Every Dead Thing

31

THERE WAS a loud thud as the insect hit the windshield. It was a large dragonfly, a “mosquito hawk.”

“Shit, that thing must have been big as a bird,” said the driver, a young FBI agent named O’Neill Brouchard. Outside, it was probably in the high nineties, but the Louisiana humidity made it seem much hotter. My shirt felt cold and uncomfortable where the air-conditioning had dried it against my body.

A smear of blood and wings lay across the glass and the wipers struggled to remove it. The blood matched the drops that still stained my shirt, an unnecessary reminder of what had happened on the plane since my head still ached and the bridge of my nose felt tender to the touch.

Beside Brouchard, Woolrich remained silent, intent upon loading a fresh clip into his SIG Sauer. The assistant SAC was dressed in his usual garb of cheap tan suit and wrinkled tie. Beside me, a dark Windbreaker marked with the agency’s letters lay crumpled on the seat.

I had called Woolrich from the satellite phone on the plane but couldn’t get a connection. At Moisant Field, I left a number with his message service telling him to contact me immediately, then hired a car and set out toward Lafayette on I-10. Just outside Baton Rouge, the cell phone rang.

“Bird?” said Woolrich’s voice. “What the hell are you doing down here?” There was concern in his voice. In the background, I could hear the sound of a car engine.

“You get my message?”

“I got it. Listen, we’re already on our way. Someone spotted Florence out by her house, with blood on her dress and a gun in her hand. We’re going to meet up with the local cops at exit one-twenty-one. Wait for us there.”

“Woolrich, it may be too late…”

“Just wait. No hotdogging on this one, Bird. I got a stake in this too. I got Florence to think about.”

In front of us I could see the taillights of two other vehicles, patrol cars out of the St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Office. Behind us, its headlights illuminating the inside of the FBI Chevy and the blood on the windshield, was an old Buick driven by two St. Martin detectives. I knew one of them, John Charles Morphy, vaguely, having met him once before with Woolrich in Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop on Bourbon, as he swayed quietly to the sound of Miss Lily Hood’s voice.

Morphy was a descendant of Paul Charles Morphy, the world chess champion from New Orleans who retired in 1859 at the grand old age of twenty-two. It was said that he could play three or four games simultaneously while blindfolded. By contrast, John Charles, with his hard body-builder’s frame, never struck me as a man much given to chess. Power lifting competitions, maybe, but not chess. He was a man with a past, according to Woolrich: a former detective in the NOPD who had left the force in the shadow of an investigation by the Public Integrity Division over the killing of a young black man named Luther Bordelon near Chartres two years earlier.

I looked over my shoulder and saw Morphy staring back at me, his shaven head glowing in the Buick’s interior light, his hands tight on the wheel as he negotiated the rutted track through the bayou. Beside him, his partner, Toussaint, held the Winchester Model 12 pump upright between his legs. The stock was pitted and scratched, the barrel worn, and I guessed that it wasn’t regulation issue but Toussaint’s own. It had smelled strongly of oil when I spoke to Morphy through the window of the car back where the Bayou Courtableau intersected with I-10.

The lights of the car caught the branches of palmetto, tupelo, and overhanging willows, huge cypress heavy with Spanish moss, and, occasionally, the stumps of ancient trees in the swamps beyond. We turned into a road that was dark as a tunnel, the branches of the cypress trees above us like a roof against the starlight, and then we were rattling over the bridge that led to the house of Tante Marie Aguillard.

Before us, the two sheriff’s office cars turned in opposing directions and parked diagonally, the lights of one shining out into the dark undergrowth that led down to the swamp banks. The lights of the second hit the house, casting shadows over the tree trunks that raised it from the ground, the building’s overlapping boards, the steps leading up the screen door, which now stood open on the porch, allowing the night creatures easy access to the interior of the house.

Woolrich turned around as we pulled up. “You ready for this?”

I nodded. I had my Smith & Wesson in my hand as we stepped from the car into the warm air. I could smell rotting vegetation and a faint trace of smoke. Something rustled through the vegetation to my right and then splashed lightly into the water. Morphy and his partner came up beside us. I could hear the sound of a shell being jacked into the pump.

Two of the deputies stood uncertainly beside their car. The second pair advanced slowly across the neat garden, their guns drawn.

“What’s the deal?” said Morphy. He was six feet tall with the V shape of a lifter, his head hairless and a circle of mustache and beard around his mouth.

“No one enters before us,” said Woolrich. “Send those two jokers around the back but tell them to stay out of the house. The other two stay at the front. You two back us up. Brouchard, stay by the car and watch the bridge.”

We moved across the grass, stepping carefully around the discarded children’s toys on the lawn. There were no lights on in the house, no sign of any occupants. I could hear the blood pumping in my head and the palms of my hands were slick with sweat. We were ten feet from the porch steps when I heard a pistol cock and the voice of the deputy to our right.

“Ah, sweet Jesus,” he said. “Sweet Jesus Lord, this can’t be…”

A dead tree, little more than an extended trunk, stood about ten yards from the water’s edge. Branches, some no more than twigs, others as thick as a man’s arm, commenced some three feet up the trunk and continued to a height of eight or nine feet.

Against the tree trunk stood Tee Jean Aguillard, the old woman’s youngest son, his naked body glistening in the flashlight beam. His left arm was hooked around a thick branch so that his forearm and empty hand hung vertically. His head rested in the crook of another branch, his ruined eyes like dark chasms against the exposed flesh and tendons of his flayed face.

Tee Jean’s right arm was also wrapped around a branch but this time his hand was not empty. In his fingers he grasped a flap of his own skin, a flap that hung like an opened veil and revealed the interior of his body from his exposed ribs to the area above his penis. His stomach and most of the organs in his abdomen had been removed. They lay on a stone by his left foot, a pile of white, blue, and red body parts in which coils of intestine curled like snakes.

Beside me, I heard one of the deputies begin to retch. I turned to see Woolrich grabbing him by the collar and hauling him to the water’s edge some distance away. “Not here,” he said. “Not here.” He left the deputy on his knees by the water and turned toward the house.

“We’ve got to find Florence,” he said. His face looked sickly and pale in the flashlight beam. “We gotta find her.”

Florence Aguillard had been seen standing at the bridge to her house by the owner of a local bait shop. She had been covered in blood and held a Colt Service revolver in her hand. When the bait shop owner stopped, Florence raised the gun and fired a single shot through the driver’s window, missing the bait shop owner by a fraction of an inch. He had called the St. Martin cops from a gas station and they, in turn, had called Woolrich, acting on his notice to the local police that any incident involving Tante Marie should be reported immediately to him.

Woolrich took the steps up the porch at a run and was almost at the door when I reached him. I put my hand on his shoulder and he spun toward me, his eyes wide.

“Easy,” I said. The wild look disappeared from his eyes and he nodded slowly. I turned back to Morphy and motioned him to follow us into the house. Morphy took the Winchester pump from Toussaint and indicated that he should hang back with the deputy, now that his partner was indisposed.

