Chapter
48
* * *
Toussaint dropped me at the Flaisance. Rachel’s door was half open when I reached the carriage house. I knocked gently and entered. Her clothes had been thrown across the bedroom floor and the sheets from her bed were tossed in an untidy pile in the corner. All of her papers were gone. Her suitcase sat open on the bare mattress. I heard movement from the bathroom and she emerged carrying her cosmetics case. It was stained with powder and foundation and I guessed that the cops had broken some of its contents during their search.
She was wearing a faded blue Knicks sweat top, which hung down over her dark blue denims. She had washed and showered and her damp hair clung to her face. Her feet were bare. I had not noticed before how small they were.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I know.” She didn’t look at me. Instead, she started to pick up her clothes and fold them as neatly as she could into her suitcase. I bent down to pick up a pair of socks, which lay in a ball by my feet.
“Leave it,” she said. “I can do it.”
There was another knock at the door and a patrolman appeared. He was polite, but he made it clear that we were to stay in the hotel until someone arrived to take us to the airport.
I went back to my room and showered. A maid came and made up the room and I sat on my clean sheets and listened to the sounds from the street. I thought about how badly I had screwed up, and how many people had been killed because of it. I felt like the Angel of Death; if I stood on a lawn, the grass would die.
I must have dozed for a while, because the light in the room had changed when I awoke. It seemed that it was dusk, yet that could not have been the case. There was a smell in the room, an odor of rotting vegetation and water filled with algae and dead fish. When I tried to take a breath, the air felt warm and humid in my mouth. I was conscious of movement around me, shapes shifting in the shadows at the corners of the room. I heard whispered voices and a sound like silk brushing against wood and, faintly, a child’s footsteps running through leaves. Trees rustled and there came a flapping of wings from above me, beating unevenly as if the bird was in distress or pain.
The room grew darker, turning the wall facing me to black. The light through the window frame was tinged with blue and green and shimmered as seen through a heat haze.
Or through water.
They came from out of the dark wall, black shapes against green light. They brought with them the coppery scent of blood, so strong that I could taste it on my tongue. I opened my mouth to call out something — even now, I am not sure what I could have called, or who would have heard — but the dank humidity stilled my tongue like a sponge soaked in warm, filthy water. It seemed that a weight was on my chest, preventing me from rising, and I had trouble taking air into my lungs. My hands clasped and unclasped until they too were still and I knew then how it felt to have ketamine coursing through one’s veins, stilling the body in preparation for the anatomist’s knife.
The figures stopped at the edge of the darkness, just beyond the reach of the window’s dim light. They were indistinct, their edges forming and reforming like figures seen through frosted glass, or a projection losing and then regaining its focus.
And then the voices came,
birdman
soft and insistent,
birdman
fading and then strong again,
birdman
voices that I had never heard and others that had called out to me in passion,
bird
in anger, in fear, in love.
daddy
She was the smallest of them all, linked hand in hand with another who stood beside her. Around them, the others fanned out. I counted eight in all and, behind them, other figures, more indistinct, women, men, young girls. As the pressure built on my chest and I struggled to draw the shallowest of breaths, it came to me that the figure that had haunted Tante Marie Aguillard, that Raymond believed he had seen at Honey Island, the girl who seemed to call out to me through dark waters, might not have been Lutice Fontenot.
chile
Each breath felt like my last, none getting farther than the back of my throat before it was choked in a gasp.
chile
The voice was old and dark as the ebony keys on an ancient piano singing out from a distant room.
wake up, chile, his world is unraveling
And then my last breath sounded in my ears and all was stillness and quiet.
? ? ?
I woke to the sound of a tapping on my door. Outside, daylight had passed its height and was ebbing toward evening. When I opened the door, Toussaint stood before me. Behind him, I could see Rachel waiting. “It’s time to go,” he said.
“I thought the New Orleans cops were taking care of that.”
“I volunteered,” he replied. He followed me into the room as I threw my shaving gear loosely into my suit carrier, folded it over, and attached the clasps. It was London Fog, a present from Susan.
Toussaint nodded to the NOPD patrolman.
