BLACK NOTICE. PATRICIA CORNWELL

“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 you’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.

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