A long central hallway led, shotgun style, to a large kitchen at the rear of the house. Six rooms radiated off the central artery, three on either side. I knew that Tante Marie’s was the last door on the right and I was tempted to make straight for it. Instead we progressed carefully, taking a room at a time, the flashlight beams cutting a swath through the darkness, dust motes and moths bobbing in the beams.

The first room on the right, a bedroom, was empty. There were two beds, one made and the second, a child’s bed, un-made, the blanket lying half on the floor. The living room opposite was also empty. Morphy and Woolrich each took a room as we progressed to the second set of doors. Both were bedrooms. Both were empty.

“Where are all the children, the adults?” I said to Woolrich.

“Eighteenth birthday party at a house two miles away,” he replied. “Only Tee Jean and the old lady supposed to be here. And Florence.”

The door opposite Tante Marie’s room stood wide open and I could see a jumble of furniture, boxes of clothes, and piles of children’s toys. A window was open and the curtains stirred slightly in the night air. We turned to face the door of Tante Marie’s bedroom. It was slightly ajar and I could see moonlight within, disturbed and distorted by the shadows of the trees. Behind me, Morphy had the shotgun raised and Woolrich had the SIG held double-handed close to his cheek. I put my finger on the trigger of the Smith & Wesson, flicked open the door with the side of my foot, and dived low into the room.

A bloody handprint lay on the wall by the door and I could hear the sound of night creatures in the darkness beyond the window. The moonlight cast drifting shadows across a long sideboard, a huge closet filled with almost identically patterned dresses, and a long, dark chest on the floor near the door. But the room was dominated by the giant bed that stood against the far wall, and by its occupant, Tante Marie Aguillard.

Tante Marie: the old woman who had reached out to a dying girl as the blade began to cut her face; the old woman who had called out to me in my wife’s voice when I last stood in this room, offering me some kind of comfort in my sorrow; the old woman who had, in turn, reached out to me in her final torment.

She sat naked on the bed, a huge woman undiminished by death. Her head and upper body rested against a mountain of pillows, stained dark by her blood. Her face was a red-and-purple mass. Her jaw hung open, revealing long teeth stained yellow with tobacco. The flashlight caught her thighs, her thick arms, and the hands that reached towards the center of her body.

“God have mercy,” said Morphy.

Tante Marie had been split from sternum to groin and the skin pulled back to be held in place by her own hands. As with her son, most of her internal organs had been removed and her stomach was a hollow cavern, framed by ribs, through which a section of her spine gleamed dully in the light. Woolrich’s flashlight moved lower, toward her groin. I stopped it with my hand.

“No,” I said. “No more.”

Then a shout came from outside, startling in the silence, and we were running together toward the front of the house.

Florence Aguillard stood swaying on the grass in front of her brother’s body. Her mouth was curled down at either side, the bottom lip turned in on itself in grief. She held the long-barreled Colt in her right hand, the muzzle pointing toward the ground. Her white dress was patterned with blue flowers, obscured in places by her mother’s blood. She made no noise, although her body was racked by silent cries.

Woolrich and I came down the steps slowly; Morphy and a deputy stayed on the porch. The second pair of deputies had come from the back of the house and stood facing Florence, Toussaint slightly to the right of them. To Florence ’s left, I could see the figure of Tee Jean hanging on the tree and, beside him, Brouchard with his unholstered SIG.

“ Florence,” said Woolrich softly, putting his gun back in his shoulder holster. “ Florence, put the gun down.”

Her body shook and her left hand wrapped itself tightly around her waist. She bent over slightly and shook her head slowly from side to side.

“ Florence,” repeated Woolrich. “It’s me.”

She turned her head toward us. There was misery in her eyes, misery and hurt and guilt and rage all vying for supremacy in her troubled mind.

She raised the gun slowly and pointed it in our direction. I saw the deputies bring their weapons up quickly. Toussaint had already assumed a sharpshooter’s stance, his arms in front of his body, his gun unwavering.

“No!” shouted Woolrich, his right hand raised. I saw the cops look toward him in doubt and then toward Morphy. He nodded and they relaxed slightly, still keeping their weapons trained on Florence.

The Colt moved from Woolrich to me, and still Florence Aguillard shook her head slowly. I could hear her voice, soft in the night, repeating Woolrich’s word like a mantra-“No no no no no”-and then she turned the gun toward herself, placed the barrel in her mouth, and pulled the trigger.

The explosion sounded like a cannon’s roar in the night air. I could hear the sound of birds’ wings flapping and small animals hurtling through the undergrowth as Florence ’s body crumpled to the ground. Woolrich stumbled to his knees beside her and reached out to touch her face with his left hand, his right reaching instinctively, futilely, for the pulse in her neck. Then he lifted her and buried her face in his sweat-stained shirt, his mouth open in pain.

In the distance, red lights shone. Farther away, I could hear the sound of a helicopter’s blades scything at the darkness.

32

THE DAY DAWNED heavy and humid in New Orleans, the smell of the Mississippi strong in the morning air. I left my guest house and skirted the Quarter, trying to clear the tiredness from my head and my bones. I eventually ended up on Loyola, the traffic adding to the oppressive warmth. The sky overhead was gray and overcast with the threat of rain, and dark clouds hung over the city, seeming to lock in the heat. I bought a copy of the Times-Picayune from a vending machine and read it as I stood before City Hall. The newspaper was so heavy with corruption that it was a wonder the paper didn’t rot: two policemen arrested on drug trafficking charges, a federal investigation into the conduct of the last Senate elections, suspicions about a former governor. New Orleans itself, with its run-down buildings, the grim shopping precinct of Poydras, the Woolworth store with its Closing Down notices, seemed to embody this corruption, so it was impossible to tell whether the city had infected the populace or if some of its people were dragging down the city with them.

Chep Morrison had built the imposing City Hall shortly after he returned from the Second World War to dethrone the millionaire Mayor Maestri and drag New Orleans into the twentieth century. Some of Woolrich’s cronies still remembered Morrison with fondness, albeit a fondness arising from the fact that police corruption had flourished under him, along with numbers rackets, prostitution, and gambling. More than three decades later, the police department in New Orleans was still trying to deal with his legacy. For almost two decades, the Big Sleazy had been top of the league table of complaints about police misconduct, numbering over one thousand complaints per year.

The NOPD had been founded on the principal of “the cut”: like the police forces in other southern cities-Savannah, Richmond, Mobile-it had been formed in the eighteenth century to control and monitor the slave population, with the police receiving a portion of the reward for capturing runaways. In the nineteenth century, members of the force were accused of rapes and murders, lynchings and robberies, of taking graft to allow gambling and prostitution to continue. The fact that police had to stand for election annually meant that they were forced to sell their allegiance to the two main political parties. The force manipulated government elections, intimidated voters, even participated in the massacre of moderates at the Mechanics Institute in 1866.

New Orleans ’s first black mayor, Dutch Morial, tried to clean up the department at the start of the nineteen eighties. If the independent Metropolitan Crime Commission, which had a quarter of a century’s start on Morial, couldn’t clean up the department, what hope did a black mayor have? The predominantly white police union went on strike and the Mardi Gras was cancelled. The national guard had to be called out to maintain order. I didn’t know if the situation had improved since then. I hoped that it had.

