Upside Down

26

New Orleans, Louisiana

At daybreak, Detective Michael Manseur returned to the scene of the vehicular homicide and got out to walk it to look for things he might have missed. Only after the physical evidence had been gathered, photographs made, measurements collected, and witness statements taken had the street been reopened. Manseur wanted to take one more look in the light to make sure he had everything that was there to get.

On his scene schematic, Manseur had marked the point of impact to where the Trammels landed and the relative distances where incident-related objects had been found. Hank Trammel's Seiko, one of his boots, a twisted umbrella, a cell phone, a purse.

The broken turn-signal lens and paint chips were from a 2001 deep blue Range Rover, which had been traveling at approximately fifty miles per hour at impact. A matching Rover had been reported missing from long-term parking an hour before the hit-and-run. Its owner was a respected sixty-two-year-old heart surgeon with Oschner Clinic. Were it not for the Porter connection, Manseur would have figured it was most likely some joyriders, or a drunk had hit them and kept going to avoid the unpleasantness associated with bouncing people off the grille after having had a “couple of drinks.”

A physician who had been in the restaurant described a child in a yellow poncho who had witnessed the accident, and the restaurant hostess said a child of the same description had asked for the Trammels seconds before they were run over. Manseur was certain the child was Faith Ann Porter, but he didn't make a note of that in his book, deciding to keep her listed as: kid in yellow slicker-witness?

The presence of the murdered lawyer's daughter on the scene, and the fact that the Trammels were relatives of hers, made this anything but a coincidental event. While he hadn't informed Captain Suggs of the connection, he would have to do that very soon or risk serious consequences for violating protocols. Under normal circumstances, since there was such an obvious probability of a connection, Manseur would have been involved in both cases. But there was something very abnormal about the Porter/Lee case, and if told the connection Suggs would probably hand this one over to Tinnerino and Doyle. Manseur suspected that Jerry Bennett's connection to the crime might explain the abnormalities.

Manseur read over his casebook to see if he had missed anything. He stopped at notes he'd made while interviewing a girl from the bar across the street who said she remembered the man because “that white cowboy hat and his mustache made him look like Wyatt Earp.” Manseur looked at the list of found objects again. There was no cowboy hat.

While there were no cars driving by, the detective hurried out into the intersection, knelt, and scanned under the cars parked on the street. He spotted the hat under a Nissan truck and rushed over to it. Reaching under the vehicle, he captured the pale beaver-skin hat by its brim and pulled it out. Other than being soiled from its journey down the street and smeared with grease along the crown, it was a cleaning and a steam-blocking away from looking new.

The decorative band was a simple gray cloth ribbon. As he inspected it, Manseur noticed the slightest bulge in the seam. He peeled back the band and removed a plastic disk that looked like the head of a thumbtack with a loop of fine wire sticking out from it.

He didn't have any idea what the gizmo was, but he took an evidence bag from his coat pocket and dropped the object in. One thing he did know was that it hadn't come with the hat from the Stetson Company, and the fine wire looked suspiciously like an antenna.

Before he left the scene, Manseur put the Stetson in his car trunk and slipped the evidence bag into his inside jacket pocket.

John Ramsey Miller

Upside Down