Page 16 of Love Me Darkly
Mateo narrowed his eyes, taking a slow sip of his Scotch while watching the three men. He spotted Tariq Hayes, aka Suede, right off. Over the neckline of his shirt was the neck tattoo he’d noticed from the mugshot. He sat on a black leather couch while his companions spread out into the matching armchairs.
Donovan retrieved his phone and held it like he was reading something. Mateo watched him adjust his angle and zoom in with a swift motion, before snapping one photo and then another.
“I’ll get these to Darcy right now. If their faces are in any of her databases, we can identify them. They definitely don’t look like the types of guys Suede would willingly hang out with.”
Donovan was right. Both men were white, and one of them looked like he might have at least twenty years on Suede. He was bald with a gray goatee and a hardened face. Their third companion was a compact man with a blond crew cut, giving him the look of a military man. They were as much a mismatched set as any Mateo had ever seen.
Mateo watched them, wondering what they discussed in their own little corner of the club. If their faces could be believed, this was business, not pleasure.
“You were right about these guys,” Donovan added. “Barely here five minutes, and they’re already popping bottles.”
Melody and two other waitresses approached the booth with champagne bottles and glass flutes. She smiled and chatted with the men much the same way she had with him and Donovan. But then, the other waitresses left, and before Melody could follow suit, the bald man reached out to grab her arm, pulling her onto the couch beside him. She flopped onto the cushions with a laugh, then turned to say something to Suede. He looked her up and down with an exaggerated sweep of his head, then gestured toward her while consulting the man with the blond hair. The two nodded as if agreeing that she looked incredible. She didn’t look uneasy, like a waitress who was just doing her job being hit on. She looked comfortable.
Mateo scowled. “She knows them.”
“I don’t know. If Darcy can be believed, guys like them hang out here all the time. Maybe they’re some of her regulars.”
Mateo shook his head, narrowing his eyes as the blond man took one of her braids between his fingers and gave it a little tug. Suede offered her a glass of champagne, and she accepted it before leaning in to toast with all three of them. Conversation went on as if she hadn’t just interrupted them.
“They look too cozy,” Mateo argued. “Look, they’re talking business right in front of her.”
“Okay, let’s say she is involved. She’s waiting tables at a club for fuck’s sake. I doubt she’s high enough in the hierarchy to do us any good. We should focus on whatever intel Darcy can gather on those other two men.”
Donovan’s words made sense, but something intrusive niggled the back of Mateo’s mind. It bothered him with the same urgency that had led him to crack several difficult and high-profile cases. His instincts had almost never failed him. Really, they had failed him only once, overshadowed by his own arrogance. But he couldn’t dwell on that now, or he’d fall apart in front of Donovan, and that was the last thing he needed.
Instead, he retrieved his phone and snapped a photo of Melody as covertly as he could manage. Darcy could look into her as easily as the men, and help appease this premonition that nothing was what it seemed.
Mateo peered over the screen of his laptop, watching pedestrians come and go down the busy street in front of a French Quarter café. It was only nine a.m., but he had been here for hours, watching for the woman he had been trailing for the past two days. Since his night with Donovan at Solstice, more pieces of this convoluted case had begun snapping together. The following morning, Darcy met Mateo at the conference room door with a handful of files. The papers he shuffled as she explained her findings in that rapid-fire way of hers were still warm from the printer.
“Baldy Mc-Goatee is Jim Morrison, owner of Gulf Atlantic Freight. It’s a shipping company operating out of the Port of New Orleans. Officially, they ship all kinds of stuff—textiles, machinery, computer parts.”
“And, unofficially?”
“Unofficially, there’s something skeezy going on. Their internal shipping manifests seem legit, but I noticed a few things that stood out. First, this shipment to Houston, Texas. It’s marked as carrying industrial machinery, but the manifest shows a weight discrepancy.”
“Too heavy or too light?”
“Too light. I’m thinking people, not machinery. And look at this … there’s another shipment for Valemont Holdings. The manifest says that the contents are religious artifacts of some kind. Ironically, they were able to avoid inspection on that one.”
“So, Jim Morrison, who owns a shipping company and has some sketchy shipments on the books, hangs out with a known pimp in a nightclub where one of our victims claims to have been bought and sold? And on top of that, we have Valemont Holdings, which owns the club, shipping religious artifacts?”
“Yes, but I haven’t told you the best part yet. Wait until you find out about mystery man number two.” She closed the file and hefted another one to the top of the stack, flipping it open. “Meet Robert Wilson … Lieutenant Robert Wilson of the NOPD. A deep dive into his financials told me everything I needed to know. The guy’s bank balance has a few too many zeroes for even a lieutenant if you get my drift.”
It all made sense. They had stumbled onto a human trafficking ring, just as he’d suspected. Jim Morrison was responsible for shipping girls in and out of New Orleans, while Lieutenant Wilson ensured the cops looked the other way. Suede was obviously more than just a lowly pimp. His presence at the club with Morrison and Wilson indicated that he was a major player in the circuit.
But what about the UNSUB and the spiritual imagery present at the crime scenes? Darcy’s sweep of the dark web had revealed nothing about The Veil, though there were some obscure references to Azrael. None of it gave any insight beyond what Aveline Marchand had already told them. Nothing they had uncovered thus far gave any hint as to how the UNSUB might be connected. That left Mateo with few choices on how to proceed. The only new evidence they’d found at the Little Rock crime scene had pointed squarely at Solstice, and the beginnings of their investigation indicated that the club was involved in the same trafficking ring their latest victim had found herself tangled up in. So, until new evidence gave him some insight into the inner workings of the UNSUB’s mind, Mateo had no choice but to follow the trail laid out in front of him.
His work phone buzzed on top of the table, bringing him out of the kind of deep thought that had made him temporarily unaware of his own surroundings. It was his boss.
“Garcia.”
“You’ll have the court order for your wiretap in twelve hours or less,” Carlisle said. “I agree that the presence of Tariq Hayes, Jim Morrison, and Lieutenant Wilson at Solstice, when combined with Kacey Mills’s report, gives us enough probable cause. I greased the wheels for you with the DOJ a bit. Shouldn’t be a problem.”
Mateo let out a sigh of relief. Going through local channels to get the wiretap could have taken weeks, which they didn’t have. If the UNSUB was truly escalating, he would kill again soon. And if the activities at Solstice had anything to do with the murders, they needed to find the connection as quickly as possible. His position as SSA and relationship with Carlisle gave him the kind of pull he needed to make things happen fast.
“Good. Thank you. Who’s the judge?”
“Renaud of the state criminal court. She’s clean, but cautious. There’s a small chance she won’t approve it, but I’ve done all I can. Now, after I’ve stuck my neck out for you, I have to ask … are you sure about this? It seems we’ve gone from investigating a single serial killer to an entire organized crime network and potential cult.”
