Cold Read online

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “The coroner must have woken up, finally, because the autopsy report came in,” he said, holding up a hand to get the attention of the server as he stood. “We gotta go. Now.”

  31.

  “Why do we have to go to the office to view an autopsy report?” I asked, following Burkitt to his cubicle. The FBI office was lit and seemed whiter today, the walls maybe catching some sunlight from the windows far in the distance, giving it a brighter hue than I’d noted last night. “Are corpse pictures classified or something?”

  Burkitt chuckled under his breath. He carried a white Styrofoam takeout box, our food from breakfast that our server had oh-so-kindly put together for us as we paid and sprinted out. I’d devoured mine on the way, because no way in hell was I missing a meal when I had a perfectly open transit window from downtown to the office. (The Bananas Foster Pain Perdu French Toast was Amazeballs.) “No, but I have problems with the interface on my phone.” He tossed his takeout next to the computer and slid off his jacket to reveal his dress shirt hanging over a wiry frame. “Lemme get logged in here and we’ll see what we’ve got.”

  “Sounds good,” I said, hovering behind him, not really sure what I was supposed to do while I waited. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and realized—hey, I should probably call that gropey jackass that traveled here with me and let him know there was a break in the case. So I did. “Hey, dipshit,” I said once I’d made it to Holloway’s voicemail. “We got the autopsy report. When you drag yourself out of bed and quaff down your twelve ibuprofen or whatever, get your lazy, sorry, drunken, unprofessional ass down to the field office.” Then I hung up.

  Burkitt didn’t say a word, but I caught a few straying eyes over the cubicle walls.

  “Here we go,” Burkitt said, Windows 10 having finally booted up and allowed him in. He opened the report and we were immediately greeted with photos of the same dead body from the crime scene pics last night, except laid out on a metal slab and opened, chest to pelvis with the familiar Y-shaped incision that coroners used.

  I looked at her with a jaded eye as Burkitt scanned the text. She had probably been pretty once, but whatever beauty there’d been had been washed away by the bayou and however long she’d spent in the water. Water was one of the most destructive elements on the planet, and could dissolve a human body to near nothingness if given long enough to work. I estimated she’d been left in the water for less than two days based on the decomposition, and then had a thought—how sad was my life that at twenty-six I’d developed a mental model for human decomposition based on water exposure?

  “Huh,” Burkitt said, and I leaned in next to him to read what he was looking over. I skimmed it and found the thing that had gotten his attention pretty quickly.

  “Track marks,” I said, shaking my head. “Not a meta, then.”

  “‘Suggests heavy intravenous drug use,’” Burkitt said, reading aloud. “Why does that rule out her being a meta?”

  “Meta healing eliminates track marks,” I said. “Even the lowest-power meta wouldn’t show more than three or four at a time, even for a heavy user.”

  “Interesting,” Burkitt said. “Hey, did you get to the part—”

  “Cause of death?” I had just hit it. “Yeah.”

  “She drowned?” Burkitt sat up a little straighter in his chair. “I don’t get it.”

  I felt a little smile play across my lips. “Well, you see, when you get water in your lungs, you can’t take in air—”

  “Ha ha,” Burkitt said. “I get the mechanics.” He pointed at the screen. “This has her listed as a suicide.”

  I nodded. “Look at the tox screen.” Did a little pointing of my own. “She was high as a kite when she went into the water. There’s room for interpretation on that ruling.”

  He turned his head to frown at me. “Ohhhh. You mean—”

  “Someone drugs her up—” I mimed shooting up into the forearm “—enough heroin to knock her out, then tosses her in the drink. Pretty much guarantees death, but it could look like a suicide.” I thought about it for a second. “Hell, she could have taken it herself and they could have just tossed her in. If she was high enough, there’d be no signs of a struggle because she’d have been in la-la land, no fight in her.”

  “Maybe. I’ll put together some questions for the experts,” Burkitt said, “and forward the report to them.” He tapped his chin. “I don’t know about you, but after reading this, I don’t feel any more enlightened.”

