“Yeah.”
“Now? With a riot going on?”
Omar looked at the silent camp, the people huddled in whatever kind of cover they could find on the flat ground. Huddled as far away from him as the fence would allow. “Do you see a riot going on, Jedthus?” he asked.
Jedthus sighed. “What kind of candy?”
“Milky Way. Snickers. Whatever’s in the Commissary.”
After Jedthus departed, Omar had the two bodies dragged out of the camp and covered with plastic sheeting. This was bad police procedure, to take the two bodies away from where they’d been shot before they could be photographed and seen by the coroner, but Omar figured the riot excused his actions.
Besides, he didn’t give a damn about the two dead people and he figured no one else would, either. He let them lie in plain sight, where the refugees could see them, while he called the fence-builders back to work.
This time there wasn’t a riot.
Omar watched the silent, resentful people in the camp, and he thought about what Knox had told him. Use science, he thought, turn them against one another. There were over two hundred people in that camp, and they had to be kept quiet and obedient and isolated.
Science, he thought. Science would save his son.
The sun hammered Omar’s head. His stomach churned. He wished he had sent Jedthus for Alka-Seltzer as well as candy. He went into his police cruiser and turned on the air-conditioning, and the cool and silence helped him to think. By the time that Jedthus returned with Omar’s bag of candy, he thought he had his plan worked out.
The heat and the lack of food combined to keep the camp quiet. People splayed out under awnings and in the camp’s shaded picnic areas, trying to stay out of the heat. Aftershocks shivered the tops of the trees. By one o’clock in the afternoon the fence was finally finished, a shimmering twelve-foot barrier of chain link with only a single gate that led out into the parking lot and the highway. The fence-builders began stringing razor-wire along the top.
“Five hours, twenty-two minutes,” Micah Knox said, looking at his big musical pocket watch. “Pretty neat, considering we had a riot and everything.”
Omar got his bullhorn from his car and advanced to the gate.
“Now you saw what happened when there was trouble,” he said. “Three people got shot, and one of them was a little girl. So I don’t want any more trouble, any more rocks or guns, because the folks who will end up paying for it will be the families here.
“So here’s what I want. I want you to choose a council to help run the camp. Responsible folks, family folks. Ten will do. And I and the parish will deal with the council, and the council will deal with the rest of you.
“The council will arrange for y’all’s distribution of food. I am going to leave now to get you some food supplies, and when I come back, I hope you’ll have chosen some people that I can turn this food over to.”
He left them to think about that for a while. The two bodies were loaded into the back of a pickup truck to be carried to Tree Simpson, and Omar arranged for the fat man’s pistol—a boxy-looking Glock 9mm, weapon-of-choice for gangsters and gangster wannabees—to be bagged for evidence and brought along with the bodies.
“I’ll be along to see Tree in just a minute,” Omar told his deputies, and sent the truck banging on its way. He himself stopped by the Reverend Morris’ wrecked California bungalow, where he found the church people waiting with the shipment of food they’d brought in for the camp’s meals. When Omar pulled into the driveway, he saw them assemble in the area between the house and the church, surging around his car before he could get it parked. They were stiff with barely suppressed hate and anger. Omar got out of his car and tipped his hat to Morris’s widow. “I’m sorry about your husband, Miz Morris,” he said. “He was a good man.”
“Thank you.” Mrs. Morris’ tone was strained but not impolite. “But when may we bring the food into the camp?”
“Yeah!” one of her supporters said. “The food!”
“There are babies in the camp,” Mrs. Morris continued, “and they need their milk.”
“There’s been trouble at the camp, Miz Morris.” He frowned at her. “And I need to ask you—do you have any reason to believe that someone may have wished your husband harm?” Mrs. Morris looked surprised. She raised a hand to her wrinkled throat. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“He was last seen in the company of a young man from the camp,” Omar said. “And now Dr. Morris is dead and the man is missing.” He waited for that to sink in, then added, “I will have Tree Simpson take a good look at your husband’s body, and we’ll see if there is any reason to suspect foul play.” He looked at Mrs. Morris, then lifted his eyes to the others, her family, and some of the church workers.
“I didn’t see the accident site myself,” he said, “so I didn’t have any reason to be suspicious, but after what happened at the camp this morning I began to wonder. There was a riot, you see—a real riot, and my deputies were shot at, and two people were killed. And a little girl was wounded. A little girl!” He raised his voice, tried to sound outraged. “Maybe you saw my deputy taking her and her mother to the doctor.”
He saw barely perceptible nods from several of the group.
“There are bad folks at the camp, Miz Morris,” Omar said. “Drug dealers, thieves, gangsters. I suspect one of them killed your husband. I don’t think I can allow civilians like yourselves into that camp anymore. It would only put you in harm’s way.”
Mrs. Morris absorbed this slowly. Her lips trembled, either with emotion or words that she hadn’t quite formed.
“I will have the parish take over delivery of the food,” Omar said. “It’s government food anyway. You people have been good enough to volunteer to prepare and distribute it, but I can’t put you in danger any longer. Not once they start shooting at us.”
He got on the radio and gave orders for his deputies to take possession of the food, then drove to the courthouse to meet with Tree Simpson.
“Give Ozie a chance,” Tree said with a weary grin, “he’ll put an end to the population explosion single-handed. What is it—three dead men so far?”
“I’m not here to talk about Ozie,” Omar said. “I want to talk about Dr. Morris.” Tree looked surprised. “What about him? I was going to send the body to the funeral home.”
“There may have been foul play there,” Omar said. “Could you give the body another look?” Tree looked dubious. “It was burned pretty bad,” he said. “I don’t know if I could find much on my own. Normally we’d send the body to Baton Rouge for a proper autopsy, but I don’t know if we can do that in the circumstances.”
“Just give it a look. There may be something there. An exit wound, a shank left in the body. Something.”
“Exit wound?” Tree frowned dubiously. “The back of the head was gone, but that could have been because the brains boiled in the fire and the head exploded.” He shrugged. “I’ll see what I can find.” Omar left Tree’s office with a quiet triumph singing in his blood. Things were working out. He would blame Morris’ killing on someone who was already dead, the runaway boy that Knox and his people had killed yesterday, sent where the woodbine twineth. And then what he’d tell Spottswood Parish was that the boy was still at large, still armed, still murderous. And that would end any kind of friendly relations between the local community—particularly the local black community—and the refugees in the camps.
What Omar intended to do next was to divide the people in the camp from one another. On his way out of town he stopped by the Commissary and bought some Alka-Seltzer, and he dropped it in a bottle of water that he also purchased and drank it off. It didn’t help. When he returned to the camp, he met with the council that the refugees had chosen to represent them. All black, mostly middle-aged people, more women than men.