“You sure this is okay?” said the cop. He looked distracted and uncertain.
“Look, New Orleans cops got better things to be doing than baby–sitting,” replied Toussaint. “I’ll get these people to their plane; you go out and catch some bad guys, okay?”
We drove in silence to Moisant Field. I sat in the passenger seat, Rachel sat in the back. I waited for Toussaint to take the turn to the airport but he continued straight on 10.
“You missed your turn,” I said.
“No,” said Toussaint. “No, I didn’t.”
? ? ?
When things start to unravel, they unravel fast. We got lucky that day. Everybody gets lucky some time.
On a junction of the Upper Grand River, southeast of 10 on the road to Lafayette, a dredging operation to remove silt and junk from the bottom of the river got some of its machinery caught up on a batch of discarded barbed wire that was rusting away on the riverbed. They eventually freed it and tried to haul it up, but there were other things caught in the wire as well: an old iron bedstead; a set of slave irons, more than a century and a half old; and, holding the wire to the bottom, an oil drum marked with a fleur–de–lys.
It was almost a joke to the dredging crew as they worked to free the drum. The report of the discovery of a girl’s body in a fleur–de–lys drum had been all over the news bulletins and it had taken up ninety lines below the fold on the Times–Picayune on the day of its discovery.
Maybe the crew joshed one another morbidly as they worked the barrel out of the water in order to get at the wire. Perhaps they went a little quieter, barring the odd nervous laugh, as one of them worked at the lid. The drum had rusted in places and the lid had not been welded shut. When it came off, dirty water, dead fish, and weeds flowed out.
The legs of the girl, partially decayed but surrounded by a strange, waxy membrane, emerged from the open lid as well, although her body remained jammed, half in, half out of the drum. The river life had fed on her but when one man shined his flashlight to the end of the drum he could see the tattered remains of skin at the forehead and her teeth seemed to be smiling at him in the darkness.
? ? ?
Only two cars were at the scene when we arrived. The body had been out of the water for less than three hours. Two uniformed cops stood by with the dredging crew. Around the body stood three men in plain clothes, one of them wearing a slightly more expensive suit than the rest, his silver hair cut short and neat. I recognized him from the aftermath of Morphy’s death: Sheriff James Dupree of St. Martin Parish, Toussaint’s superior.
Dupree motioned us forward as we stepped from the car. Rachel hung back slightly but still moved toward the body in the drum. It was the quietest crime scene at which I had ever been present. Even when the coroner appeared later, it remained restrained.
Dupree pulled a pair of plastic gloves from his hands, making sure that he didn’t touch their exterior with his exposed fingers. His nails were very short and very clean, I noticed, although not manicured.
“You want to take a closer look?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I’ve pretty much seen all I want to see.”
There was a rotten, pungent odor coming from the mud and silt dredged up by the crew, stronger even than the smell from the girl’s body. Birds hovered over the detritus, trying to target dead or dying fish. One of the crew lodged his cigarette in his mouth, bent to pick up a stone, and hurled it at a huge gray rat that scuttled in the dirt. The stone hit the mud with a wet, thudding sound like a piece of meat dropped on a butcher’s slab. The rat scurried away. Around it, other gray objects burst into activity. The whole area was alive with rodents, disturbed from their nests by the actions of the dredging crew. They bumped and snapped at one another, their tails leaving snaking lines in the mud. The rest of the crew now joined in, casting stones in a skimming motion close to the ground. Most of them had better aims than their friend.
Dupree lit a cigarette with a gold Ronson lighter. He smoked Gitanes, the only cop I had ever seen do so. The smoke was acrid and strong and the breeze blew it directly into my face. Dupree apologized and turned so that his body partially shielded me from the smoke. It was a peculiarly sensitive gesture and it made me wonder, once again, why I was not sitting at Moisant Field.
“They tell me you tracked down that child killer in New York, the Modine woman,” said Dupree eventually. “After thirty years, that’s no mean feat.”
“She made a mistake,” I said. “In the end, they all do. It’s just a matter of being in the right place at the right time to take advantage of the situation.”
