk about that after you eat. Come on,” she said, gesturing with her head. “Gumbo’s ready.”
The gumbo was rich and smoky, ladled over a roasted quail. It was the kind of food that didn’t just fill your stomach, it reminded you that you were alive. He ate slowly, methodically, lost in thought.
Belle picked at her food without really eating.
“Chris, the man who tried to kill you at the river. He was a cop. That makes three.”
Walker finished his gumbo and pushed his plate to the side. He had given Belle the rundown last night on the drive to Gloria’s.
“I know.”
“They are going to find you.”
“I know that too.”
“That means they are going to find me. We are too connected now.”
“I’m so sorry, Belle.”
“We need to get this story out there with hard evidence that will blow this thing wide open. Get it to Greer, the reporter. If it’s out there, then there is no need to silence us.”
“There is another option,” Walker said slowly.
“Why do I get a feeling I’m not going to like it?”
“This stopped being about Leigh Ann, Connor, or even John for me. Now it’s about protecting you and Gloria.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that after we map out this organization, everyone who’s involved, I can do what I do best.”
“What’s that?”
“I can kill them all.”
She bit her lower lip and slid her hand across the table, resting it on top of Walker’s.
“Chris…”
“Like you said, I’ve already killed three cops. Dirty or not, they are not going to just let me walk, even if we expose this, and we don’t really know what ‘this’ is yet. And if we do figure it out, the guilty might walk between the raindrops. People get off on technicalities all the time.”
She squeezed Walker’s hand.
“And all those books in your van on logic, reason, and meaning?”
“I’m using logic. I have reason. And meaning?” He paused. “You’ve given me that.”
She brought Walker’s hand to her lips, closed her eyes, lightly kissed it and then pressed it against her cheek, her tough exterior melting away.
“Belle, I…”
“Shhh… give me a second.”
She held his hand to her face for another moment and then opened her eyes.
“Maybe one day you’ll play a guitar for me,” she said.
“Belle…”
“Come with me,” she said, standing and walking into the dining room, her emotional armor back in place.
“I think I worked some of this out while you were swimming in the Mighty Miss.”
“That’s not funny.”
“It’s a little funny.”
“Maybe a little.”
“I’ve been working through these binders and cross-referencing them with Connor’s decoded journal entries, searching for commonalities.”
She leaned over the table and flipped open a binder; her dark nail polish?painted index fingernail stopped at a line and tapped. Then she opened another folder where she had highlighted a line on another page.
“See these? They are different. They aren’t letters. They’re numbers.”
“Okay.”
“You said you saw sacks of sugar at Dorado Freight.”
“I saw sacks. The foreman I talked with told me it was refined sugarcane, on its way to distributors.”
“Right.” She flipped a page. “If that’s the main product at Dorado, you can see lots of activity; a bunch of repeating numbers in these notebooks. There was a railroad nearby, right?”
“Yes. Same line that runs along the river to the ports. Dorado is one of the port stops, probably dating back to the facility’s Navy days.”
“Well, if you look at most of the pass-through inventory flowing through Dorado, you can understand how they track it. See? The first four alphanumeric digits are coded the same. The next ones are five-digit numbers.” She tapped the relevant entries with her black fingernail.
“I’m not following.”
“I thought you were a genius. What do they teach you guys in the CIA?”
“Not whatever this is.”
She opened her laptop and angled it in his direction.
“I Googled the numbers. They’re zip codes: Baltimore, Philly, New York.
Within each of those zips is a food processing center.
When I searched for information on them, I found that their customers are food service suppliers. They deliver food to restaurants.”
“So?”
“So, if the bulk of the Dorado business is sugar, these were probably going off to those big consumer markets. That’s legit freight.
This set of numbers,” she said, tapping one of her highlights, “is different. Only four digits. And it happens at irregular intervals. Every now and then, it’s there with the probable sugar shipments. In this case, it’s not.”
Walker looked as she flipped through the various dates and coded outgoing shipments.
“I feel like I’m missing something.”
“I told you I’m working on my master’s in management information systems, right?”
“I still don’t really know what that is.”
“And I mentioned that I studied accounting at LSU?”
“You did.”
“Well, this structure suggests that the first four digits are a different SKU and that the lack of a zip code means it was either a local shipment or set aside to be picked up at Dorado.”
“Where are you going with this?”
“Here,” she said, connecting her computer to the video surveillance server Walker had taken from the Dorado management office.
“How did you get this working?”
“It uses a standard USB-C power cable,” she said. “I connected it via a regular HDMI cable into my laptop, downloaded the public software, and voilà.”
“You didn’t need a password?”
“This is a closed security system, not cloud-based, probably because they wanted to be able to destroy any video evidence rather than let it get subpoenaed. I was able to pull it right up.”
“How do you know this again?”
“Management information systems, Chris. I kind of want a real job one day.”
“How does this help us?” he asked.
“Simple. We cross-reference the dates from those shipments without zip codes with the dates captured on the video and see who is picking up what.”
“Now that really is genius.”
“I already did it. Check this out.”
She tapped a date and then scrolled until she found a specific entry.
“Here’s one of those frames.”
Walker watched as a yellow F-350 pickup with a brush bar drove up to a container. A man stepped out of the passenger seat and stood talking with Babineaux while a forklift entered the container, backed up, swiveled, and deposited a loaded pallet in the back of the pickup.
“Can we figure out who that guy is talking to Babineaux?”
“Way ahead of you.”
Belle paused the video.
“I went back and looked at the media reporting on the night of Leigh Ann’s murder. One of the police officers they interviewed was a Lieutenant Cornelius Bates of the NOPD.”
“Is that Bates talking with Babineaux?”
She moused to another browser tab.
“No. This is Bates talking to reporters.” She paused the video. “See the guy just behind him? That’s the same guy who stepped out of the yellow truck.”
“And let me guess. You have a name.”
She went to another tab that opened to the New Orleans Police Department COPE Unit.
“Meet Detective Howard Gormley. He’s in a bunch of other video cuts, driving up alone in a Dodge Charger.”
Walker’s eyes narrowed, and for a moment he was back on the banks of the Mississippi River watching a yellow F-350 disappear into the current.
“It begs the question,” Belle said, “why is a detective with the New Orleans Police Department picking up a pallet at Dorado Freight in the same truck that rammed you into the river last night?”
“There’s one way to find out,” Walker said.
“What’s that?”
“We ask him.”