Weaving her way through the tables, Triana slid into the booth on the other side of the table from Bodine and flagged down a passing waitress.
“Coffee and whole wheat toast,” she said.
While the diner made a delicious breakfast, her stomach was too jumpy to consider anything heavier. For the first time in months, there was a chance she’d finally learn something about the man who’d killed her father.
“Sure you don’t want something else to eat?” Bodine said. “My treat. I swear I won’t even add it to the expense report.”
Triana almost laughed. So far, the PI had added everything to his expense report. The last one had had an entry for thirty-five cents, the cost of the parking meter outside the coffee shop he’d stopped at for a bagel while on the way to his office to email her the report.
“Toast is fine,” she said. “What do you have?”
Short and stocky, Bodine had a touch of gray in his curly brown hair, and dark eyes that didn’t miss a thing. He reached down into the messenger-style bag beside him on the bench and came out with a thick yellow envelope. Without a word, he shoved it across the table at her.
She started to open it, but he shook his head. “Not here. If anyone sees you reading that, it would lead to a lot of awkward questions.”
Triana was so curious her fingers itched, but she resisted the temptation to assume Bodine was being a drama queen and instead put the envelope on the seat beside her.
“What is it?” she asked.
He went back to eating his Creole Slammer, a big mess of eggs and hash browns smothered in crawfish étouffée. She loved her city’s down-home cooking as much as the next girl, but there was no way in heck she could eat something like that this early in the morning.
“It’s the entire case file the NOPD has on your father’s murder,” he said. “And I do mean the entire case file, including the coroner’s death investigation report.”
If she’d thought her fingers had been itching to see it before, it didn’t compare to how eager she was now. She’d been asking the NOPD for a copy of the file for over a year and hadn’t gotten so much as a return phone call. Apparently, it wasn’t something the police preferred to hand out, especially when the case was technically still open.
“How’d you get it?” she asked Bodine. She wasn’t quite sure if it was illegal to have a copy of a full, unabridged police report in New Orleans, but she didn’t think anyone would be thrilled about it.
Bodine didn’t even look up from his plate as he shoveled eggs onto his fork. “I stole it. When you get a chance to read it in private, you’ll notice the actual crime scene photos have been sealed in a separate envelope. It’s my suggestion that you skip that part of the report. Take my word for it, you don’t want to see them.”
She nodded, forcing herself to suddenly take interest in the coffee and toast the waitress had just delivered to avoid thinking about what might be in that sealed envelope.
“Any information you think is of particular interest?” she asked as she sipped her coffee.
Bodine glanced at the nearby tables like he was worried the NOPD had suddenly started following him. But after a few moments of surveillance, he must have decided the risk was low enough because he nodded.
“Several items. In no particular order,” he said quietly, “first, the detective running this case should probably be fired. Outside of the generic walk-around-the-block-and-ask-if-anyone-heard-anything type of questions, he’s done nothing. My personal opinion is that as soon as they saw your dad’s old rap sheet, they wrote this off as criminal-on-criminal violence and let the case sink.”
Triana immediately felt her face flush with anger. Her father had never hidden the fact that he’d had a shady background growing up or that he’d been in tangles with the law back when he was younger. But all that had been more than two decades ago. Everything had changed after she and her mother were in his life. Didn’t a man get any credit for turning his life around?
Still, as mad as she was, Triana knew that Bodine hadn’t told her anything she hadn’t already figured out on her own. She’d known the police hadn’t tried very hard to find her father’s killer, but it still hurt to have it confirmed.
“There were a few random notes in the file about some people thinking your dad had pissed off someone dangerous in the days or weeks right before his death, but nothing specific,” Bodine continued. “I’m going to dig into that angle a bit more.”
Triana didn’t say anything as she nibbled on her breakfast.
“The most interesting tidbits were found in the autopsy report,” Bodine added, scraping up the last of his breakfast with a piece of toast slathered in so much butter that it left yellow streaks behind on the plate. Triana had to wonder what this guy’s blood pressure and cholesterol averaged on a normal day. “There was also blood at the crime scene that wasn’t your dad’s—two distinct blood types beyond his—and lots of it. The coroner stated it was arterial, probably from the carotid based on angle and distance of spray. Unfortunately, there were no hits in CODIS or the Louisiana DNA databases.”
Triana looked up in surprise. “Dad was attacked by two people?”
Bodine shook his head. “More than that. The coroner was of the opinion that the amount of blood at the scene indicated both of those people would have bled out in something like twenty or thirty seconds. But their bodies weren’t at the scene, meaning there were at least three attackers and that whoever was left removed the bodies of the two who’d been killed. Why the hell someone would hang around to drag off their bodies but not the body of the person they’d killed is frigging beyond me. The coroner’s theory is also supported by the fact that ballistics showed three distinct large-caliber automatics used on your father. None of the weapons were found at the scene or anywhere nearby, though.”
“Three people shooting large-caliber handguns in the middle of the night and no one heard a thing?” she asked in disbelief. “It’s not like Dad’s club was in the middle of nowhere.”
Bodine shrugged. “My guess is that they used silencers, which is kind of scary, since it likely means that these men were professionals. Common criminals don’t walk around the street carrying silenced weapons.”
Professionals, huh? Something else the NOPD detective had never mentioned to her and her mother. “They were professionals, but Dad was still able to kill two of them?” She felt a completely stupid sense of pride at that. Her dad had gone down swinging, the way he’d always told her to face any obstacle life put in front of her. “I didn’t know he’d even kept a weapon at the club.”
Bodine looked around the diner again, making sure no one was eavesdropping on their conversation, then lowered his voice. “That’s where things get interesting. Those men weren’t shot. The coroner and crime scene techs were sure of that. The only guns fired in that club belonged to the men who attacked your father. There was blood found on the tips of all of your dad’s fingers though, implying that he ripped the men’s throats out with his bare hands. I have to admit, that conclusion makes me wonder if the crime scene techs didn’t mess something up during the collection. I know your dad was big, but I’m not buying the idea that he was able to rip two people’s throats out while getting shot multiple times.”