He tilted his head slightly to one side, as if he didn’t entirely agree with what I had said but was prepared to give it a little thought in case he’d missed something. He took another long drag on his cigarette. It was an upmarket brand, but he smoked it the way I had seen longshoremen on the New York docks smoke, the butt held between the thumb and the first two fingers of the hand, the ember shielded by the palm. It was the sort of hold you learned as a kid, when smoking was still a furtive pleasure and being caught with a cigarette was enough to earn you a smack across the back of the head from your old man.
“I guess we all get lucky sometimes,” said Dupree. He looked at me closely. “I’m wondering if maybe we’ve got lucky here.”
I waited for him to continue. There seemed to be something fortuitous in the discovery of the girl’s body, or perhaps I was still remembering a dream in which shapes came out of my bedroom wall and told me that a thread in the tapestry being woven by the Traveling Man had suddenly come loose.
“When Morphy and his wife died, my first instinct was to take you outside and beat you to within an inch of your life,” he said. “He was a good man, a good detective, despite everything. He was also my friend.”
“But he trusted you, and Toussaint here seems to trust you too. He thinks maybe you provide a linking factor in all this. If that’s true, then putting you on a plane back to New York isn’t going to achieve anything. Your FBI friend Woolrich seemed to feel the same way, but there were louder voices than his shouting for you to be sent home.”
He took another drag on his cigarette. “I reckon you’re like gum caught in someone’s hair,” he continued. “The more they try to pry you out, the more you get stuck in, and maybe we can use that. I’m risking a storm of shit by keeping you here, but Morphy told me what you felt about this guy, how you believed he was observing us, manipulating us. You want to tell me what you make of this, or do you want to spend the night at Moisant sleeping on a chair?”
I looked at the bare feet and exposed legs of the girl in the drum, the strange yellow accretion like a chrysalis, lying in a pool of filth and water on a rat–infested stretch of a river in western Louisiana. The coroner and his men had arrived with a body bag and a stretcher. They positioned a length of plastic on the ground and carefully maneuvered the drum onto it, one of them supporting the girl’s legs with a gloved hand. Then slowly, gently, the coroner’s hands working inside the drum, they began to free her.
“Everything we’ve done so far has been dogged and predicted by this man,” I began. “The Aguillards learned something, and they died. Remarr saw something, and he was killed. Morphy tried to help me, and now he’s dead as well. He’s closing off the options, forcing us to follow a pattern that he’s already set. Now someone’s been leaking details of the investigation to the press. Maybe that person has been leaking things to this man as well, possibly unintentionally, possibly not.”
Dupree and Toussaint exchanged a look. “We’ve been considering that possibility as well,” said Dupree. “There are too many damn people crawling over this for anything to stay quiet for long.”
“On top of all that,” I continued, “the feds are keeping something back. You think Woolrich has told you everything he knows?”
Dupree almost laughed. “I know as much about this guy Byron as I know about the poet, and that’s sweet FA.”
From inside the drum came a scraping sound, the sound of bone rubbing on metal. Gloved hands supported the girl’s naked, discolored body as it was freed from the confines of the drum.
“How long can we keep the details quiet?” I asked Dupree.
“Not long. The feds will have to be informed, the press will find out.” He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “If you’re suggesting that I don’t tell the feds …” But I could see in his face that he was already moving in that direction, that the reason why the coroner was examining the body so soon after its discovery, the reason why there were so few police at the scene, was to keep the details limited to the minimum number of people.
I decided to push him. “I’m suggesting you don’t tell anyone about this. If you do, the man who did this will be alerted and he’ll cut us off again. If you’re put in a position where you have to say something, then fudge it. Don’t mention the barrel, obscure the location, say you don’t believe the discovery is connected to any other investigation. Say nothing until the girl is identified.”
“Assuming that we can identify her,” said Toussaint mournfully.
“Hey, you want to rain someplace else?” snapped Dupree.
“Sorry,” said Toussaint.
“He’s right,” I said. “We may not be able to identify her. That’s a chance we’ll have to take.”