New Orleans is also homicide central, with about four hundred Code 30s-NOPD code for a homicide-each year. Maybe half get solved, leaving a lot of people walking the streets of New Orleans with blood on their hands. That’s something the city fathers prefer not to tell the tourists, although maybe a lot of the tourists would still come anyway. After all, when a city is so hot that it offers riverboat gambling, twenty-four-hour bars, strippers, prostitution, and a ready supply of drugs, all within a few blocks of one another, there’s got to be some kind of downside to it all.

I walked on, eventually stopping to sit on the edge of a potted tree outside the pink New Orleans Center, the tower of the Hyatt rising behind it, while I waited for Woolrich to show. In the midst of the previous night’s confusion, we had arranged a meeting for breakfast. I had considered staying in Lafayette or Baton Rouge, but Woolrich indicated that the local cops might not like having me so close to the investigation, and as he pointed out, he himself was based in New Orleans.

I gave him twenty minutes, and when he didn’t arrive, I began to walk down Poydras Street, its canyon of office buildings already thronged with businesspeople and tourists heading for the Mississippi.

At Jackson Square, La Madeleine was packed with breakfasters. The smell of baking bread from its ovens seemed to draw people in like cartoon characters pulled along by a visible, snakelike scent. I ordered a pastry and coffee and finished reading the Times-Picayune. It’s next to impossible to get the New York Times in New Orleans. I read somewhere that the New Orleans citizenry bought fewer copies of the New York Times than any other city in the United States, although they made up for it by buying more formal wear than anywhere else. If you’re going out to formal dinners every evening, you don’t get much time to read the New York Times.

Amid the magnolia and banana trees of the square, tourists watched tap dancers and mimes and a slim black man who maintained a steady, sensual rhythm by hitting his knees with a pair of plastic bottles. There was a light breeze blowing from the river, but it was fighting a losing battle with the morning heat and contented itself with tossing the hair of the artists hanging their paintings on the square’s black iron fence and threatening the cards of the fortune-tellers outside the cathedral.

I felt strangely distant from what I had seen at Tante Marie’s house. I had expected it to bring back memories of what I had seen in my own kitchen, the sight of my own wife and child reduced to flesh, sinew, and bone. Instead, I felt only a heaviness, like a dark, wet blanket over my consciousness.

I flicked through the newspaper once again. The killings had made the bottom of the front page, but the details of the mutilations had been kept from the press. It was hard to tell how long that would last; rumors would probably begin to circulate at the funerals.

Inside, there were pictures of two bodies, those of Florence and Tee Jean, being taken across the bridge toward waiting ambulances. The bridge had been weakened by the traffic and there were fears that it might collapse if the ambulances tried to cross. Mercifully, there were no pictures of Tante Marie being transported on a special gurney to her ambulance, her huge bulk seeming to mock mortality even as it lay shrouded in black.

I looked up to see Woolrich approaching the table. He had changed his tan suit for a light gray linen; the tan had been covered in Florence Aguillard’s blood. He was unshaven and there were black bags beneath his eyes. I ordered him coffee and a plate of pastries and stayed quiet as he ate.

He had changed a great deal in the years I had known him, I thought. There was less fat on his face, and when the light caught him a certain way, his cheekbones were like blades beneath his skin. It struck me for the first time that he might be ill, but I didn’t raise the topic. When Woolrich wanted to talk about it, he would.

While he ate, I recalled the first time that I had met him, over the body of Jenny Ohrbach. She had been pretty once, a thirty-year-old woman who had kept her figure through regular exercise and a careful diet and who had, it emerged, lived a life of considerable luxury without any obvious means of support.

I had stood over her in an Upper West Side apartment on a cold January night. Two large bay windows opened out on to a small balcony overlooking Seventy-ninth Street and the river, two blocks from Zabar’s deli on Broadway. It wasn’t our territory, but Walter Cole and I were there because the initial MO looked like it might have matched two aggravated burglaries we were investigating, one of which had led to the death of a young account executive, Deborah Moran.

All of the cops in the apartment wore coats, some with mufflers dangling around their necks. The apartment was warm and nobody was in any great hurry to head back out into the cold, least of all Cole and I, despite the fact that this seemed to be a deliberate homicide rather than an aggravated burglary. Nothing in the apartment appeared to have been touched and a purse containing three credit cards and over seven hundred dollars in cash was found undisturbed in a drawer under the television set. Someone had brought coffee from Zabar’s and we sipped from the containers, our hands cupped around them, enjoying the unaccustomed feeling of warmth on our fingers.

The coroner had almost finished his work and an ambulance team was standing by to remove the body when an untidy figure shambled into the apartment. He wore a long brown overcoat the color of beef gravy, and the sole of one of his shoes had come adrift from the upper. Through the gap, a red sock and an exposed big toe revealed themselves. His tan pants were as wrinkled as a two-day-old newspaper and his white shirt had given up the struggle to keep its natural tones, settling instead for the unhealthy yellow pallor of a jaundice victim. A fedora was jammed on his head. I hadn’t seen anyone wear a fedora at a crime scene since the last film noir revival at the Angelika.

But it was the eyes that attracted the most attention. They were bright and amused and cynical, trailing lines like a jellyfish moving through water. Despite his ramshackle appearance, he was clean shaven and his hands were spotless as he took a pair of plastic gloves from his pocket and pulled them on.

“Cold as a whore’s heart out there,” he remarked, squatting down and placing a finger gently beneath Jenny Ohrbach’s chin. “Cold as death.”

I felt a figure brush my arm and turned to see Cole standing beside me.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked.

“I’m one of the good guys,” responded the figure. “Well, I’m FBI, so whatever that makes me in your eyes.” He flicked his ID at us. “Special Agent Woolrich.”

He rose, sighed, and pulled the gloves from his hands, then thrust both gloves and hands deep into the pockets of his coat.

“What brings you out on a night like this, Agent Wool-rich?” I asked. “Lose the keys to the Federal Building?”

“Oh, the witty NYPD,” said Woolrich, with a half smile. “Lucky there’s an ambulance standing by in case my sides split.” He turned his head to one side as he took in the body again. “You know who she is?” he asked.

“We know her name, but that’s it,” said a detective I didn’t recognize. I didn’t even know her name at that point. I knew only that she had been pretty once and now she was pretty no longer. She had been beaten around the face and head with a piece of hollow-centered coaxial cable, which had been dumped beside her body. The cream carpet around her head was stained a deep, dark red and blood had splashed on the walls and the expensive, and probably uncomfortable, white leather furniture.

“She’s Tommy Logan’s woman,” said Woolrich.

“The garbage collection guy,” I said.

“The very same.”

Tommy Logan’s company had clinched a number of valuable garbage collection contracts in the city over the previous two years. Tommy had also expanded into the window cleaning business. Tommy’s boys cleaned the windows in your building or you didn’t have any windows left to clean, and possibly no building either. Anyone with those kinds of contacts had to be connected.

“Racketeering interested in Tommy?” It was Cole.

“Lots of people interested in Tommy. Lot more than usual, if his girlfriend is lying dead on the carpet.”

“You think maybe someone’s sending him a message?” I asked.

Woolrich shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe someone should have sent him a message telling him to hire a decorator whose eyesight didn’t give out the year Elvis died.”

