Page 118 of The Fourth Option
“Did he go to the police?”
She rolled her eyes at him. “Have you learned nothing about this city?”
The washer below stopped with a buzzing alarm.
“I’ll go shove that in the dryer,” Walker said. “Look through the rest of this and tell me what you think.”
When he returned, Belle was comparing his typed pages to Connor’s handwriting. “This is really good,” she said. “If you’re right that Rayne is Officer Slate and Hendrick is Officer Chestnut, then we know those two were part of this Snowball-dealing ring. Would have been helpful if Connor wrote in complete sentences instead of this shorthand.”
“Rayne and Hendrick were just pieces of what Connor was trying to uncover. You can see that, here in the back of the journal, where he set up these diagrams. He was looking for the roots of the distribution, the way Snowball was getting into the city. That all seems to come through this entity.”
“Marked by an X.”
“Right. Either he didn’t know what the name was yet, or X is the code name he gave it. Doesn’t help us much either way, as it’s just a letter.”
“Or a symbol. See, the one over here is a plus sign.” Belle pointed to another mark on the diagram.
“I think that the plus sign is likely a medical cross,” Walker said, lifting one of his typed pages. “Earlier in the translation I came across this reference to ‘corp hosp.’ I think he probably meant a corporate hospital or hospital corporation, something like that.”
“What’s this box with the arrows going in? The hospice thing?”
“I don’t know. I found another entity called ‘dorado,’ but I don’t know if dorado is another layer, like the code he used for Slate. Not sure what it is. If it was a hospital, I would think it would have a cross. My thought is that it’s the drug company that supplies the hospital. It could be the X.”
“If it’s the X, it sits in the middle of his diagram. Maybe it’s not a color. Maybe it’s money. My high school Spanish tells me that it means golden.” She typed into her phone. “Google Translate says so too.”
“Or the color. Could it be a pill mill?” Walker nodded toward the fentanyl patches. “That would make sense. The suspected hospital shoots over the fentanyl patches and those are converted into laced pills in a mill.”
Belle’s eyes brightened. “I once picked up a book for him at Faulkner House, a used bookstore on Pirate’s Alley. It was about China’s involvement in the opioid crisis. At the time, I had thought Connor’s research was leading to an exposé of China’s role in opioids, especially fentanyl. But he looked through it and said they had it all wrong. Something like that.”
“We need to figure out what dorado is,” Walker said. “That’s the common denominator here, the known unknown.”
“Known unknown. Not sure if that’s jargon or just gibberish,” Belle said. “But let’s see what the internet has to say about dorado.” She thumbed her phone.
“You trust that thing too much,” Walker said.
She gestured to the smudged typewritten pages with a smirk. “We need to evolve if we are going to solve.” Belle tapped her screen quickly, eyes scanning. After a few minutes, she turned it toward him. A blunt-nosed fish stared back, bright, iridescent, almost cartoonish. “Check that out.”
“Your point?” he asked.
“Read the search bar. Dorado is also a fish. Gulf waters. Mahi-mahi. Like sushi.” She swiped to another page. “Dorado, as in the fish, also happens to be the logo for a freight forwarding company on the East Bank. Dorado Freight. They handle imports from South America.”
She pulled up the company’s website. A stylized fish leaped over a wave, bold and clean.
“Maybe we should get you one of these,” she said, waving the phone.
Walker accepted the outstretched device and read.
“This isn’t far from my new camp, east side of the Mississippi.”
He handed the phone back.
“Let’s go check it out,” Belle said, the enthusiasm rising in her voice.
Walker shook his head. “We’re done with joint ops.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means, get some rest, but before you do, does Gloria have a color printer?”