“Once we exhaust our own records, we’ll have to use the feds,” said Dupree.
“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it,” I responded. “Can we do this?”
Dupree shuffled his feet and finished his cigarette. He leaned through the open window of his car and put the butt into the ashtray.
“Twenty–four hours max,” he said. “After that, we’ll be accused of incompetence or deliberately impeding the progress of an investigation. I’m not even sure how far we’ll get in that time, although” — he looked at Toussaint, then back to me — “it may not come to that.”
“You want to tell me,” I said, “or do I have to guess?”
It was Toussaint who answered.
“The feds think they’ve found Byron. They’re going to move on him by morning.”
“In which case, this is just a backup,” said Dupree. “The joker in our pack.”
But I was no longer listening. They were moving on Byron, but I would not be there. If I tried to participate, then a sizable portion of the Louisiana law enforcement community would be used to put me on a plane to New York or to lock me in a cell.
? ? ?
The crew were likely to be the weakest link. They were taken aside and given cups of coffee, then Dupree and I were as honest with them as we felt we could be. We told them that if they didn’t keep quiet about what they had seen for at least one day, then the man who had killed the girl would probably get away and that he would kill again. It was at least partly true; cut off from the hunt for Byron, we were continuing the investigation as best we could.
The crew was made up of hardworking local men, most of them married with children of their own. They agreed to say nothing until we contacted them and told them that it was okay to do so. They meant what they said, but I knew that some of them would tell their wives and their girlfriends as soon as they got home, and word of what had happened would spread from there. A man who says he tells his wife everything is either a liar or a fool, my first sergeant used to say. Unfortunately, he was divorced.
Dupree had been in his office when the call came through and had picked pairs of deputies and detectives whom he trusted implicitly. With the addition of Toussaint, Rachel, and me, along with the coroner’s team and the dredging crew, maybe twenty people knew of the discovery of the body. It was nineteen people too many to keep a secret for long, but that couldn’t be helped.
After the initial examination and photography, it was decided to bring the body to a private clinic outside Lafayette, where the coroner sometimes consulted, and he agreed to commence his work almost immediately. Dupree prepared a statement detailing the discovery of a woman of unspecified age, cause of death unknown, some five miles from the actual location of the discovery. He dated it, timed it, then left it under a sheaf of files on his desk.
By the time we both arrived at the autopsy room, the remains had been X–rayed and measured. The mobile cart that had brought the body in had been pushed into a corner, away from the autopsy table on its cylindrical tank, which delivered water to the table and collected the fluids that drained through the holes on the table itself. A scale for the weighing of organs hung from a metal frame, and beside it, a small–parts dissection table on its own base stood ready for use.
Only three people, apart from the coroner and his assistant, attended the autopsy. Dupree and Toussaint were two. I was the third. The smell was strong and only partly masked by the antiseptic. Dark hair hung from her skull, and the skin that was left was shrunken and torn. The girl’s remains were almost completely covered by the yellow–white substance.
It was Dupree who asked the question. “Doc, what is that stuff on the body?”
The examiner’s name was Dr. Emile Huckstetter, a tall, stocky man in his early sixties with a ruddy complexion. He ran a gloved finger over the substance before he responded.
“It’s a condition called adipocere,” he said. “It’s rare — I’ve seen maybe two or three cases at most, but the combination of silt and water in that canal seems to have resulted in its development here.”
His eyes narrowed as he leaned toward the body. “Her body fats broke down in the water and they’ve hardened to create this substance, the adipocere. She’s been in the water for a while. This stuff takes at least six months to form on the trunk, less on the face. I’m taking a stab here, but I figure she’s been in the water for less than seven months, certainly no more than that.”
Huckstetter detailed the examination into a small microphone attached to his green surgical scrubs. The girl was seventeen or eighteen, he said. She had not been tied or bound. There was evidence of a blade’s slash at her neck, indicating a deep cut across her carotid artery as the probable cause of death. There were marks on her skull where her face had been removed and similar marks in her eye sockets.