He was right. Jenny Ohrbach’s apartment was so retro it should have been wearing flares and a goatee. Not that it mattered to Jenny Ohrbach any more.

No one ever found out who killed her. Tommy Logan seemed genuinely shocked when he was told that his girlfriend was dead, so shocked he even stopped worrying that his wife might find out about her. Maybe Tommy decided to be more generous to his business partners as a result of Jenny Ohrbach’s death, but if he did, their arrangement still didn’t last much longer. One year later, Tommy Logan was dead, his throat cut and his body dumped by the Borden Bridge in Queens.

But Woolrich I saw more of. Our paths crossed on occasion; we went for a drink once or twice before I returned home and he went back to his empty apartment in Tribeca. He produced tickets to a Knicks game; he came to the house for dinner; he gave Jennifer an enormous stuffed elephant as a birthday present; he watched, but did not judge or interfere, as I drank myself away shot by shot.

I have a memory of him at Jenny’s third birthday party, a cardboard clown’s hat jammed on his head and a bowl of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream in his hand. He looked embarrassed, sitting there in his crumpled suit surrounded by three-and four-year-olds and their adoring parents, but also strangely happy as he helped small children blow up balloons or drew quarters from behind their ears. He did farmyard impressions and taught them how to balance spoons on their noses. When he left, there was a sadness in his eyes. I think he was recalling other birthdays, when his child was the center of attention, before he lost his way.

When Susan and Jennifer died, he followed me to the station and waited outside for four hours until they had finished questioning me. I couldn’t go back to the house, and after that first night when I found myself crying in a hospital lobby, I couldn’t stay with Walter Cole, not only because of his involvement in the investigation but because I did not want to be surrounded by a family, not then. Instead, I went to Woolrich’s small, neat apartment, the walls lined with books of poetry: Marvell, Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, Herbert, Jonson, and Ralegh, whose “Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage” he sometimes quoted. He gave me his bed. On the day of the funeral, he had stood behind me in the rain and let the water wash over him, the drops falling from the brim of his hat like tears.

“How you doing?” I asked eventually.

He puffed his cheeks and breathed out, his head moving slightly from side to side like a nodding-dog figure on the backseat of a car. Gray was seeping through his hair from silver pools over his ears. There were lines like the cracks in fine china spreading from his eyes and the corners of his mouth.

“Not so good,” he said. “I got three hours’ sleep, if you can call waking up every twenty minutes to flashes of red ‘sleep.’ I keep thinking of Florence and the gun and the way it looked as it slid into her mouth.”

“Were you still seeing her?”

“Not so much. On and off. We got together a coupla times and I was out at the house a few days back to see if everything was okay. Jesus, what a mess.”

He pulled the newspaper toward him and scanned its coverage of the killings, his finger moving along the sides of each paragraph so that it became dark with print. When he had finished reading, he looked at his blackened fingertip, rubbed his thumb lightly across it, then wiped them both on a paper napkin.

“We got a fingerprint, a partial print,” he said, as if the sight of his own lines and whorls had only just reminded him of it.

Outside, the tourists and the noise seemed to recede into the distance and there was only Woolrich and his soft eyes. He drained the last of his coffee then dabbed at his mouth with the napkin.

“That’s why I was delayed. Confirmed it just an hour ago. We’ve compared it against Florence ’s prints, but it’s not her. There are traces of the old woman’s blood in it.”

“Where did you find it?”

“Underside of the bed. He may have tried to steady himself as he cut, or maybe he slipped. Doesn’t look like there was an attempt to erase it. We’re comparing it against local files and our master fingerprint identification records. If he’s in the system, we’ll find him.” As well as criminals, the files covered federal employees, aliens, military personnel, and those individuals who had requested that their prints be retained for identification purposes. Over the next twenty-four hours, the print found at the scene would be checked against about two hundred million others on record.

If it turned out to be the Traveling Man’s print, then it would be the first real break since the deaths of Susan and Jennifer, but I wasn’t holding my breath. A man who took the time to clean my wife’s fingernails after he killed her was unlikely to be so careless as to leave his own fingerprint at a crime scene. I looked at Woolrich and knew he thought the same thing. He raised his hand for more coffee as he looked out at the crowds on Jackson Square and listened to the snorting of the ponies hitched to the touring carriages pulled up on Decatur.

“Florence’d been shopping in Baton Rouge earlier in the day, then returned home to change for some birthday party, one of her second cousins. She called you from some juke joint in Breaux Bridge, then went back to the house. She stayed there until maybe eight-thirty, then went to a cousin’s birthday party at Breaux Bridge at about nine. According to witness statements taken by the local cops, she was distracted and didn’t stay for long-seems that her momma insisted that she go, that Tee Jean could take care of her. She stayed one hour, maybe ninety minutes, then came back. Brennan, the bait shop owner, spotted her maybe thirty minutes after that. So we’re looking at a window of one to two hours, no more, for the killings.”

“Who’s dealing with the case?”

“Morphy’s bunch, in theory. In practice, a lot of it is likely to devolve mainly to us, since it matches the MO on Susan and Jennifer, and because I want it. Brillaud is going to hook up your phone, in case our man calls. It’ll mean hanging around your hotel room for a while, but I don’t see what else we can do.” He avoided my eyes.

“You’re cutting me out.”

“You can’t be too involved in this, Bird. You know that. I’ve told you before and I’m telling you again: we’ll decide the extent of your involvement.”

“Limited.”

“Damn yes, limited. Look, Bird, you’re the link to this guy. He’s called once, he will call again. We wait, we see.” He spread his hands wide.

“She was killed because of the girl. Are you going to look for the girl?”

Woolrich rolled his eyes in frustration. “Look where, Bird? The whole fucking bayou? We don’t even know that she existed. We have a print, we’ll run with that and see where it takes us. Now pay the check and let’s get out of here. We’ve got things to do.”

I was staying in a restored Greek Revival house, the Flaisance House, on Esplanade, a white mansion filled with dead men’s furniture. I had opted for a room in the converted carriage house at the rear, partly for the seclusion but also because it contained a natural alarm in the form of two large dogs who prowled the courtyard beneath and growled at anyone who wasn’t a guest, according to the guy manning the night desk. In fact, the dogs just seemed to sleep a lot in the shade of an old fountain. My large room had a balcony, a brass ceiling fan, two heavy leather armchairs, and a small refrigerator, which I filled with bottled water.

When we reached the Flaisance, Woolrich turned on an early morning game show and we waited, unspeaking, for Brillaud to arrive. He knocked on the door about twenty minutes later, long enough for a woman from Tulsa to win a trip to Maui. Brillaud was a small, neatly dressed man with receding hair, through which he ran his fingers every few minutes as if to reassure himself that there was still some there. Behind him, two men in shirtsleeves awkwardly carried an array of monitoring equipment on a metal trolley, carefully negotiating the wooden external stairway that led up to the four carriage house rooms.

“Get cooking, Brillaud,” said Woolrich. “I hope you brought something to read.” One of the men in shirtsleeves waved a sheaf of magazines and some battered paperbacks that he had removed from the base of the trolley.

“Where will you be if we need you?” asked Brillaud.