  “Nope,” I said, checking the time on my phone, “it’s just another firehose of non-specific clues in a case already awash with them. But it does rule one thing out—this is not our assassin, because we have this woman’s corpse and she’s definitely not meta. So, in terms of catching our bad gal…” I straightened my back and stood up. “We’re back to square one, and unless there’s some useful clue hiding in this field of endless questions…we have just about nothing.”

  32.

  My phone started to buzz a few seconds after I’d made that dramatic pronouncement, and I looked down at it once I’d fished it out of my pocket, then felt my eyes widen in surprise.

  FBI DIRECTOR CHALKE, the caller ID read, so I answered it. “What’s up, bitch?” This was a woman who’d lightly threatened me into taking this job, and whom I’d called the Assistant Undersecretary of Wanking, so I felt no need to be formal with her.

  There was a very slight pause on the other end of the line as Burkitt shot me a puzzled look, then shook it off. He clearly had no idea who I was talking to, or he’d have shit a brick right there.

  “You really are a rebel, aren’t you?” Chalke sounded like she’d taken my insult in stride.

  “I like to march to the report of my own machine gun, yeah,” I said. “So, again—what’s up?”

  “Your current case,” she said, finally getting that I wanted to forgo pleasantries. “I’m watching your progress, or lack thereof.”

  “Yeah, it’s a tough one,” I said.

  “Where are you at with it?” she asked. “The last thing I have is your verbal report to SAC Shaw from last night.”

  “Nothing much this morning,” I said, lapsing into professionalism to deliver it bullet-quick. “Autopsy report just confirms that the dead body is not our meta assassin, assuming our assassin actually is meta and didn’t have someone make the bullet for her. Either way, unless we get a new report back that the body we exhumed last night is different from the body they found and buried two years ago, we’re either dealing with an unrelated lookalike or a twin, and either way, we have no ID and no leads, except checking into the outfit that paid for her burial. Which we will be doing in…” I glanced at my phone clock and found it was nearing nine AM. “Well, soon.”

  “Who paid for the burial?” Chalke asked. She sounded pretty focused, maybe a little strained.

  “Some LLC out of Baton Rouge,” I said. “Rouge Future, I think? They have an office here in New Orleans. We’re heading for it in a few minutes. No answer at their office numbers last night, no returned call as yet this morning from the messages we left.” I looked to Burkitt for confirmation. He had a furrowed brow, probably wondering how I’d gone from, “What’s up, bitch?” to providing a case summary on this call. I made a mental note to step back before I told him who I was talking to, in fear the brick he would shit might crush my toes.

  “Do you have your team back at the office looking into this company?” Chalke asked.

  “Burkitt does,” I said. “Nothing much came back, as I recall.” He shook his head to confirm. “The registered agent or whatever—they’re not known to us, no criminal record, blah blah blah.”

  Chalke was quiet for a second, then she spoke, very low. “I don’t think I’ve ever taken a report from a field agent that included the phrase ‘blah blah blah.’”

  “I’m special. Obviously.”

  “Indeed,” Chalke said. “Keep me apprised. The President has a particular interest in th
is case. I’m briefing him personally.”

  That prompted me to frown. “What? Why does he care about what happens in Louisiana?”

  “Governor Warrington is a key ally of the President,” Chalke said, and I could almost see her smarmy smile, even with a phone and thousands of miles between us. “President Gondry wants to make sure that nothing happens to him.”

  “It’s why I’m here,” I said, and the not-so-subtle click on the other end of the line told me that our conversation was over. “That and the local cuisine.” This I said to Burkitt, who was still looking at me with undisguised curiosity.

  “Who was that?” Burkitt asked.

  “Director Chalke,” I said, and watched him almost choke on his tongue. “How far away is this Rouge Future office?”

  “Thirty minutes, this time of day.” He shook his head, as if trying to escape the idea I’d just talked like that to our boss and head of the bureau. “It’s in Metairie.”

