"We've never been able to get enough on them to nail them;" Talley said. "With your help, we might have a chance."
"How?" I asked, although I wanted nothing to do with a murderous family like that.
"Verification, to start with. We need to prove the body is Thomas. I have no doubt. But there are those little legal nuisances we law enforcers have to put up with." He smiled at me.
"DNA, fingerprints, films? Do we have anything for comparison?" I asked, knowing full well what the answer would be.
"Professional criminals make it a point to avoid such things," Mirot remarked.
"We've found nothing," Talley replied. "And that's where Loup-Garou comes into the picture. His DNA could identify his brother's."
"So we're supposed to put an ad in the paper and ask the Loup to drop by and give a blood sample?" Marino was getting surlier as the morning went on.
"Here's what we think might have happened," Talley said, ignoring him. "On this past November twenty-fourth, just two days before the Sirius set sail for Richmond, the man who calls himself Loup-Garou made what we believe was his last murder attempt in Paris. Notice I say attempt. The woman escaped.
"This was around eight-thirty in the evening," Talley, began his account of the events. "There was a knock on her door. When she answered it, she found a man standing on her porch. He was polite and articulate; he seemed very refined; and she thought she remembered an elegant long dark coat, maybe leather, and a dark scarf tucked into the collar. He said he'd just been in a minor car accident and could he please use her phone to call the police. He was very convincing. She was about to let him in when her husband called out something from another room and the man suddenly fled." - "She get a good look at him?" Marino asked.
"The coat, the scarf, maybe a hat. She's fairly certain he had his hands in his pockets and was kind of hunched against the cold," Talley said. "She couldn't see his face because it was dark. Overall, it was her impression he was a polite, pleasant gentleman.'
Talley paused.
"More coffee? Water?" he asked everyone while he looked at me. I noticed his right ear was pierced. I hadn't seen the tiny diamond until it caught the light as he bent over to fill my glass.
"Two days after the murder attempt, on November twenty-fourth, the Sirius was to sail out of Antwerp, as was another vessel called the Exodus, a Moroccan ship that regularly brings phosphate to Europe," Talley resumed as he returned to his chair.
"But Thomas Chandonne had a sweet little diversion going, and the Exodus ended up in Miami with all sorts of guns, explosives-you name it-hidden inside bags of phosphate. We've known what he was doing, and maybe yo u're beginning to see the HIDTA connection? The take down your niece was involved in? It was just one of manyspinoffs of Thomas's activities."
"Obviously, his family caught on," Marino said.
"We believe he got away with it for a long time by using strange routes, altering books, you name it," Talley replied. "On the street, you call it spanking. In legal business, you call it embezzling. In the Chandonne family, you call it suicide. And we don't know exactly what happened, but something did, because we expected him to be on the Exodus and he wasn't.
"And why not?" Talley posed it almost as if it were a rhetorical question. "Because he knew he was had. He altered his tattoo. He chose a small port where no one was likely to look for a stowaway." Talley looked at me. "Richmond was a good choice. There are very few niche ports left in the United States, and Richmond has a steady stream of vessels going back and forth to Antwerp."
"So Thomas, using an alias…" I started to say.
"One of many," Mirot inserted.
"He'd already signed on as crew for the Sirius. Point was, he was supposed to end up in the safe haven of Richmond while the Exodus went on its way to Miami to make a run without him," Talley said.
"And where does the werewolf come into all this?" Marino wanted to know.
"We can only speculate," Mirot answered. "LoupGarou's getting increasingly out of control, his last murder attempt has gone haywire. Now maybe he's been seen. Maybe his family's had enough, plans to get rid of him and he knows it. Maybe he somehow knows his brother plans to leave the country on the Sirius. Maybe he was stalking Thomas, too, knew about the altered tattoo, and so on. He drowns Thomas, locks the body inside the container and tries to make it appear this dead person is him, this Loup-Garou."
"Swapped clothes with him?" Talley directed this at me.
"If he planned to take Thomas's place on a ship, he's not going to show up in Armani"
"What was found in the pockets?" Talley seemed to lean into me even when he was sitting up straight.
"Transferred," I said. "The lighter, the money, all of it. Out of Thomas's pockets and stuffed inside the pockets of the designer jeans his dead brother-if it is his brotherwas wearing when his body turned up at the Richmond port.',
"Pocket contents swapped, but no form of identification turned up."
"Yes," I said. "And we don't know that all of this change of clothing happened after Thomas was dead. That's rather cumbersome. Better to force your victim to undress."
"Yes." Mirot nodded. "I was coming around to that. Exchange clothes that way before killing the person. Both people undress."
I thought of the inside-out underwear, the grit on the naked knees and buttocks. The scuffs on the back of the shoes might have been caused later when Thomas was drowned, his body dragged into the corner of the container.
"How many crewmen was the Sirius supposed to have?" I asked.
It was Marino who answered. "There was seven on the list. All- of them was questioned, but not by me since I don't speak the language. Some guy in customs had the honors."
"The crewmen all knew each other?" I asked.
"No;' Talley replied. "Which isn't unusual when you consider that these ships only earn money when they're moving. Two weeks out to sea, two weeks back, nonstop, there's going to be rotating crew. Not to mention, you're talking about the kind of guys who never stay with anything very long, so you could have a crew of seven and only two of them might have sailed together before."
"Same seven men on board when the ship sailed back to Antwerp?" I asked.
"According to Joe Shaw," Marino replied, "none of them ever left the Richmond port. Ate and slept on their ship, unloaded and was gone."
"Ah," Talley said. "But that's not quite the case. One of them supposedly had a family emergency. The shipping agent took him to the Richmond airport but never actually saw him get on the plane. The name on his seaman's book was Pascal Uger. This Monsieur Uger doesn't seem to exist and quite possibly was Thomas's alias, the one he was using when he was killed, the alias Loup-Garou may have taken aftei he drowned him."
"I'm having trouble envisioning this deranged serial killer as Thomas Chandonne's brother," I said. "What makes you so certain?"
"The cover-up tattoo, as we've said;" Talley replied. "Your most recent information about the details of Kim Luong's murder. The beating, biting, the way she was undressed, all the rest of it. A very, very unique and horrific M.O. When Thomas was a boy, Dr. Scarpetta, he used to tell his- classmates he had an older brother who was an espйee de sale gorille. A stupid, ugly monkey who had to live at home."
"This killer isn't stupid;' I said.
"Not hardly," Mirot agreed.
"We can't find any record of this brother. Not his name, nothing," Talley said. "But we believe he exists."
"You'll understand all of this better when we go through the cases," Mirot added.
"I'd like to review them now," I said.
34
Jay Talley picked up the accordion folder and withdrew numerous thick files. He set them on the coffee table in front of me.