“The usual place,” said Woolrich. “Around.” And then he was gone.

I had once visited, through Woolrich, an anonymous room in the FBI’s New York office. This was the tech room, where the squads engaged in long-term investigations-organized crime, foreign counterintelligence-monitored their wiretaps. Six agents sat before a row of reel-to-reel voice-activated tape recorders, logging the calls whenever the recorders kicked in, carefully noting the time, the date, the subject of the conversation. The room was almost silent, save for the click and whir of the machines and the sound of pens scratching on paper.

The feds do love their wiretaps. Back in 1928, when the FBI was called the Bureau of Investigation, the Supreme Court allowed almost unrestricted access to wiretaps of targets. In 1940, when the attorney general, Andrew Jackson, tried to end wiretapping, Roosevelt twisted his arm and extended taps to cover “subversive activities.” Under Hoover ’s interpretation, “subversive activities” covered anything from running a Chinese laundry to screwing someone else’s wife. Hoover was the god of wiretaps.

Now the feds no longer have to squat by junction boxes in the rain trying to protect their notebooks from the elements. Judicial approval, followed by a call to the telephone company in order to have the signal diverted, is usually enough. It’s even easier when the subject is willing to cooperate. In my case, Brillaud and his men didn’t even have to sit in a surveillance van, smelling one another’s sweat.

I excused myself for five minutes while Brillaud worked to hook up both my own cell phone and the room phone, telling him that I was just heading for the kitchen of the main house. I left the Flaisance and strolled through the courtyard, attracting a bored glance from one of the dogs huddled in the shadows. I walked down to a telephone by a grocery store one block away. From there, I called Angel’s number. The machine was on. I left a message telling him the situation and advising him not to call me on the cell phone.

Technically, the feds are supposed to engage in minimization on wiretapping or surveillance duties. In theory, this means that the agents hit the pause button on the recorder and tune out of the conversation, apart from occasional checks, if it becomes apparent that it’s a private call unconnected with the business at hand. In practice, only a moron would assume that his private business would remain private on a tapped line and it seemed unwise for me to have conversations with a burglar and an assassin while the FBI was listening. When I had left the message, I picked up four coffees in the grocery store, reentered the Flaisance, and went up to my room, where an anxious-looking Brillaud was waiting by the door.

“We can order coffee up, Mr. Parker,” he said disapprovingly.

“It never tastes the same,” I replied.

“Get used to it,” he concluded, closing the door behind me.

The first call came at 4 P.M., after hours of watching bad TV and reading the problem pages in back issues of Cosmo. Brillaud rose quickly from the bed and clicked his fingers at the technicians, one of whom was already tugging at his headphones. He counted down from three with his fingers and then signaled me to pick up the cell phone.

“Charlie Parker?” It was a woman’s voice.

“Yes?”

“It’s Rachel Wolfe.”

I looked up at the FBI men and shook my head. There was the sound of breath being released. I put my hand over the mouthpiece. “Hey, minimization, remember?” There was a click as the recorder was turned off. Brillaud went back to lying on my clean sheets, his fingers laced behind his head and his eyes closed.

Rachel seemed to sense that there was something happening at the other end of the line.

“Can you talk?”

“I have company. Can I call you back?”

She gave me her home number and told me she planned to be out until 7:30 P.M. I could call her then. I thanked her and hung up.

“Lady friend?” asked Brillaud.

“My doctor,” I replied. “I have a low tolerance syndrome. She hopes that within a few years I’ll be able to cope with idle curiosity.”

Brillaud sniffed noisily but his eyes stayed closed.

The second call came at six. The humidity and the sound of the tourists had forced us to close the balcony window, and the air was sour with male scent. This time, there was no doubt about the caller.

“Welcome to New Orleans, Bird,” said the synthesized voice, in deep tones that seemed to shift and shimmer like mist.

I paused for a moment and nodded at the FBI men. Brillaud was already paging Woolrich. On a computer screen by the balcony, I could see maps shifting and I could hear the Traveling Man’s voice coming thinly through the headphones of the FBI men.

“No point in welcoming your FBI friends,” said the voice, this time in the high, lilting cadences of a young girl’s voice. “Is Agent Woolrich with you?”

I paused again before responding, conscious of the seconds ticking by and the “number withheld” message on the cell phone display.

“Don’t fuck with me, Bird!” Still the child’s voice, but this time in the petulant tones of one who has been told that she can’t go out and play with her friends, the swearing rendering the effect even more obscene than it already was.

“No, he’s not here.”

“Thirty minutes.” Then the connection ended.

Brillaud shrugged. “He knows. He won’t stay on long enough to get a fix.” He lay back down on the bed to wait for Woolrich.

Woolrich looked exhausted. His eyes were red rimmed from lack of sleep and his breath smelled foul. He shifted his feet constantly, as if they were too big for his shoes. Five minutes after he arrived, the phone rang again. Brillaud counted down and I picked up the phone.

“Yes.”

“Don’t interrupt, just listen.” It sounded like a woman’s voice, the voice of someone who was about to tell her lover one of her secret fantasies, but distorted, inhuman. “I’m sorry about Agent Woolrich’s lover, but only because I missed her. She was supposed to be there. I had something special planned for her, but I suppose she had ideas of her own.”

Woolrich blinked hard once, but gave no other indication that he was disturbed by what he heard.

“I hope you liked my presentation,” continued the voice. “Maybe you’re even beginning to understand. If you’re not, don’t worry. There’s plenty more to come. Poor Bird. Poor Woolrich. United in grief. I’ll try to find you some company.”

Then the voice changed again. This time it was deep and menacing.

“I won’t be calling again. It’s rude to listen in on private conversations. The next message you get from me will have blood on it.” The call ended.

“Fuck,” said Woolrich. “Tell me you got something.”

“We got nothing,” said Brillaud, tossing his headphones on the bed. “Number keeps changing. He knows.”

I left the FBI men to pack away their equipment in a white Ford van and walked down through the Quarter to the Napoleon House to call Rachel Wolfe. I didn’t want to use the cellular. For some reason, it seemed soiled by its role as the means of contact with a killer. I also wanted the exercise, after being cooped up in my room for so long.

She picked up on the third ring.

“It’s Charlie Parker.”

“Hi…” She seemed to struggle for a time as she tried to decide what to call me.

“You can call me Bird.”

“Well spotted.”

There was an awkward pause, then: “Where are you? It sounds incredibly noisy.”

“It is. It’s New Orleans.” And then I filled her in as best I could on what had taken place. She listened in silence, and once or twice, I heard a pen tapping rhythmically against the phone at the other end of the line.

“Any of those details mean anything to you?” I asked, when I had finished.

“I’m not sure. I seem to recall something from my time as a student but it’s buried so far back that I’m not sure that I can find it. I think I may have something for you arising out of your previous conversation with this man. It’s a little obscure, though.” She was silent for a moment. “Where are you staying?”

I gave her the number of the Flaisance. She repeated the name and the number to herself as she wrote them down.

“Are you going to call me back?”

“No,” she said. “I’m going to make a reservation. I’m coming down.”

