A Quiet Vendetta by R.J. Ellory Read Free Book Online Page B

Hadn’t even gotten the thing off the ground.’
    Gabillard and Luckman nodded in unison. ‘We appreciate your co-operation,’ Gabillard said, and rose from his chair.
    They shook hands again, and Verlaine directed them to the front exit of the building. He stood on the steps ahead of the Precinct House, watching the generic gray sedan pull away and disappear down the street, and then he turned and walked back to his office.
    He wondered why he’d said nothing of the message he’d received, of his visit with Feraud. Perhaps nothing more than the desire to hold onto something, to keep something of this as his own.
    John Verlaine stood for a time, thinking nothing at all, and then he remembered the words Feraud had said, and the gravity with which they had been pronounced:
Turn and walk away from this quickly and quietly . . . This is not something you should go looking for, you understand
?
    Verlaine understood little of anything at all. This morning he’d woken with a murder case, and now he had nothing. He did not resent the FBI’s involvement; he’d been around long enough to know that every once in a while a case could be taken right out of his hands. This was New Orleans, heart of Louisiana, and one thing he knew for sure, as sure as anything in his life: there would never be a shortage of work.

THREE
    Robert Luckman and Frank Gabillard had been partners for seven years. Working out of the New Orleans Federal Bureau of Investigation Field Office on Arsenault Street, they believed that between them they had seen it all. Under the aegis of the United States Justice Department they investigated federal offences – espionage, sabotage, kidnapping, bank robbery, drug trafficking, terrorism, civil rights violations and fraud against the government. They also received alerts when security-tagged print identification requests were made by any law enforcement agency in Louisiana. Patched through FBI Co-ordination Headquarters in Baton Rouge, the ID request was flagged and a report was immediately logged with the local Field Office. Security tags were registered against any official given security clearance within the law enforcement or intelligence community: Police, National Guard, all branches of the military, FBI, CIA, National Security Agency, Department of Justice, any arm of the Attorney General’s Office, Office of Naval Intelligence, NASA
et al
. The report was then pursued by the assigned FBI field operatives, and if the case in some way touched their territory they held the right to assume complete control of all files, records, documents, and any subsequent investigation that might be required. They also possessed the authority to clear the ID request and allow the local police to deal with the matter.
    In this instance this was not the case.
    On the afternoon of Wednesday 20 August, a nineteen-year-old girl called Catherine Ducane left her home in Shreveport, Louisiana. She was not alone. A fifty-one-year-old man called Gerard McCahill had accompanied her, driving the car, attending to her requirements, ensuring that the visit to her mother in New Orleans went without a hitch. Her father, Charles Ducane, had stood on the steps of his vast mansion and waved her goodbye, and once the car had disappeared from view he had returned inside to attend to his business. He did not expect to see his daughter again for a week. He was perhaps a little surprised not to have received a call to say she had arrived safely, but he knew his daughter and his ex-wife sufficiently well to understand that once they were together there would be little time for anything but shopping and fashionable lunches. By the time Saturday rolled around, Charles Ducane was embroiled in a legal complication that devoured every ounce of attention he could summon, for Charles Ducane was an important man, a figurehead in the community, an opinion leader and a voice with which to be reckoned. Charles Mason Ducane was Governor of the State of