"You're kidding, aren't you?" I said.
"You think you can beat these guys playing by the rules? Wake up. They own the ballpark. We're just the humps who carry out the garbage."
"Been toking on a little Mexican gage tonight?"
"No, what I've been doing is wrapping a 'drop' in black tape and filing off a few serial numbers."
"Come on in and eat something."
"I'm going to take Chalons down. Nobody is calling my partner a perve. You see Jericho Johnny around town, pretend you don't."
He climbed in his pink Cadillac and roared off, a tape deck blasting out Bob Seeger's "The Horizontal Bop," leaves blowing from under the wire wheels.
Would Clete actually try to pop Val Chalons? Or was that just a mixture of weed and beer talking? I thought about it. Clete's Caddy swerved at the corner in front of the Shadows, flattening a garbage can into a building.
chapter TWENTY-FIVE
The 911 call from a fisherman out by Lake Dautrieve came in at 5:43 Monday morning. "She don't have no clothes on. I t'ought maybe it was some kind of accident. Like maybe she fallen out of a tree or somet'ing," he said.
"Sir, calm down. Is the person injured?" the female dispatcher said.
"Injured? What you talkin' about?" the caller replied.
Helen picked me up in my front yard. The sun was just striking the brick buildings on Main as we crossed the drawbridge and headed up Loreauville Road toward the lake.
"I thought I was on the desk," I said.
"This cruiser is your desk, so shut up," she said.
We arrived at the crime scene just behind the coroner's van. Uniformed sheriff's deputies from both Iberia and St. Martin parishes were already there, stringing yellow tape through scrub oaks and gum and willow trees on the edge of the lake.
The shallows were carpeted with hyacinths, and I could see the black heads of moccasins between the lily pads, barely breaking the water. High up on the windstream, turkey buzzards circled like ragged-edged oriental kites. I watched Koko Hebert stoop under the tape and walk toward a forked oak tree with the plodding ennui of a man who has long given up on the world.
Helen took a call on a hand-held radio, then tossed it on the seat of the cruiser. "The boys from Baton Rouge are on their way," she said.
"They think it's the Baton Rouge guy?" I said.
"A tattoo on the vie is the same as on a woman who was abducted by LSU Sunday afternoon," she replied.
The abduction had taken place in a middle-income neighborhood a few blocks off Highland Road. The victim, Barbara Trajan, was the mother of two children, an aerobics instructor at a health club, and the wife of a high school football coach. She had a tattoo of an orange and purple butterfly on her abdomen, just below her navel. The previous afternoon, she had been working in her flower bed, one that paralleled the driveway. Her husband had taken the children to a church softball game. When they returned home, Barbara Trajan had disappeared. Her gardening trowel and one cotton glove lay on the concrete.
I looked across the lake at the sun. It was molten and watery, wrapped in vapor, just above the tree line. The previous night had been hot and dry, the clouds crackling with thunder that gave no rain. Now, a breeze suddenly sprang up in the south and riffled across the lake. A gray, salty odor that had been trapped inside the woods struck my face. Helen cleared her throat and spit to the side. "Oh boy," she said.
We pulled on latex gloves and went inside the tape. The ground was leaf strewn and soft, torn with drag marks, gouged by boots or heavy shoes, as though a man had been pulling a weight that resisted his grasp. The victim was nude, her chin fitted at an upward angle in the fork of a tree. Her wrists were bound behind her with plastic cuffs, her eyes open, as though they had been poached by a vision of human behavior she had never imagined. A white cotton work glove protruded from her mouth.
Koko Hebert stood behind the dead woman, wiping mosquitoes out of his face. I saw him stoop over, reach out with his latex-gloved hand, then rise up again and jot something on a notepad. A moment later he walked past me, without speaking, his shoulders humped, his face flushed and oily in the heat. He ducked under the crime scene tape and went out by the lake, by himself, into the breeze. I followed him down by the lakeside. He was still writing on his notepad.
"Wait for the postmortem and I'll be able to speak with more specificity," he said.
"I'm on a short tether. I'm not sure how much time I have left with the department," I said.
"Entrance through the rear. Bite marks on the shoulders. Death by strangulation. With a chain of some kind. With tiny links in it." He looked at me.
"Like the little piece of chain Fontaine Belloc hid on her person before she died?"
"That'd be my bet," he said.
"How do you read this guy? Don't give me your cynical runaround, either, Koko. You're an intelligent man."
"He's a classic psychopath, which means we don't have a clue about what goes on inside his head. But if you ask me, I think he's trying to lead the hunt away from Baton Rouge. I don't think he's from around here."
"Why not?"
"He's transported two vies eighty miles into Iberia Parish. Both were alive during the trip. That means he incurred risks he didn't have to. It was for a reason. My guess is he lives not far from Baton Rouge, maybe around Port Allen or Denham Springs. He's squeezing his big-boy every time he sees us scratching our heads on TV."
"Maybe he had another reason," I said.
Koko lit a cigarette and studied the lake, either lost in his own thoughts or out of indifference to anything I had to say. Twenty feet out from the bank, I saw the gnarled, green-black tail of a gator roil the lily pads. Koko exhaled his cigarette smoke into the wind. "Yeah?" he said.
"What if dropping the vie here is a 'fuck-you' card for people he knows?" I said.
Koko continued to puff on his cigarette, his eyes veiled. I walked back toward the cruiser, then heard him laboring his way up the slope behind me.
"Know anything about anthropology, primitive man's behavior, that kind of crap?" he said.
"No," I replied.
"Sometimes serial killers mark their territory, particularly when it has some kind of personal meaning to them. It looks like there're piss stripes on a tree back there. There were also piss stripes on a tree by the pond where we found the Belloc woman. I didn't pay much attention to it at the time because we had the semen on the vie."
"I've read through all the forensics on the Baton Rouge crime scenes. None of them makes mention of the perpetrator marking the area with urine. I think our guy is telling us something."
"Why didn't he disfigure this one?" I asked.
"He did. Inside. I told you to wait on the post, but you don't listen. If you ever get this demented fuck in your sights, ask God to look the other way."
It was not a morning to think about what I had seen.
Any inner-city street cop., homicide investigator, or member of a sex crimes unit carries images in his head that never go away, not unless he wants to burn them out of his skull with booze or yellow jackets or black speed. But what if the problem is not him or even the job? What if the problem is the simple fact that there is something bestial and cruel at work in the human race? What if his perception as a police officer is not a jaded but an accurate one?
When I was on loan to Miami P.D. I saw a black mob in Liberty City drag three Cuban kids from a car and crush their heads into pulp with curbstones. I also saw five uniformed cops in Opa Locka beat a black motorcyclist to death with batons. Clete and I cut a corpse dancing with maggots out of a brick wall and had our unmarked car Molotoved in the same night. I've worked child abuse cases I will never discuss with anyone.