I looked around the Napoleon after I hung up. It was packed with locals and vaguely bohemian looking visitors, some of them tourists staying in the rooms above the dimly lit bar. A classical piece I couldn’t identify was playing over the speakers and smoke hung thick in the air.

Something about the Traveling Man’s calls bothered me, although I wasn’t sure what. He knew I was in New Orleans when he made his calls. He knew where I was staying, too, since he was aware of the presence of the feds, and that awareness meant that he was familiar with police procedures and was monitoring the investigation, which matched Rachel’s profile.

He had to have been watching the crime scene as we arrived, or shortly after. His reluctance to stay on the line was understandable, given the feds’ surveillance, but that second call…I played it back in my mind, trying to discern the source of my unease, but it yielded nothing.

I was tempted to stay in the Napoleon House, to breathe in the sense of life and gaiety in the old bar, but instead I returned to the Flaisance. Despite the heat I walked to the large windows, opened them, and stepped out onto the balcony. I looked out at the faded buildings and wrought iron balconies of the upper Quarter and breathed deeply of the smells of cooking coming from a restaurant nearby, mingled with smoke and exhaust fumes. I listened to the strains of jazz music coming from a bar on Governor Nicholls, the shouts and laughter of those heading for the rip-off joints on Bourbon Street, the singsong accents of the locals blending with the voices of the out-of-towners, the sound of human life passing beneath my window.

And I thought of Rachel Wolfe, and the way her hair rested on her shoulders, and the sprinkling of freckles across her white neck.

33

THAT NIGHT, I dreamed of an amphitheater, with rising aisles filled with old men. Its walls were hung with damask, and two high torches illuminated its central rectangular table, with its curved edges and legs carved like bones. Florence Aguillard lay on the table, the exterior of her womb exposed while a bearded man in dark robes tore at it with an ivory-handled scalpel. Around her neck and behind her ears was the mark of a rope burn. Her head lay at an impossible angle on the tabletop.

When the surgeon cut her, eels slithered from her uterus and tumbled to the floor and the dead woman opened her eyes and tried to cry out. The surgeon stifled her mouth with a burlap sack, then continued to cut until the light went from her eyes.

Figures watched from a twilight corner of the amphitheater. They came to me from the shadows, my wife and child, but now they were joined by a third, one who stayed farther back in the dimness, one who was barely a silhouette. She came from a cold, wet place and brought with her a dense, loamy smell of rotting vegetation, of flesh bloated and disfigured by gas and decay. The place where she lay was small and cramped, its sides unyielding, and sometimes the fish bumped against it as she waited. I seemed to smell her in my nostrils when I woke and could still hear her voice…

help me

as the blood rushed in my ears

I’m cold, help me

and I knew that I had to find her.

I was awakened by the sound of the telephone in my room. Dim light lanced through the curtains and my watch glowed the time at 8:35 A.M. I picked up the phone.

“Parker? It’s Morphy. Get your ass in gear. I’ll see you at La Marquise in an hour.”

I showered, dressed, and walked down to Jackson Square, following the early morning worshipers into St. Louis Cathedral. Outside the cathedral, a huckster tried to attract worshipers to his fire-eating act while a group of black nuns crowded beneath a yellow-and-green parasol.

Susan and I had attended mass here once, beneath the cathedral’s ornately decorated ceiling depicting Christ among the shepherds and, above the small sanctuary, the figure of the Crusader king Louis IX, Roi De France, announcing the Seventh Crusade.

The cathedral had effectively been rebuilt twice since the original wooden structure, designed in 1724, burned down during the Good Friday fire of 1788, when over eight hundred buildings went up in flames. The present cathedral was less than one hundred and fifty years old, its stained-glass windows, overlooking the Place Jean-Paul Deux, a gift from the Spanish government.

It was strange that I should have remembered the details so clearly after so many years. Yet I remembered them less for their own intrinsic interest than for their connections to Susan. I remembered them because she had been with me when I learned them, her hand clasped in mine, her hair pulled back and tied with an aquamarine bow.

For a brief moment it seemed that, by standing in the same place and remembering the same words spoken, I could reach back to that time and feel her close beside me, her hand in my hand, her taste still on my lips, her scent on my neck. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine her sauntering down the aisle, her hand in mine, breathing in the mingled smells of incense and flowers, passing beneath the windows, moving from darkness to light, light to darkness.

I knelt at the back of the cathedral, by the statue of a cherub with a font in its hands and its feet upon a vision of evil, and I prayed for my wife and child.

Morphy was already at La Marquise, a French-style patisserie on Chartres. He was sitting in the rear courtyard, his head freshly shaved. He wore a pair of gray sweatpants, Nike sneakers, and a Timberland fleece top. A plate of croissants and two cups of coffee stood on the table before him. He was carefully applying grape jelly to one half of a croissant as I sat down across from him.

“I ordered coffee for you. Take a croissant.”

“Coffee’s fine, thanks. Day off?”

“Nah, just avoided the dawn patrol.” He took the half croissant and stuffed it into his mouth, using his finger to cram in the last part. He smiled, his cheeks bulging. “My wife won’t let me do this at home. Says it reminds her of a kid hogging food at a birthday party.”

He swallowed and set to work on the remaining half of the croissant. “ St. Martin ’s been frozen out of the picture, ’part from running around looking under rocks for bloody clothes,” he said. “Woolrich and his boys have pretty much taken over the investigation. We don’t have a helluva lot to do with it anymore, legwork excepted.”

I knew what Woolrich would be doing. The killings of Tante Marie and Tee Jean now confirmed the existence of a serial killer. The details would be passed on to the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit, the hard-pressed section responsible for advising on interrogation techniques and hostage negotiation, as well as dealing with VICAP, ABIS-the arson and bombing program-and, crucially for this case, criminal profiling. Of the thirty-six agents in the unit, only ten worked on profiling, buried in a warren of offices sixty feet below ground in what used to be the FBI director’s fallout shelter at Quantico.

And while the feds sifted through the evidence, trying to build up their picture of the Traveling Man, the police on the ground continued to search for physical traces of the killer in the area around Tante Marie’s house. I could picture them already, the lines of cops moving through the under-growth, warm green light shedding down upon them from the trees above. Their feet would be catching in the mud, their uniforms snagging on briars, as they searched the ground before them. Others would be working through the green waters of Atchafalaya, swatting at no-see-ums and sweating heavily through their shirts.

There had been a lot of blood at the Aguillard house. The Traveling Man must have been awash with it by the time his work was done. He must have worn overalls, and it would be too risky for him to hold on to them. They had either been dumped in the swamp, or buried, or destroyed. My guess was that he had destroyed them, but the search had to go on.

“I don’t have a helluva lot to do with it anymore, either,” I said.

“I hear that.” He ate some more croissant and finished off his coffee. “You finished, we’ll get going.” He left some money on the table and I followed him outside. The same battered Buick that had followed us to Tante Marie’s was parked half a block away, a hand-lettered cop-on-duty sign taped to the dashboard with duct tape. A parking ticket flapped beneath the wiper.

“Shit,” said Morphy, tossing the ticket in a trash can. “Nobody got respect for the law no more.”