As the examination drew to a close, Dupree was paged, and minutes later, he arrived back with Rachel. She had checked into a Lafayette motel, storing both her own baggage and mine, then returned. She recoiled initially at the sight of the body, then stood beside me and, without speaking, took my hand.
When the coroner was done, he removed his gloves and commenced scrubbing. Dupree took the X rays from the case envelope and held them up to the light, each in turn. “What’s this?” he said, after a time.
Huckstetter took the X ray from his hand and examined it himself. “Compound fracture, right tibia,” he said, pointing with his finger. “Probably two years old. It’s in the report, or it will be as soon as I can compile it.”
I felt a falling sensation and an ache spreading across my stomach. I reached out to steady myself and the scales jangled as I glanced against their frame. Then my hand was on the autopsy table and my fingers were touching the girl’s remains. I pulled my hand back quickly, but I could still smell her on my fingers.
“Parker?” said Dupree. He reached out and gripped my arm to steady me. I could still feel the girl on my fingers.
“My God,” I said. “I think I know who she is.”
? ? ?
In the early morning light, near the northern tip of Bayou Courtableau, south of Krotz Springs and maybe twenty miles from Lafayette, a team of federal agents, backed up by St. Landry Parish sheriff’s deputies, closed in on a shotgun house that stood with its back to the bayou, its front sheltered by overgrown bushes and trees. Some of the agents wore dark rain gear with FBI in large yellow letters on the back, others helmets and body armor. They advanced slowly and quietly, their safeties off. When they spoke, they did so quickly and with the fewest possible words. Radio contact was kept to a minimum. They knew what they were doing. Around them, deputies armed with pistols and shotguns listened to the sound of their breathing and the pumping of their hearts as they prepared to move on the house of Edward Byron, the man they believed to be directly responsible for the deaths of their colleague, John Charles Morphy, his young wife, and at least five other people.
The house was run down, the slates on the roof damaged and cracked in places, the roof beams already rotting. Two of the windows at the front of the house were broken and had been covered with cardboard held in place by duct tape. The wood on the gallery was warped and, in places, missing altogether. On a metal hook to the right of the house hung the carcass of a wild pig, newly skinned. Blood dripped from its snout and pooled on the ground below.
On a signal from Woolrich, shortly after 6 A.M., agents in Kevlar body armor approached the house from the front and the rear. They checked the windows at either side of the front door and adjoining the rear entrance. Then, simultaneously, they hit the doors, moving into the central hallway with maximum noise, their flashlights burning through the darkness of the interior.
The two teams had almost reached each other when a shotgun roared from the back of the house and blood erupted in the dim light. An agent named Thomas Seltz plunged forward as the shot ripped through the unprotected area of his armpit, the vulnerable point in upper–body armor, his finger tightening in a last reflex on the trigger of his machine pistol as he died. Bullets raked across the wall, ceiling, and floor as he fell, sending dust and splinters through the air and injuring two agents, one in the leg and one in the mouth.
The firing masked the sound of another shell being pumped into the shotgun. The second shot blasted wood from the frame of an interior door as agents hit the ground and began firing through the now empty rear door. A third shot took out an agent moving fast around the side of the house. A mass of logs and old furniture, destined for firewood, lay scattered on the ground, dispersed when the shooter broke from his hiding place beneath it. The sound of small–arms fire directed into the bayou reached the agents as they knelt to tend to their injured colleagues or ran to join the chase.
A figure in worn blue jeans and a white–and–red check shirt had disappeared into the bayou. The agents followed warily, their legs sinking almost to the knee at times in the muddy swamp water, dead tree trunks forcing them to deviate from a straight advance, before they reached firm ground. Using the trees as cover, they moved slowly, their guns at their shoulders, sighting as they went.
There was the roar of a shotgun from ahead. Birds scattered from the trees and splinters shot out at head height from a huge cypress. An agent screamed in pain and stumbled into view, impaled in the cheek by the shards of wood. A second blast rang out and shattered the femur in his left leg. He collapsed on the dirt and leaves, his back arched in agony.