  “We should probably get going, then,” I said, checking the time again. “Since they’re the only lead we have at this point.” Hopefully, when we got there, that would change.

  33.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said as Burkitt and I hit the parking lot, heading for the SUV to start our road trip. It was a little warm, sun beating down and the mercury rising toward 80. But that wasn’t what prompted me to swear, not even as my shoes felt like they stuck to the asphalt and sweat seemed to form spontaneously on my skin from the sheer humidity.

  The thing that got me swearing was the sight of Holloway stumbling his way toward us from the entry gate, dark sunglasses covering his eyes and his hand over the top of them, as if he couldn’t block enough light without manually adding to the shades.

  “Hey,” Holloway said, trying to flag us down as I kept walking. “Hey, Nealon, wait up a second, will you?”

  “Keep your hands where I can see ’em, Holloway,” I said, not veering from my course. Burkitt snorted, eyeing Holloway but not changing direction to meet him, either. “I’d hate to have to drop you—oh, hell, who am I kidding? No, I wouldn’t. Not at this point. But I doubt Shaw would understand, so…”

  “Just hold up a second, will you?” Holloway broke into a jog to catch us. “I want to apologize.”

  That made me slow, but I was still keeping a close eye on him. After the crap he’d pulled last night, hell if I knew what he was going to do for an encore. Maybe he’d drill me with a bullet in the back right here and claim some outrageous thing like I’d threatened to kill him. Which I probably had, though I couldn’t exactly recall. I’d certainly thought about it.

  “I’m sorry,” Holloway said, drawing even with me, hands held up to show me he was openhanded. Probably to avoid getting shot or beaten down or some similar fate. Which he totally deserved. “Truly, genuinely—I was out of line. And an ass.”

  I didn’t stop walking, though I might have slowed a step. “You’re just saying that because I’m scary as hell.”

  Though I couldn’t see behind his sunglasses, I caught the motion of his head, and it strongly hinted at a roll of the eyes. “I’ve dealt with lots of scary people, Nealon. You’re not even top five. I estimate I’d have to do something a lot worse before you’d really bring the hurt. Not that I’m going to.” He waved those hands, still open-palmed. “Just trying to say—I’m not apologizing out of fear. I’m apologizing out of shame, because I was, to use one of your favored words, a total dipshit.”

  “Apology acknowledged,” I said, and resumed my pace. The SUV was just ahead, and Burkitt already had the fob out, unlocking it.

  “But not accepted?” Holloway kept a reasonable distance from me.

  “You seem contrite,” I said. “But let me ask you—you ever arrest anyone after they’ve done something horrible and had them all apologetic, weeping, ‘I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have done that horrible thing’—murder, rape, bombing, whatever?”

  Holloway didn’t flinch, but he did slow a little. “Yeah.”

  “It’s like that,” I said. “Maybe you’re sorry, maybe you’re not. Talk is cheap. We’ll see over time whether you mean it or not.”

  “I guess I couldn’t ask for anything better,” Holloway said, but he didn’t seem happy about it. Good.

  I stopped and veered for the back seat, beating him to the door before he could break for it. His eyebrows rose in surprise, but he didn’t say a word, he just went for the passenger seat. “You don’t want me at your back, do you?”

  “Nope,” I said, and we got in. The car ride was pure silence as we pulled out of the lot, and stayed like that all the way to our destination.

  34.

  Rouge Future, LLC was located in an unimpressive office building, the kind that Reed was probably seeking out to cut his costs. There was a proctologist’s office next door, and it had a hand held up in a “high five” sign, which I thought was a little weird, but hey, marketing.

  “What the hell?” Holloway muttered as we went by. Burkitt nodded subtly. I guess none of us got it.