We drove to the Desire projects, a harsh urban landscape where young blacks lounged by rubbish-strewn lots or shot hoops desultorily in wire-rimmed courts. The two-story blocks were like barracks, lining streets with bad-joke names like Piety, Abundance, and Humanity. We pulled in near a liquor store, which was barricaded like a fortress, causing young men to skip away from us at the smell of cop. Even here, Morphy’s trademark bald head appeared to be instantly recognizable.

“You know much about New Orleans?” said Morphy after a time.

“Nope,” I replied. Beneath his fleece top, I could see the trademark bulge of his gun. The palms of his hands were callused from gripping dumbbells and barbells, and even his fingers were thickly muscled. When he moved his head, muscles and tendons stood out on his neck like snakes moving beneath his skin.

Unlike most bodybuilders, there was an air of suppressed danger about Morphy, a sense that the muscle wasn’t just for show. I knew that he had killed a man once in a bar in Monroe, a pimp who had shot up one of his girls and the john she was with in a hotel room in Lafayette. The pimp, a two-hundred-and-twenty-pound Creole who called himself Le Mort Rouge, had stabbed Morphy in the chest with a broken bottle and then tried to choke him on the ground. Morphy, after trying punches to the face and body, had eventually settled for a grip on Le Mort’s neck, and the two men had remained like that, locked in each other’s grip, until something burst in Le Mort’s head and he fell sideways against the bar. He was dead by the time the ambulance arrived.

It had been a fair fight, but sitting beside Morphy in the car, I wondered about Luther Bordelon. He had been a thug, that much was certain. He had a string of assaults stretching back to his years as a juvenile and he was suspected of the rape of a young Australian tourist. The girl had failed to identify Bordelon in a lineup and no physical evidence of the rapist had been left on the girl’s body because her assailant had used a condom and then made her wash her pubic region with a bottle of mineral water, but the NOPD cops knew it was Bordelon. Sometimes, that’s just the way things are.

On the night he died, Bordelon had been drinking in an Irish bar in the Quarter. He was wearing a white T-shirt and white Nike shorts, and three customers in the bar, with whom he had been playing pool, later swore statements that Bordelon had not been armed. Yet Morphy and his partner, Ray Garza, reported that Bordelon had fired on them when they attempted to routinely question him and that he had been killed in their return of fire. A gun, an old S &W Model 60 that was at least twenty years old, was found by his side with two shots fired. The serial number of the gun had been filed away from the frame under the cylinder crane, making the gun difficult to identify, and Ballistics reported that it was clean and had not been previously used in the commission of a crime in the city of New Orleans.

The gun looked like a throwdown and the NOPD’s Police Integrity Division clearly felt that was the case, but Garza and Morphy stuck by their story. One year later Garza was dead, stabbed to death while trying to break up a brawl in the Irish Channel, and Morphy had transferred to St. Martin, where he had bought a house. That was it. That was how it ended.

Morphy gestured toward a group of young blacks, the asses of their jeans around their knees and oversized trainers slapping the sidewalk as they walked. They returned our gaze unflinchingly, as if daring us to make a move on them. From a boom box they carried came the sound of the Wu-Tang Clan, music to kick start the revolution. I felt a kind of perverse pleasure from recognizing the music. Charlie Parker, honorary homeboy.

Morphy grimaced. “That is the worst goddamn racket I ever heard. Shit, these people invented the blues. Robert Johnson heard that crap, he’d know for sure that he’d sold his soul to the devil and gone straight to hell.” He turned on his car radio and flicked through the channels with an unhappy look. Resignedly, he pushed in a tape and the warm sound of Little Willie John filled the car.

“I grew up in Metairie, before the projects really took hold in this city,” he began. “I can’t say any of my best friends were black or nothing-most of the blacks went to public schools, I didn’t-but we got along together.

“But when the projects went up, that was the end. Desire, Iberville, Lafitte, those were places you didn’t want to end up, ’less you were armed to the teeth. Then fucking Reagan came along and the place got worse. You know, they say there’s more syphilis now than there was fifty years ago. Most of these kids ain’t even been immunized against measles. If ya have a house in the inner city, might as well abandon it and let it rot. It ain’t worth shit.” He shook his head and slapped the steering wheel.

“When you got that kind of poverty, a man can make a lot of money from it if he puts his mind to it. Lot of people fighting for a slice of the projects, fighting for a slice of other things too: land, property, booze, gambling.”

“Like who?”

“Like Joe Bonanno. His crew’s been running things down here for the past decade or so, controlling the supply of crack, smack, whatever. They been trying to expand into other areas too. There’s talk that they want to open a big leisure center between Lafayette and Baton Rouge, maybe build a hotel. Maybe they just want to dump some bricks and mortar there and write it off as a tax loss, launder money through it.”

He cast an appraising eye around the projects. “And this is where Joe Bones grew up.” He said this with a sigh, as if he could not understand how a man would set out to undermine the place in which he had grown and matured. He started the car again, and as he drove, he told me about Joe Bones.

Salvatore Bonanno, Joe’s father, had owned a bar in the Irish Channel, standing up against the local gangs who didn’t believe that an Italian had any place in an area where people named their children after Irish saints and an “oul sod” mentality still prevailed. There was nothing particularly honorable about Sal’s stance; it was simply born out of pragmatism. There was a lot of money to be made in Chep Morrison’s postwar New Orleans, if a man was prepared to take the knocks and grease the right palms.

Sal’s bar was to be the first in a string of bars and clubs that he acquired. He had loans to pay off, and the income from a single bar in the Irish Channel wasn’t going to satisfy his creditors. He saved and bought a second bar, this time in Chartres, and from there his little empire grew. In some cases, only a simple financial transaction was required to obtain the premises he wanted. In others, some more forceful encouragement had to be used. When that didn’t work, the Atchafalaya Basin had enough water to hide a multitude of sins. Gradually, he built up his own crew to take care of business, to make sure the city authorities, the police, the mayor’s office were all kept happy, and to deal with the consequences when those lower down the food chain tried to better themselves at Sal’s expense.

Sal Bonanno married Maria Cuffaro, a native of Gretna, east of New Orleans, whose brother was one of Sal’s right-hand men. She bore him one daughter, who died of TB at the age of seven, and a son, who died in Vietnam. She died herself in ’58, of breast cancer.

But Sal’s real weakness was a woman named Rochelle Hines. Rochelle was what they called a high yellow woman, a Negress whose skin was almost white following generations of interbreeding. She had, as Morphy put it, a complexion like butter oil, although her birth certificate bore the words “black, illegitimate.” She was tall, with long dark hair framing almond eyes and lips that were soft and wide and welcoming. She had a figure that would stop a clock and there were rumors that she might once have been a prostitute, although, if that was the case, Sal Bonanno quickly put an end to those activities.

Bonanno bought her a place in the Garden District and began introducing her as his wife after Maria died. It probably wasn’t a wise thing to do. In the Louisiana of the late 1950s, racial segregation was a day-to-day reality. Even Louis Armstrong, who grew up in the city, could not perform with white musicians in New Orleans because the state of Louisiana prohibited racially integrated bands from playing in the city.

