Page 89 of The Fourth Option
“None noted in the ME report. But that’s not all that unusual. He could have cooked the heroin and smoked it elsewhere. Or injected it in hard-to-detect locations.”
“Can we check out the heroin stash to see how it might have been accessed?”
“We can, but I would need to get it from the NOPD evidence locker.”
“Hold on that for now,” Stanton said.
The normal way for him to handle this would have been to start a PI, a preliminary inquiry, to officially look over the NOPD’s evidence records. But after studying the case files in his home office early that morning, his gut told him to poke around a little first, quietly. The politics on this thing were too explosive for someone to start shouting that there was an FBI investigation in the works.
“Tell me about the mother,” he said to J.J.
She flipped a page vertically, folding it over the file folder. “Leigh Ann Staub. Forty-eight years old. Long career in nursing, some of it on naval bases in Virginia. For the past few years, she worked at the Tulane Medical Center ER as a charge nurse, a senior position.”
“Record?”
“No criminal record.”
“What about professionally?”
“She was a star, well respected at Tulane,” J.J. said. “At least with what I’ve been able to uncover so far in interviews and personnel files.”
“Finances?”
“She had a 401(k) worth about three hundred grand and thirty-five thousand or so in the bank.”
“That’s a good chunk but not enough to afford a house in the Garden. How’d she get it? Divorce?”
“This is where it gets a little murky.”
“How so?”
“Her husband had a business that did well for a few years.”
“What type of business?”
“That’s the murky part. Final Options, LLC. He was the sole employee. I did some digging. Want to know where it led?”
“I do.”
“Langley, Virginia.”
“He was CIA?”
“A contractor. Former SEAL. Worked overseas, so it looks like he collected a few years of tax-free dough that helped purchase the house. He was killed in Afghanistan in 2021. Not much information other than that. Wife got a USAA life insurance policy. Enough to pay down the home loan but not enough to be able to stop working.”
“Interesting. I may reach out to Langley. I worked with a guy there after the terror attack in the Quarter last year,” he said, referring to ISIS-inspired former Army serviceman Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, who in the early morning hours of New Year’s Day 2025 rammed his Ford truck into partiers on Bourbon Street. He then unloaded on the crowd with a rifle and pistol before being shot by police. Jabbar killed fourteen people and wounded almost sixty others. He also had a detonator in his truck connected to two pipe bombs in coolers on Bourbon Street, bombs that did not detonate.
“How about media?”
J.J. set her phone on Stanton’s desk and turned the screen to face him. “This is online and will be in the morning papers.”
The headline readMassacre in the Garden.
“This the crime beat guy?”
“Evan Greer. The article says it was a cartel hit linked to the son. Greer is connecting his OD to the drug world. He doesn’t come right out andsay it, but he sure connects enough dots between what happened in the Garden and Connor Staub’s OD.”
Stanton took her phone and perused the article, thumbing all the way to the bottom before handing it back.