  The building smelled of plaster and construction, presumably because someone was doing a buildout somewhere inside. We stuck right to the business at hand, though, and found Rouge Future, LLC in Suite 120, behind a rough-looking wooden door that also had four other faux-brass placards on it. They read:

  Coalition for Our Children’s Future

  Forward Louisiana

  21st Century Bayou

  Rouge Future, LLC

  Werner Consulting

  Louisiana Online Future

  There were six more spaces below that for other nameplates to be slid in, and I touched the end of the one marked 21st Century Bayou. It slid out easily, and I frowned as I pushed it back into place. “This smell a little like a fly-by-night to you guys?”

  “It does have a little of that aroma,” Burkitt breathed as he opened the door and entered. Holloway caught it and held it open for me. I stared at him, he stared at me, shrugged, then held out his hand indicating I should go first. I did, but my face probably told him how I felt about it, and I heard him make an, “Oof,” kind of noise under his breath. He probably wouldn’t shoot me in the back on such a small opportunity, but you better believe I was listening for the sound of a gun leaving its holster, and my hand was right by mine as I walked.

  The interior of the office smacked of luxury in a way that the rest of the place certainly didn’t. The walls were nicely covered with a textured wallpaper and hung with pleasant scenes interspersed with photos of a tall, dark-haired man hobnobbing with what I presumed were scions of power: men in suits, women in pantsuits, the occasional tuxedo or formal dress thrown in, and backgrounds that spoke volumes about how connected this dude was. Which I imagined was the point of the entire display.

  “Burkitt, you know any of these folks?” I nodded to the walls as we approached the front desk, which was presently unmanned. Kind of like how Holloway would be if he ever groped me again.

  Credit to him, Burkitt was already looking. “I see Senator Urquhart, Congresswoman Gastan, Congressman Richard—yeah. These people are probably what you expect. Big deals. Not sure who the common thread guy is though.”

  “The common thread guy,” came a voice from a door just behind the desk, “is Mitchell Werner.” The man from the pictures appeared, sporting a dark beard and mustache combo, well-groomed. He was wearing a pink dress shirt with suit pants, no jacket or tie, and had a stainless steel coffee mug in hand. He was grinning like he’d been waiting all his life for this meeting. “That’s me, in case it wasn’t obvious.”

  “You think adding the beard is enough to make you anonymous?” I glanced at the photos, then back at him. “Because I think the shifty eyes and shit-eating grin give you away.”

  He laughed. “Fair enough. What brings the great Sienna Nealon to my humble door?”

  “You don’t check your answering service?” Holloway asked, still wearing his sunglasses. I bet his head was just ringing. He didn’t even slide them down his nose
to glare at Werner.

  “Nope.” Werner took a sip of coffee. “That’s my secretary’s job, and she called in sick this morning with, uh…” He grinned even wider, looking right at Holloway. “Well, with what you’ve got, I think. She called it the flu, but we’ve known each other long enough at this point…”

  “We’re here about a body you helped bury,” I said, deciding to go at him in the most confrontational possible manner, see if I could rattle him out of his smug sweetness, which was a combo I found almost intolerable.

  He laughed again, a short, sharp bark. “Beg pardon?” He didn’t sound upset. More like he knew I was trying to rattle him and wasn’t rising to the bait. A cool customer.

  “A Jane Doe found in Plaquemines Parish a couple years ago,” I said. “Down at the Caernarvon Spillway? Rouge Future helped pay for her funeral?”

  “Ohhhh, sure,” Werner said, motioning us forward. “Come on in, by the by. No point in just standing out here in the lobby. I’ve got chairs in my office.” He disappeared inside without waiting for us to accept or decline.

  I traded a look with Burkitt. He shrugged. Holloway offered no comment, so I just nodded and Burkitt led the way into Werner’s office. Holloway trailed behind, but broke off as I entered the office. He headed on past it, deeper into the suite, presumably to nose around since we’d been asked in. I halted at the door so as not to give away the fact that Holloway was off doing his own thing. In fact, I did my best to fill the door frame, which is tough to do when you’re 5’ 4”. But it would have been a lot harder for Holloway to hide my famous absence from Werner, so I just stood there and pretended to look at the secretary’s desk just outside as though there were something absolutely fascinating anchoring me in place.