A Quiet Vendetta

‘We sure are. She’s okay?’

‘She’s fine, a little temperamental, a little headstrong, but then you only have to look at her background, her family, and you could guess she was gonna be something of a handful.’ The voice laughed. There was something intensely disturbing about that sound.

‘So, as I was saying, you’re gonna need the girl, but in order to get the girl you’re gonna have to trade her for something.’

‘Of course,’ Fraschetti said. ‘Of course we understood all along that there would have to be a trade.’

‘Good enough. So I’ll be in touch. I just wanted you to know that you were doing a fine job, and in all honesty I wouldn’t feel the same way if someone else was handling things. I’m keeping tabs on everything that’s going on. I understand it must be somewhat stressful, but I wouldn’t want you guys to be losing any more sleep over this. This is a personal thing, and we’re gonna get it all figured out in a personal kind of way.’

‘Okay, I understand that, but-’

The line went dead in Fraschetti’s ear.

He waited a second, two, three, and then he was standing in the doorway of his office screaming for the result.

‘Call box,’ Danziger shouted from the other side of the main office. ‘Call box on Gravier… got two units on the way there now.’

The same place as the car, Fraschetti thought, and he knew, he just knew once again, that by the time those two units reached Gravier they would find absolutely nothing.

The Washington units arrived a little after seven. It was raining. Leland Fraschetti had not slept for the better part of thirty-six hours. Governor Charles Ducane had called the attorney general himself, figuring, perhaps, that as far as the legal and judicial system was concerned he couldn’t get much higher, and the attorney general had called the director of the FBI personally and told him to get his ass in gear.

This is a governor’s daughter we’re talking about, Bob, Attorney General Richard Seidler had told the director. A goddamned Louisiana governor’s daughter, and we have a bunch of half-assed kindergarten cops meandering all over the countryside with their thumbs up their asses waiting for someone to tell ’em the game is already in the third quarter. This is your nightmare, Bob, and believe me we better wake up in the morning all relieved and ready for breakfast or the shit’s gonna fly six ways to Sunday.

FBI director Bob Dohring listened and acknowledged. He did not retort in an antagonistic or challenging manner. As far as he was concerned, he had already sent two units down to New Orleans and that was as good as it was going to get. Attorney General Richard Seidler could fuck himself right in the ass, but then again Dohring figured the guy’s dick was too short.

Fraschetti was thanked for his work and sent home. Agents Luckman and Gabillard were thanked also, and temporarily reassigned to a field office in Metairie. Washington unit chiefs Stanley Schaeffer and Bill Woodroffe relocated everything from Baton Rouge FBI Co-ordination and set up camp in the New Orleans Field Office on Arsenault Street. They rearranged tables and chairs. They put up whiteboards and city maps. They listened to the call Fraschetti had taken over and over again, until every man present knew it verbatim. They processed every full and partial print from both the callbox and every coin in it near Gravier, and came away with two minor felons, a guy on parole after four and a half years in Louisiana State Pen. for molesting a fifteen-year-old cheerleader called Emma-Louise Hennessy, and a man called Morris Petri who, in August of 1979, had mailed a box of human faeces to the governor of Texas. Every other print was either too incomplete to process, or was a non-person as far as the federal government was concerned. No-one who fitted their profile had used that phone. Woodroffe and Schaeffer had known – even before they’d begun the exercise – that they were doing it for no other reason than form and protocol. In the final analysis, if everything went tits up and the girl died or was never found, their careers would be on the line for the slightest omission in procedure. They sat up ’til three on Thursday morning brainstorming, and came away with nothing but migraines and caffeine overdoses.

The baton had passed. The new runners were fresh and watered and willing, but the race had no apparent beginning and the end, if indeed there was an end, was nowhere in sight.

The track seemed circular, and even when Criminalistics came back with a third repetition of the autopsy results, with chemical formulas and blood types and hair samples and fingernail scrapings, it seemed they had all run like fury after their own tails and wound up back at the starter’s gate.

It was what it was, and what it was was a bitch.

Morning of Thursday the twenty-eighth. It was now four days and some hours since Jim Emerson had peered down into the darkness of the Cruiser’s trunk and spoiled his appetite. The city of New Orleans was going about its business, the press had been shut down on any reports regarding the kidnapping of Catherine Ducane, and folks like Emerson, Michael Cipliano and John Verlaine were spending their daylight hours looking at other bodies and other rap sheets, the car wrecks and Vietnams of entirely different lives.

A voice specialist had been enlisted to analyse the recording made of the call Fraschetti had taken the previous afternoon. His name was Lester Kubis, and though he looked nothing like Gene Hackman he had nevertheless watched The Conversation a good two dozen times. He believed that technology would advance to the point where you could listen to the smallest intimacies of anybody’s life, and he looked forward to that day immensely. Lester sat in a small dark room with his large headphones and pored over the brief section of tape for several hours. He came back with a somewhat tentative outline which suggested that the caller had spent time in Italy, New Orleans, Cuba, and somewhere in the south-eastern states, perhaps Georgia or Florida. He estimated the caller’s age at sixty to seventy years of age. He could not be precise as to his origin, nor any other specific identifying features. This information, though it would prove immeasurably valuable once they apprehended the caller, did not in any significant way assist their current investigation. The age bracket had served to narrow the field, but with a population of something around two hundred and fifty million spread across three and a half million square miles, they were still searching for a molecule in a ballpark. The fact that the call had been made from Gravier meant that the caller, not necessarily the kidnapper, was still in New Orleans, though it was nothing more than a couple of hours to the state line either way. The girl, Woodroffe felt certain, had been spirited out of Louisiana within hours of the kidnapping. Either that or she was already dead. Schaeffer was sure there was more than one man involved. The lifting of McCahill’s body from the back seat and into the trunk of the Cruiser would not have been easily done alone, but they both knew they were guessing and fishing. Schaeffer had taken three calls from the head of operations in Washington by lunchtime, and he knew they were as desperate as everyone else. Rare it was to be assigned to a case that had involved Bureau Director Dohring personally, and upon such things a career was exalted or finished. Schaeffer knew little of Governor Ducane himself, but imagined that, much like all governors, senators and congressmen, he would believe the world and all its resources available to him twenty-four seven. Such a case would not die down or disappear. Such a case would be among the highest-profile investigations until it was finished, one way or the other. And he, too, knew it would only be so long before Ducane would appear in person. No matter the life, no matter the pressures, a father was a father when all was said and done. Schaeffer knew Ducane had already threatened to fly down there and kick some FBI ass, but Washington had assured Schaeffer they were doing all they could to keep the governor in Shreveport.

By mid-afternoon on Thursday tempers were fraying and patience was as thin as rice-paper. Woodroffe had taken six men out to Gravier to trawl the area around the site of the car and the call box in search of anything else indicative of the caller’s identity or the killer’s motivation. Schaeffer held court in the Field Office, he and five men tracking through the entire chain of events since the discovery of McCahill’s body. There were many questions, but seemingly no further answers, and by early evening when Woodroffe returned empty-handed, Schaeffer believed they had reached an impasse.

At eight minutes past seven the second call came.

The caller asked for Stanley Schaeffer by name. He told the field agent who took the call that Stan would know what it was about, but refused to identify himself.

‘Good evening, Agent Schaeffer,’ were the words that greeted Schaeffer when he took the receiver and identified himself.

It was the same voice, undoubtedly. Schaeffer would have recognized that voice a hundred years from now.