Chapter 8

“How bad do you think this is going to be?” Remy asked the room in general. Talking about the upcoming ass-reaming had to be better than sitting around stewing over it.

“On a scale of one to ten?” On the other side of the table in the small NOPD headquarters conference room, Lorenzo’s mouth tightened. “I’m figuring about a twelve, maybe even a thirteen since I’m feeling so lucky today.”

Remy looked at Brooks, then Drew, hoping one of the other SWAT officers might offer up something to give the narcotics detective a little hope. But both men were sitting there with the same tight, concerned expression on their faces.

Okay. That must mean this meeting with the captain of narcotics major case squad and the assistant district attorney responsible for prosecuting Aaron Lee, if the man ever saw the inside of a courtroom, was going to be just as awful as Lorenzo feared. Not that Remy expected anything less after the absolute catastrophe of a morning they’d had at the freight storage warehouse owned and operated by another one of Lee’s shell companies.

Remy and his pack mates had barely walked into the SWAT facility that morning when Drew stuck his head out of his office and said they had a call. He hadn’t given them any details, just simple instructions to get their gear ready, load up the operations vehicle, and roll. Not that Remy needed much in the way of details to figure out they were going after Aaron Lee again. That was the only reason Drew would have been so mum about the whole thing.

Drew had given them an extremely basic mission briefing en route to the warehouse. According to their narcotics informant, the crime boss had the crystal meth stored in there and intended to start breaking it down today. Since Drew and Lorenzo didn’t want to risk the operation getting compromised again, they’d accelerated the normal timetable for a raid like this as well as limited the number of people involved. They’d hoped by moving fast and light, they’d hit Lee’s warehouse before word of the raid leaked out to the man.

Unfortunately, it hadn’t worked that way.

Remy had known there was something wrong before he’d even kicked in the back door of the warehouse. The approach to the structure had simply been too easy, the lack of exterior guards was a blaring alarm that they were walking into a setup. His inner wolf had gone into alert mode, sure there were going to be shooters in the place waiting to mow them all down the moment they stepped inside.

Drew had sent his teams into the warehouse through multiple entry points, much the same way Remy would have done if he were running the show. They’d even blown out two windows, so they could get officers into the rearmost storage areas, where they were sure the drugs were being held. But there hadn’t been any drugs in the place, even though Remy was able to pick up a clear scent telling him the crap had been there no more than an hour ago.

Even more embarrassing than the absence of meth was the obvious fact that the people running the warehouse had known they were coming. Instead of the normal bustling crew of twenty or thirty men that should have been working, there were only a handful of men who claimed to know nothing about the drugs.

On the bright side, Aaron Lee and his lieutenants hadn’t shown up to crow at them. But on the not-so-bright side, Drew and Lorenzo had gotten a call about twenty minutes later, telling them to come downtown to police headquarters and to bring Remy and Brooks with them.

Remy felt bad that Drew and Lorenzo were in hot water, but he was also a little worried about why he and Brooks had been pulled into this mess. They were merely visitors here. No way in hell was he going to let the NOPD brass try and lay this shit sandwich at their feet.

He swiveled around in his chair as the door to the conference room opened. An older man with captain bars on the shoulders of his uniform and a name tag that read Barron walked in, followed by a harried-looking guy in a suit and tie that had to be the ADA. One look at him and Remy could already tell they weren’t going to get along.

Captain Barron walked over and shook each of their hands. “You must be Senior Corporal Brooks and Officer Boudreaux. I’m Corey Barron. Thanks for coming down to talk to us.” He motioned at the lawyer. “This is ADA Russo. He’d like to ask a few questions and see if we can get to the bottom of our current predicament.”

Barron gave Russo a nod, then took a seat at the table beside Brooks. Russo didn’t sit. Instead, he swept a glare over all of them.

“You realize that I’ve gone to Judge Thibodeau twice now for warrants, right? And that in order to get the one signed this morning, I had to go over to his house before sunrise with one of his clerks in tow and wake the man and his wife up?” He scowled at Lorenzo. “Do you know how much I hate waking up a judge at six o’clock in the morning? Do you?”

When Lorenzo didn’t answer his question, Russo took a deep breath and ran his fingers through his tousled blond hair. “Thibodeau wasn’t real keen on going up against Lee to begin with, so I had to talk him into it. He’s coming up for reelection soon, and Aaron Lee can bury him easily enough if he wants to. But I’d promised him we had a solid source inside the old man’s organization. I can’t imagine the judge puts much stock in my promises now, seeing as we’re oh-for-two on these damn raids. I swear, I don’t know what’s worse, the fact that Judge Thibodeau will probably shoot me the next time I walk into his office, or that I can forget about ever getting another search warrant signed by the man.”

