Crossroads

Crossroads is an NCIS: New Orleans novel written by Jeff Mariotte.
==Synopsis==
NCIS is charged with apprehending dangerous and elusive criminals that pose a threat to the nation's security. In a city that keeps surviving disaster, one elite team is dedicated to making its shores a little safer. During the famous Mardi Gras parade, a young Naval oceanographer plunges to his death from a hotel balcony. It's up to Pride and his crew to investigate. But this is a case that goes from grisly to utterly strange. A gris-gris bag found in the victim's belongings, a trail of mystical clues, and the haunting figure of a voodoo loa on CCTV at the crime scene all suggest that dark powers are at work in The Big Easy.
==Plot==
In New Orleans, Caydee Sprugeon is at a Mardi Gras festival with her boyfriend, Roger Mitchell with Caydee's older sister, Bree and her boyfriend/husband, Spence taking a weeklong climbing and hiking trip to Lake Placid which had resulted in Spence proposing to Bree at the top of Mount Marcy, New York's highest peak and the marriage had lasted for seven years with the couple also having two daughters.
However, Caydee is having a different experience compared to her sister and is realizing that the trip is on the verge of ending on a bad note as Caydee is planning on breaking up with Roger and heading back to her home of Dayton, Ohio.
It's also revealed that the couple are in St. Charles Avenue and watching a parade on Fat Tuesday of Mardi Gras but things change when Caydee watches a man fall or be pushed to his death, causing the parade to stop and everyone in sight to begin screaming while Roger moans, unaware of what's just happened.
Some time later, Dwayne Cassius Pride and his team of fellow NCIS agents Christopher LaSalle and Sonja Percy, Jefferson Parish medical examiner Loretta Wade, forensics agent Sebastian Lund and NCIS computer specialist Patton Plame are enjoying themselves with Pride silently wishing the team's newest recruit, Tammy Gregorio would be in attendance but she's currently in Washington D.C., leading some specialized training workshops. At CFA, the bar Pride owns, he suspects manager and bartender Michael Buckey is alread being run ragged with Pride expecting to help out later on.
However, Pride suddenly hears screams echoing from St. Charles Avenue and he winces, noting that even though it doesn't mean trouble for NCIS, it means someone's day has just gotten a lot worse.
He then tells his team to follow him, suspecting NOPD could use a hand, Loretta hoping it's just Pride's hands that are needed and not hers as Mardi Gras parades should be memorable, not fatal with Pride telling her they'll all hoping for that, there's only one way to know for sure, though before telling everyone, "Let's go learn things".
NOPD has cleared St. Charles Avenue and rerouted the parades much to the dismay of people who have been on the streets since before sunrise to get a good spot to see the parade and of course, the curious people who hang back, interested in seeing the victim than the rest of the parades with the NOPD officers pushing those back to the ends of the block, sealing the area with tape marked CRIME SCENE as well as many uniformed officers that can be spared.
EMTs and firefighters have worked together to free the victim from the trident and bring him down to the street with Loretta performing a preliminary investigation while Sebastian tells Pride he's seen compromised crime scenes before but not one that had five thousand people walk all over it between the crime and the investigation and after assuring Sebastian he's not going to make him head up to the top of the trident, Sebastian revealing he's not great with heights and telling him to figure out if this is a homicide, accident or suicide, Pride heads over to Loretta who reveals the victim is Navy Lieutenant Edward Alpunete and that he lived in Nicholson, Mississippi and that he must at Stennis Space Centre which in addition to being a NASA field center is also home base for various Navy organizations such as the Naval Metrology and Oceanography Command, the Naval Oceanographic Office and a small craft training center with it being revealed that Alpuente is a thirty-four year old African-American man, trim with a short, military-style haircut and his eyes are far apart while he has a strong chin with a clet in it. 
Loretta also shows the team bags she found which are revealed to contain items associated with voodoo much to everyone's surprise. She also reveals that Alpuente was alive when he hit the trident and that one of the barbs likely penetrated his heart.
Sebastian later rejoins the team, informing them that Alpuente is from Shell Beach in St. Bernard Parish and is unmarried. He reveals that Alpuente lives in MS but is also renting a house over in Treme on a month-to-month basis.
Thanking Sebastian, Pride dispatches Chris and Sonja to the house in Treme while he and Sebastian will go to the Buccaneer Hotel to find out why a Navy Lieutenant who had a house across the state line and one here in New Orleans was doing on that hotel balcony besides watching a parade.
Loretta tells Pride she'll get the Lieutenant to the morgue and she'll have more for him later today with Pride thanking her before he wishes everyone a happy Mardi Gras.
Pride later meets NOPD Detective Byron Menefee and along with Sebastian, talks, hinting the death might be a homicide, something that has Menefee shocked with Menefree telling Pride that are a few NOPD cops who will take a long time to forgive him for insisting he move an entire parade route elsewhere. 
Menefee also gives them a witness: Caydee Spurgeon, a tourist from Ohio who tells him what she knows even though it's not much. She also tells him about her boyfriend or soon to be ex-boyfriend, Caydee revealing she wants to change her flight and let her ex go home alone, preferring not to fly with him, Pride telling her he'll make some calls as they want people go home, happy and they'll do whatever they can to make it happen, revealing it's the best way to have people come back, something Caydee thanks him for along with the suggestion Caydee look into a possible career in law enforcement.
As Caydee leaves, Pride reflects on the fact it's young love.
Later, Pride meets Rose Vergados who he's friends with, Rose giving them information about a man named J.B Goodwin who checked into room 327 and urging Pride to find out what happened as something like this can ultimately kill a hotel's business, Rose even revealing she can't go looking for another job.
After a series of leads and interviews, Loretta and Sebastian inform Pride and LaSalle that Lieutenant Alpuente had L-DOPA in his system, a chemical in the body that can also be used as an athletic performance enhancer with Pride believing someone might have drugged Alpuente through his food although a search of the food turns up nothing, the food will be sent to the lab so Sebastian can test it for traces of L-DOPA.
However, the investigation later uncovers a connection to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and that Apluente was keeping tabs on a suspect: Burl Robitaille.
After Robitaille and Landry try to kill Pride, he manages to subdue the two men with the help of Walter Landry, Landry's father.
Once the arrests and interrogation have been conducted, Pride reveals to his team that Robitaille wanted to expand the baboon population in hopes of leading a new pandemic at the expense of leopards and lions dying out and that when Lieutenant Alpuente discovered what was going on, he brought himself to Robitaille's attention with Robitallite ordering Alpuente to be murdered to stop the Lieutenant from blocking progress concerning the resort and the dredging with the outcome of the investigation meaning that both Landry, Robitallie and the prison guard Pride apprehended are going to be spending some time in prison while the first prison guard died after the tiger caught him with the tiger itself also being put down by Animal Control due to the tiger being found feasting on the dead guard's corpse with the group reflecting on the case as Sebastian believes that the video footage that had Landry and which was fritzed out is something that happened due to voodoo while Pride silently reflects on life in New Orleans and notes he wants to be here in his favorite city, surrounded by his friends which he hopes will happen for as long as he lives.
==Trivia==
*The events in this novel presumably take place some time after the NCIS: New Orleans Season 3 episode, Return of the King (episode) as it's revealed in the book that Sebastian is the newest agent to join the team.
Category:NCIS: New Orleans Novels