Automatic fire raked the trees, shattering branches and blasting foliage. After four or five seconds of concentrated firing, the order went out to cease fire and the swamp was quiet once again. The agents and police advanced once more, moving quickly from tree to tree. A shout went up as blood was found by a willow, its broken branches white as bone.
From behind came the sounds of dogs barking as the tracker, who had been kept in reserve three miles away, was brought in to assist. The dogs were allowed to sniff around Byron’s clothing and the area of the woodpile. Their handler, a thin, bearded man with his jeans tucked into muddy boots, let them smell the blood by the willow as soon as he caught up with the main party. Then, the dogs straining at their leashes, they moved on cautiously.
But no more shots came at them from Edward Byron, because the lawmen were not the only ones hunting him in the swamp.
? ? ?
While the hunt continued for Byron, Toussaint, two young deputies, and I were in the sheriff’s office in St. Martinville, where we continued our trawl through Miami’s dentists, using emergency numbers from answering machines where necessary.
Rachel provided the only interruption, when she arrived with coffee and hot Danishes. She stood behind me and gently laid a hand on the back of my neck. I reached around and clasped her fingers, then pulled them forward and lightly kissed their tips.
“I didn’t expect you to stay,” I said. I couldn’t see her face.
“It’s almost at an end, isn’t it?” she asked quietly.
“I think so. I feel it coming.”
“Then I want to see it out. I want to be there at the end.”
She stayed for a little longer, until her exhaustion became almost contagious. Then she returned to the motel to sleep.
It took thirty–eight calls before the dental assistant at Erwin Holdman’s dental surgery at Brickell Avenue found the name of Lisa Stott on her records, but she declined even to confirm if Lisa Stott had attended during the last six months. Holdman was on the golf course and didn’t like being disturbed, the assistant said. Toussaint told her that he didn’t give a good goddamn what Holdman liked or didn’t like and she gave him a cell phone number.
She was right. Holdman didn’t like being disturbed on the golf course, especially when he was about to make a birdie on the fifteenth. After some shouting, Toussaint requested Lisa Stott’s dental records. The dentist wanted to seek the permission of her mother and stepfather. Toussaint handed the phone to Dupree and Dupree told him that, for the present, that wasn’t possible, that they only wanted the records in order to eliminate the girl from their inquiries and it would be unwise to disturb the parents unnecessarily. When Holdman continued to refuse to cooperate, Dupree warned him that he would ensure that all his records were seized and his tax affairs subjected to microscopic examination.
Holdman cooperated. The records were kept on computer, he said, along with copies of X rays and dental charts that had been scanned in. He would send them on as soon as he returned to his office. His dental assistant was new, he explained, and wouldn’t be able to send on the records electronically without his password. He would just finish his round …
There was some more shouting and Holdman decided to suspend his golfing activities for that day. It would take him one hour, traffic permitting, to get back to his surgery. We sat back to wait.
? ? ?
Byron had made it about a mile into the swamp. The cops were closing and his arm was bleeding badly. The bullet had shattered the elbow of his left arm and a steady current of pain was coursing through his body. He paused in a small clearing and reloaded the shotgun by tensing the stock against the ground and pumping awkwardly with his good hand. The barking was closer now. He would take the dogs as soon as they came in sight. Once they were gone, he would lose the lawmen in the swamp.
It was probably only when he rose that he first became aware of the movement in front of him. The pack couldn’t have got around him already, he reasoned. The waters were deeper to the west. Without boats, they would not have been able to make it into the swamp from the road. Even if they had, he would have heard them coming. His senses had become attuned to the sounds of the swamp. Only the hallucinations threatened to undo him, but they came and went.
Byron crooked the shotgun awkwardly beneath his right arm and moved forward, his eyes moving constantly. He advanced slowly toward the treeline, but the movement seemed to have stopped. Maybe he shook his head then to clear his sight, fearing the onset of the visions, but they didn’t come. Instead, death came for Edward Byron as the woods came alive around him and he was surrounded by dark figures. He loosed off one shot before the gun was wrenched from his grip and he felt a pain shoot across his chest as the blade opened his skin from shoulder to shoulder.