Remy wasn’t generally fond of lawyers, and Russo was working his way steadily higher on his list of disliked people. So it wasn’t really his fault he couldn’t hold his tongue. “Since I’ve been shot a few times before, I think having the judge shoot you would be worse than having to go find another judge to sign your search warrants. But then again, maybe that’s just me.”

He opened his mouth to add that Russo getting shot might not be such a bad thing if the ADA could convince the judge to shoot him in some noncritical part of his anatomy like his ass or his brain, but beside him, Brooks laid a hand on his arm and squeezed until the bones started to creak.

Russo glared at Remy but didn’t say anything, much to Remy’s disappointment. Instead, the lawyer turned his attention to Captain Barron.

“You’d think this day couldn’t get any worse, right? Wrong,” the ADA said. “Want to know what I get to do next?”

No one answered this question either, but Russo didn’t seem to notice. He stood there, jaw clenched, his heart beating so fast Remy thought the lawyer was going to blow a gasket. Shit, this guy needs to take up yoga or something.

“I get to spend some quality time with Mr. Lee himself,” Russo said, his heart thumping even harder. “Yeah, that’s right. He is on his way here right now with his entourage of lawyers. They want to talk to me about why they shouldn’t be suing the department for property damages and harassment. And guess what? The DA has left me to deal with this on my own. You want to know what he told me? You’re the one who wanted to go after the big fish. Guess you better figure out how to reel him in on your own.” The ADA shook his head. “The man is flat out going to offer me up as fish bait if this goes wrong. And right now, it’s going pretty fucking wrong. I mean, shit, guys, did you have to blow out his fucking windows?”

Russo grabbed a chair and quickly sat down, like he’d suddenly run out of gas—or might faint. His face did actually look a little pale. Remy almost felt bad for him. Not that bad, of course, since the guy had almost certainly jumped on this case because he saw some future value to be gained if he could take down a criminal as big as Aaron Lee. Political careers in this city had been started on far less. Now the weather vane was turning the other way and poor ADA Russo realized that maybe he’d made a serious tactical error.

“What the hell happened, Corey?” Russo finally asked, sounding totally defeated as he sat there pressing his fingers to his temples and making circular motions. “You said you had a man on the inside of Lee’s organization. I get why you don’t want to tell me anything about him, but I have to ask—is this informant incompetent or did he just get paid off?”

Captain Barron shook his head. “The leak is not our informant. They’ve been in the old man’s organization for three years now and are in a position to know exactly what Lee is doing. This person is risking their life for us. There has to be someone in the NOPD or the DA’s office who’s selling us out to Lee.”

Russo considered that for a moment, then pinned Remy and Brooks with a calculating look. “How do we know it’s not the SWAT team you brought in from Dallas? It can’t be a coincidence they’ve been on both operations and they’ve both gone bad.” His eyes narrowed at Remy. “In fact, didn’t you used to work in one of the local parish sheriff’s offices a while back? For all we know, you’ve been in Lee’s pockets for years.”

Remy snorted. “Yeah, that’s right. I orchestrated this entire SWAT cross-training exercise that took months to set up so I’d be in town just in time for Drew to send me out on a mission I had no idea I’d be allowed to go on, so I could tell a criminal I was on the way to bust him. Wow, that’s fucking brilliant. Tell me, Russo, how many cases have you won? With an intellect like yours, you must be up to, what? Two or three by now?”

Russo jumped out of his chair to charge at Remy, who was already on his feet and ready to meet the asshat halfway. Brooks and Lorenzo quickly put themselves between Remy and the man. Not that the ADA looked too serious about taking a swing at Remy, now that he’d seen how much taller and bigger Remy was.

“That’s enough,” Captain Barron said sharply. “We’re wasting time here, Russo. It’s extremely unlikely that one of the SWAT officers from Dallas is our leak. They simply didn’t have access to enough information to compromise either operation.”

Russo looked like he wanted to argue, but then finally shook his head in disgust. “I know. But if it’s not them, what the hell are we going to do? How do we find this leak and plug it?”

“I’ve asked the public integrity bureau to look into the situation, but the chances of them finding anything in the near term is unlikely,” Barron said.

The NOPD Public Integrity Bureau—or PIB—was similar to the internal affairs division in Dallas. The fact that Barron was willing to turn this effort over to the cops in the PIB meant he was serious about finding this leak. But like he said, it would take time.

“What’s the plan if the PIB can’t find the leak in the next day or two?” Remy asked.

The captain sighed. “If we can’t plug the leak before our informant sends us another tip, I’m pulling them out.”

Lorenzo swore. “Dammit, Captain. We’ve been after Lee for years. We’ll never get this close again.”

“Don’t you think I know that? I won’t risk our informant, not even for Lee.” Barron got to his feet. “If you want to put Aaron Lee away, then you need to figure out a way to do it fast—without exposing our source.”

Giving them a nod, the captain walked out of the room.

