“You didn’t pack a bag,” she says.
“I didn’t anticipate making the trip. I’d come back through Houston, but that would add another hour to the drive.”
“I’ve hardly seen you the past week.”
“It’s this case,” I say. “Everything is unraveling on me and I’m not sure what to do.”
“Bridger called the house looking for you.”
“He has my cell number.”
“I guess he thought you’d be home on a Sunday afternoon. He wants you to call him.”
“I’ll do that.” The phone is warm against my ear. “Charlotte, I don’t want you to be mad. I would have said something before, if I knew this would come up.”
“I’m not mad,” she says.
A pause.
“Look,” I say. “It’s this pregnancy thing, isn’t it?” Silence. “It’s been eating at you ever since you found out. I know it’s. .” My voice trails off. Still nothing. “Is it the thought of a baby in the house, or the fact that they’ll probably move out-?”
This time there’s no question who hangs up first.
I decide to give her time, calling Bridger instead. He picks up and I get a blast of wind noise over the line, immediately picturing him on a golf course green. He’s just the sort to play in this weather. But no, he’s in the car, smoking with the window down.
“You should give up,” I say.
“Thanks for the advice. Now, what’s this I hear about Donald Fauk appealing his conviction? There’s no chance of the court entertaining this, is there?”
I start to explain the situation. He makes a series of affirming grunts, prodding the story along. Occasionally I hear him exhale loudly, and I imagine a cloud of smoke swirling around the pathologist’s windblown head.
“I heard about the DNA samples going missing,” he says. “What do you think about that?”
“Is it any wonder? Evidence gets lost even under the best conditions, and these days nobody’s calling HPD’s DNA section the best.”
“You don’t think it’s convenient, though?”
“In what way?”
“This particular set of samples going missing.”
“Fauk must be happy,” I say, puzzled.
“But you think it’s just a coincidence.”
Now I’m really confused. “What are you getting at exactly?”
“Maybe it’s nothing,” he says. “But when the original tests were done, the results were verified by an independent lab. We send a lot of work to this particular lab, and I happened to be talking to one of their doctors earlier this week when the subject came up. He brought it up, by the way, and he had a strange story to tell.
“When the evidence couldn’t be retrieved from HPD, Fauk’s attorney queried the independent lab about whether they had samples in storage. My friend answered that they did-these guys keep everything-but the lawyer insisted on him physically checking to see whether they were there. And when he did, guess what?”
“No samples.”
“Exactly. And it’s not like somebody misplaced them. He checked every test they’d run the same month as the Fauk evidence, and all of it was there. The only thing missing were the Fauk DNA samples.”
“Did he have a theory?”
“He told me they were still looking into it. But off the record he said the only explanation was that someone on staff removed them. He doesn’t know when, but at some point, a lab employee went into storage and took the evidence.”
“So Fauk’s counsel insisted on them checking because he knew already the evidence was no longer there.”
“That’s how it looks to me.”
“If this is true,” I say, “then what are the odds the same thing happened in the HPD crime lab?”
“Pretty good, if you ask me. A lot of heads rolled during that inquiry. Maybe somebody decided to make an extra buck. It might not have seemed too serious to them, knowing there was a confession and those backup samples at the other lab.”
“You’ve given me something to think about. Thanks for passing it along.”
“How are you doing, March? The whole Fauk thing coming back like this has to be taking its toll. .”
“There’s a lot going on,” I say, brushing his concern aside. “If I can keep Fauk in jail, that’ll be one thing I don’t have to worry about at night.”
After I hang up, I remember Carter Robb saying something similar to me last night.
If I could just get clarity. On just one thing.
And what had I told him? Something stupid about the human condition. Speeding through East Texas with New Orleans in my crosshairs, I keep repeating Carter’s words to myself. If I could just get clarity on just one thing. A mantra doubles and redoubles in my head, syncopated by the roar of the road, by the rush of forced air, and the beat of raindrops on the windshield. I hear the tap, tap, tap of the knifepoint, first on the stainless surface of the autopsy slab and then chipping away at the sheriff’s conference table. It all becomes white noise and then fades to silence, and in the silence a new sound, wet and whispering, fills my ears. It’s the porous sucking hiss of a blade through flesh.
CHAPTER 18
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13 — 9:09 P.M.
When he returned to New Orleans a year after the hurricane, Gene Fontenot found himself a brick one-story in Westwego across the river from Audubon Park, an ugly house with a bare concrete patio, where he could grill steaks and drink beer after-hours, separated from the mud-colored Mississippi by a rusted shipyard. To mark my arrival, he carries a chair from the breakfast table out onto the slab. We sit and listen to the sizzle of cooking meat, and Gene pulls a couple of longnecks from the cooler.
“None for me,” I say.
“Come on, now.” He extends the bottle closer, then sets it aside with a suit-yourself smile. “I don’t recall you being a teetotaler-but whatever. I checked up on that boy you were asking about, Wayne Bourgeois, and if you want, we can pay him a visit later on. He stays up at his stepsister’s place on Desaix Boulevard, over by the fairgrounds. It wouldn’t hurt to know why he’s in your gunsights.”
“Remember Donald Fauk?”
He lifts his hands. “How could I forget?”
“My information is, when Bourgeois got out of Huntsville, he had an errand to run for Fauk. I assume, based on the fact he came back here, that this task of his was local. Now, what would Fauk want done in New Orleans? The only thing I can come up with has to do with you.”
“I’ve never heard of this boy before. What’s his sheet look like?”
“He beat the living daylights out of a prostitute, but I don’t think that’s got anything to do with the situation. Apparently, Fauk’s been paying off newly released cons to do odd jobs he can’t run through his team of lawyers. For example, this trial that just fell apart on you, the one that sparked the internal investigation? Is it possible Bourgeois coached your suspect on what to say, maybe gave him a plausible story that would make the confession sound coerced?”
He laughs at the idea, takes a swig from his bottle, and sets it on the concrete. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
“That doesn’t sound too likely.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“What that defense attorney said in the courtroom. . Much as it pains me to concede anything to the man, that’s pretty much what happened.” The words come out light and sarcastic, like this admission is no big deal, only he can’t look me in the eye.
“What are you saying, Gene?”
“The little dirtbag was guilty, make no mistake. But without any physical evidence tying him to the scene, and with my witness coming over with a sudden case of amnesia, there was no sticking it to him without a straight-up admission. Lucky for me when we picked him up he’d collected a few bruises, including a nice one right here on the biceps.” He taps his arm to show me just where. “Before the interrogation, I conducted a little pre-interview, and whenever he lied to me I gave him a punch on the arm. This boy had just smoked a man in cold blood, two shots to the head, and I had him crying like a baby from a few taps.” He chuckles at the memory, still avoiding eye contact. “And don’t tell me you never do things like that in Houston, ’cause I wasn’t born yesterday. In fact, I seem to recall a little talk we had once upon a time, a regular meeting of the minds. .”