The figures surrounded him — hard–faced men, one with an M16 slung over his shoulder, the others armed with knives and axes, all led by a huge man with reddish brown skin and dark hair streaked with gray. Byron fell to his knees as blows rained down on his back and arms and shoulders. Dazed with pain and exhaustion, he looked up in time to see the big man’s axe scything through the air above him.
Then all was darkness.
? ? ?
We were using Dupree’s office, where a new PC sat ready to receive the dental records Holdman was sending. I sat in a red vinyl chair that had been repaired so often with tape that it was like sitting on cracking ice. The chair squeaked as I shifted in it, my feet on the windowsill. Across from me was the couch on which I had earlier caught three hours of uncomfortable sleep.
Toussaint had gone off to get coffee thirty minutes before. He still hadn’t come back. I was starting to get restless when I heard the sound of voices raised from the squad room beyond. I passed through the open door of Dupree’s office and into the squad room, with its rows of gray metal desks, its swivel chairs, and hat stands, its bulletin boards and coffee cups, its half–eaten bagels and donuts.
Toussaint appeared, talking excitedly to a black detective in a blue suit and open–collar shirt. Behind him, Dupree was talking to a uniformed patrolman. Toussaint saw me, patted the black detective on the shoulder, and walked over to me.
“Byron’s dead,” he said. “It was messy. The feds lost two men, couple more injured. Byron broke for the swamp. When they found him, someone had cut him up and split his skull with an axe. They’ve got the axe and a lot of boot prints.” He fingered his chin. “They think maybe Lionel Fontenot decided to finish things his way.”
Dupree ushered us into his office, but didn’t close the door. He stood close to me and touched my arm gently.
“It’s him. Things are still confused, but they’ve got sample jars matching the one in which your daughter’s” — he paused, then rephrased it — “the jar that you received. They’ve got a laptop computer, the remains of some kind of homemade speaker attachment, and scalpels with tissue remains, most of it found in a shed at the back of the property. I talked to Woolrich, briefly. He mentioned something about old medical texts. Said to tell you that you were right. They’re still searching for the faces of the victims, but that could take some time. They’re going to start digging around the house later today.”
I wasn’t sure what I felt. There was relief, a sense of a weight being lifted and taken away, a sense that it had all come to a close. But there was also something more: I felt disappointment that I had not been there at the end. After all that I had done, after all the people who had died, both at my hands and the hands of others, the Traveling Man had eluded me right until the end.
Dupree left and I sat down heavily in the chair, the sunlight filtering through the shades on the window. Toussaint sat on the edge of Dupree’s desk and watched me. I thought of Susan and Jennifer and of days spent in the park together. And I remembered the voice of Tante Marie Aguillard, and I hoped that she was now at peace.
A low, two–note signal beeped from Dupree’s PC at regular intervals. Toussaint hauled himself from the desk and walked around to where he could see the screen of the PC. He tapped some keys and read what was on–screen.
“It’s Holdman’s stuff coming through,” he said.
I joined him at the screen and watched as Lisa Stott’s dental records appeared, detailed in words, then as a kind of two–dimensional map of her mouth with fillings and extractions marked, and then in the form of a mouth X ray.
Toussaint called up the coroner’s X ray from a separate file and set the two images side by side.
“They look the same,” he said.
I nodded. I didn’t want to think of the implications if they were.
Toussaint called up Huckstetter, told him what we had, and asked him to come over. Thirty minutes later, Dr. Emile Huckstetter was running through Holdman’s file, comparing it with his own notes and the X–ray images he had taken from the dead girl. At last, he pushed his glasses up on his forehead and pinched the corners of his eyes.
“It’s her,” he said.
Toussaint let out a long, jagged breath and shook his head in sorrow. It was the Traveling Man’s last jest, it seemed, the old jest. The dead girl was Lisa Stott, or, as she once was known, Lisa Woolrich, a young girl who had become an emotional casualty of her parents’ bitter divorce, who had been abandoned by a mother anxious to start a new life without the complication of an angry, hurt teenage daughter, and whose father was unable to provide her with the stability and support she needed.
She was Woolrich’s daughter.