Remy noticed the captain had been careful to never mention the gender of their undercover informant throughout their entire conversation, or whether the person was a cop or not. His promise to pull the informant rather than put them at risk was something Remy could appreciate.

No sooner had Barron walked out than a uniformed officer stuck his head in the open door. “Mr. Russo, those people you’ve been waiting to talk to have arrived. They’re in the interrogation room at the end of the hall. And by the way, the deputy superintendent will also be sitting in on the meeting.”

Russo’s face turned a few shades paler, but he nodded. “Okay. I might as well get this over with.”

As the ADA left the room, Remy wondered if the man was even going to make it through the meeting with Lee and his lawyers. Russo’s heart was pounding like a drum.

“You guys want to listen in and see what Lee and his lawyers have to say?” Lorenzo asked. “It might be interesting.”

Remy doubted that but nodded anyway. “Why not? If nothing else, it’ll be fun to see Russo squirm.”

It turned out that watching Russo get grilled by Aaron Lee and six of his high-priced lawyers wasn’t fun at all. In fact, it was kind of painful to see. From where he stood behind the one-way glass with Brooks, Drew, and Lorenzo, Remy winced as Lee and his lawyers eviscerated the ADA.

Russo tried to trip him up, but the old man was too good. Lee wouldn’t have said anything incriminating even if his lawyers hadn’t been there. The worst part of having a front row seat to the whole thing was watching Lee gloat about the fact that the police hadn’t found anything to arrest him for and never would. He was even threatening to sue the NOPD and the city of New Orleans for everything he could get. The man was thumbing his nose at the ADA like it was all a game to him.

Beside Remy, Drew let out a snort of disgust. “As long as Lee has someone inside the department, we’re never going to get close to him. Even if the informant is able to get word to us on where Lee is keeping the meth, the son of a bitch will know we’re coming before we get there.”

“Then why do we keep chasing our tails by trying to play whack-a-mole with this guy and his stash of crystal meth?” Remy asked. “Isn’t there a way we can get a step ahead of Lee and hit him someplace he’s not expecting? Where does he run his business from? I mean his legitimate business, not his shell companies.”

Drew shook his head. “He’s got a big old plantation to the west of Kenner, up near the lake. Everyone in this city knows he’s got more incriminating evidence there than we have in our entire NOPD evidence warehouse.”

Remy remembered driving around that part of the shores of Lake Pontchartrain when he was younger. There were some pricey properties up there. “If everyone knows, why can’t we get a warrant for that place?”

It was Lorenzo who answered. “Never going to happen. He’s too well connected with the right people in this city and even more in Kenner. The fact that we’ve gone after him twice and missed both times would make it even harder.”

Remy ground his jaw as he continued to watch Russo flounder in his battle of wits with Lee. They needed to do something completely different, or the next raid would end up the same as their first two. Worse, it might end up with them finding the narcotics squad’s informant dead in a swamp somewhere.

He turned away from the carnage in the interrogation room to look at Lorenzo. “I know my guys and I are outsiders here, but what if I told you I had a plan that had a good chance of taking down Aaron Lee and keeping your informant alive?”

The narcotics detective regarded him thoughtfully. “What kind of plan?”

“The kind that involves you not telling anyone but Brooks, Drew, and me the next time your informant calls with information, then letting us run the operation,” Remy said.

Lorenzo flinched. “I don’t think Captain Barron would ever go for that.”

“That won’t be a problem since a key part of the plan is not telling him either.”

* * *

It was almost one o’clock by the time Triana got to her mother’s shop. She hadn’t been able to wait to read the police and coroner’s reports Bodine had given her, so after leaving the diner, she’d hopped off the streetcar at the Tulane station and run across the street to the public library. At that time of the day, it hadn’t been hard to find a quiet cubicle out of the way to review the files.

Even though she’d pored over thousands of reports like this in her job, it had been difficult to read these. This wasn’t just a random murder. This was her father’s. But she’d forced herself to push the emotions aside as much as she could and focus solely on the facts in the reports.

She’d hoped the file would provide some details she might be able to dig into with her forensic skills, but there had been no unusual hairs, fibers, trace evidence, or even fingerprints found at her father’s club. Like Bodine had said, the blood of the two attackers her father had apparently killed was not in the system, and the bullet casings didn’t come back as related to any other reported crimes.

She’d hoped the animal tranquilizer used on her father might be a different story. Xylazine was a sedative and analgesic used for horses and other large animals. The coroner had found several large, deep puncture marks on her father’s body, indicating he’d been hit multiple times with a dart gun of some kind. The dosage used on her father had been extreme, and the coroner estimated that nearly fifteen milliliters of the stuff had been dumped into his body. That would have been a lot for a full-size horse. For a human—even one as big as her father—it would have been fatal in minutes.

But even though Triana had never heard of anyone using xylazine on humans in regard to murder, it appeared no one had done anything with the information. She’d read through the reports several times and found no record that the coroner or detective in charge of the case had checked with ViCAP or any other state criminal database to see if something like this had happened before.

Triana had called a friend at the crime lab in Houston and asked the woman to check for other murders involving the use of this drug. Her friend had been curious, wanting to know if this had anything to do with her father’s death, but when Triana said it wasn’t something she wanted to get out to the rest of the lab, her friend had promised to keep it quiet.

It was entirely possible that the reason there hadn’t been a note in the file about a ViCAP check was because the coroner had done his job and hadn’t found anything, but it wouldn’t hurt to check again, if for no other reason than it would give her something to do while Bodine was digging into the angle that her father had pissed someone off right before his death. Bodine promised to let her know if he learned anything and asked her to do the same.

As Triana walked into the shop, she couldn’t help smiling when she saw her mom behind the counter, tying up gris-gris bags and putting price tags on them. Her mother looked up and returned her smile.

“So you finally decided to come home, huh?” she teased.

Triana laughed. She’d texted her mom earlier that morning, before her meeting with Bodine, and again before stopping at the library. So it wasn’t like her mother hadn’t known where she was and that she was safe.

Walking over to the counter, she set down her purse and the envelope so she could help with the gris-gris bags. She absolutely loved the smell of the combination of herbs and spices her mom put in them.

Her mother glanced at her as she reached for another bag. “Since you spent the night with Remy, that must mean your date went well.”

Triana’s first instinct was to say it was wonderful and that they had a great time, but she caught herself. Her mother was as much her friend as her parent, and if there was one person in the world she could tell about her date with Remy—minus the part about them sleeping together—it was her mom. Besides, if she didn’t talk to someone about Remy and how much she liked him, she was sure she would explode.

But wanting to talk about Remy and actually getting the right words to come out were two completely different things. Especially because her head was still swimming with everything she’d been feeling. Thankfully her mother didn’t rush her as she tried to get her thoughts together.

Finally, she took a deep breath and opened her mouth, hoping the right words would somehow find their way out. “It went extremely well. I can honestly say that I’ve never been with a man so charming, engaging, relaxed, confident, or so…”

“Attractive?” her mother finished.

Triana grinned. “Yes. Without a doubt, Remy is the most attractive man I’ve ever seen, much less dated. The funny thing about it is that I don’t think Remy knows how incredibly handsome he really is. I saw at least a dozen women trying to catch his eye when we walked into Muriel’s and he didn’t even notice. He never looked at a single one of them. In fact, he never took his eyes off of me the entire night.”

Her mother’s lips curved. “Why would he? Remy’s as smitten with you as you are with him.”

Even though Triana appreciated her mother’s analysis of Remy’s feelings, she couldn’t help laughing. “Mom. No one uses the word smitten anymore. And even if they did, I’m not sure I’d say I’m smitten with him. It’s a little too early for anything like that.”

Her mother lifted a brow. “What word would you use then, if not smitten?”

Triana opened her mouth, all ready to try to put the crazy feelings that had been zipping back and forth through her head all morning into a single, simple word. She failed.

“I don’t know,” she finally admitted. “What I’m feeling right now is too complicated to fit into a single word or even a whole bunch of words. All I can say for certain is that I’ve never been with anyone like Remy. I can’t stop thinking about him.”

“You seem to have done a decent job of saying how you feel right there,” her mother said. “And whether you want to admit it or not, you are smitten with him.”

Triana knotted the ribbon on the gris-gris bag she was working on. “I can’t be smitten with him. That would mean I’m falling for him, and that would be certifiably insane considering we’ve only gone out once.”

Her mom laughed. “First off, I think you get a little credit for being friends with Remy in high school. It’s not as if you just met the man two days ago, you know. Even if you had, there’s nothing crazy about falling fast. It simply means fate put you in front of the man you were meant to be with. There’s nothing insane about that. In fact, it’s magical.” When Triana looked skeptical, her mother continued. “If it makes you feel any better, the exact same thing happened when I met your dad.”

Triana looked at her mother in surprise. “It did?”

She knew how her parents had met, of course, but she didn’t know it had been love at first sight.

“It did,” her mom said. “I knew there was something special about him the moment I saw him. Neither of us felt the need to play games. Your father asked me to marry him a week after we met, and I said yes.”

Triana stood there so stunned she wouldn’t have been surprised if her mouth was hanging open. She’d thought her parents had dated for months, maybe even years, before deciding to get married—the way normal people did. The idea that her mother and father had fallen in love in a week was crazy hard to believe. But she had to admit it was also interesting. Her parents had been the most in-love couple she’d ever seen. If it was possible for that kind of love to happen in days, maybe this thing going on with Remy wasn’t so insane.