And so, while white men could keep black mistresses and consort with black prostitutes, a man who introduced a black woman, no matter how pale her skin, as his wife was just asking for trouble. When she gave birth to a son, Sal insisted that he bear his name and he took the child and his mother to band recitals in Jackson Square, pushing the huge white baby carriage across the grass and gurgling at his son.

Maybe Sal thought that his money would protect him; maybe he just didn’t care. He made sure that Rochelle was always protected, that she didn’t walk out alone, so that no one could come at her. But in the end, they didn’t come at Rochelle.

One hot July night in 1964, when his son was five years old, Sal Bonanno disappeared. He was found three days later, tied to a tree by the shore of Lake Cataouatche, his head almost severed from his body. It seems likely that someone decided to use his relationship with Rochelle Hines as an excuse to move in on his operation. Ownership of his clubs and bars was transferred to a business consortium with interests in Reno and Vegas.

As soon as her “husband” was found, Rochelle Hines vanished with her son and a small quantity of jewelry and cash before anyone could come after them. She resurfaced one year later in the area that would come to be called Desire, where a half sister rented a property. The death of Sal had destroyed her: she was an alcoholic and had become addicted to morphine.

It was here, among the rising projects, that Joe Bones grew up, paler yet than his mother, and made his stand against both blacks and whites since neither group would accept him as its own. There was a rage inside Joe Bones and he turned it on the world around him. By 1990, ten years after his mother’s death in a filthy cot in the projects, Joe Bones owned more bars than his father had thirty years before, and each month, planeloads of cocaine flew in from Mexico, bound for the streets of New Orleans and points north, east, and west.

“Now Joe Bones calls himself a white man, and don’t nobody differ with him,” said Morphy. “Anyway, how’s a man gonna talk with his balls in his mouth? Joe got no time for the brothers now.” He laughed quietly. “Ain’t nothin’ worse than a man who can’t get on with his in-laws.”

We stopped at a gas station and Morphy filled the tank, then came back with two sodas. We sipped them by the pumps, watching the cars go by.

“Now there’s another crew, the Fontenots, and they got their eyes on the projects too. Two brothers, David and Lionel. Family was out of Lafayette originally, I think-still got ties there-but came to New Orleans in the twenties. The Fontenots are ambitious, violent, and they think maybe Bonanno’s time has come. All of this has been coming to a head for about a year now, and maybe the Fontenots have a piece of work planned for Joe Bones.”

The Fontenots were not young men-they were both in their forties-but they had gradually established themselves in Louisiana and now operated out of a compound in Delacroix guarded by wire and dogs and armed men, including a hardcore of Cajuns from back in Acadiana. They were into gambling, prostitution, some drugs. They owned bars in Baton Rouge, one or two others in Lafayette. If they could take out Joe Bones, it was likely that they would muscle in on the drugs market in a big way.

“You know anything about the Cajuns?” asked Morphy.

“No, not beyond their music.”

“They’re a persecuted minority in this state and in Texas. During the oil boom, they couldn’t get any work because the Texans refused to employ coon asses. Most of them did what we all do when times are tough: they knuckled down and made the best of things. There were clashes with the blacks, because the blacks and the Cajuns were competing for the same few jobs, and some bad things went down, but most people just did what they could to keep body and soul together without breaking too many laws.

“Roland Fontenot-that’s the grandfather-he left all that behind when he came to New Orleans, following some other obscure branch of the family. But the boys, they never forgot their roots. When things were bad in the seventies, they gathered a pretty disaffected bunch around them-a lot of young Cajuns, some blacks-and somehow kept the mixture from blowing up in their faces.” Morphy drummed his fingers on the dashboard. “Sometimes I think maybe we’re all responsible for the Fontenots. They’re a visitation on us, because of the way their people were treated. I think maybe Joe Bones is a visitation too, a reminder of what happens when you grind a section of the population into the dirt.”

Joe Bones had a vicious streak, said Morphy. He once killed a man by slowly burning him with acid over the space of an afternoon and was thought by some to be missing part of his brain, the part that controlled unreasonable actions in most men. The Fontenots were different. They killed, but they killed like businessmen closing down an unprofitable or unsatisfactory operation. They killed joylessly, but professionally. In Morphy’s view, the Fontenots and Joe Bones were all bad. They just had different ways of expressing it.

I finished my soda and trashed the can. Morphy wasn’t the type to spin a yarn for its own sake. All of this was leading up to something.

“What’s the point, Morphy?” I asked.

“The point is, the fingerprint that was found at Tante Marie’s belongs to Tony Remarr. He’s one of Joe Bones’s men.” I thought about that as he started the car and pulled into the street, trying to match the name to any incident that might have occurred back in New York, anything that might connect me to Remarr. I found nothing.

“You think he did it?” Morphy asked.

“Do you?”

“No, no way. At first I thought, yeah, maybe. You know, the old woman, she owned that land. Wouldn’t have taken much drainage work to make something of it.”

“If a man was considering opening a big hotel and building a leisure center.”

“Exactly, or if he wanted to convince someone he was serious enough about it to dump some bricks there. I mean, swamp’s swamp. Assuming he could get permission to build, who wants to share the warm evening air with critters even God regrets making?

“Anyway, the old woman wouldn’t sell. She was shrewd. Her people have been buried out there for generations. The original landowner, an old Southern type who traced his ancestry back to the Bourbons, died in sixty-nine. He stipulated in his will that the land should be offered for sale at a reasonable rate to the existing tenants.

“Now most of the tenants were Aguillards and they bought that land with all the money they had. The old woman, she made all the decisions for them. Their ancestors are there and they have a history with that land going back to the time when they wore chains around their ankles and dug channels through the dirt with their bare hands.”

“So Bonanno had been putting pressure on her to sell up, but she wouldn’t, so he decided to take things a step further,” I said.

Morphy nodded. “I figure maybe Remarr was sent out to put more than pressure on her-maybe he’s going to threaten the girl or some of the children, maybe even kill one of them-but when he arrives she’s already dead. And maybe Remarr gets careless from the shock, thinks he hasn’t left any traces, and heads off into the night.”

“Does Woolrich know all this?”

“Most of it, yeah.”

“You bringing Bonanno in?”

“Brought him in last night and let him go an hour later, accompanied by a fancy lawyer called Rufus Thibodeaux. He ain’t movin’, says he ain’t seen Remarr for three or four days. Says he wants to find Remarr as much as anyone, something about money from some deal out in West Baton Rouge. It’s bullshit, but he’s sticking with the story. I think Woolrich is going to try to put some pressure on his operations through Anti-Racketeering and Narcotics, put the squeeze on him to see if he can change his mind.”

“That could take time.”

“You got a better idea?”

I shrugged. “Maybe.”

Morphy’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t be fuckin’ with Joe Bones, now, y’hear? Joe ain’t like your boys back in New York, sittin’ in social clubs in Little Italy with their fingers curled around the handles of espresso cups, dreaming about the days when everyone respected them. Joe don’t got no time for that. Joe don’t want folks to respect him; Joe wants folks to be scared to death of him.”

We turned onto Esplanade. Morphy signaled and pulled in about two blocks from the Flaisance. He stared out the window, tapping the index finger of his right hand against the steering wheel to some internal rhythm in his head. I sensed he had something more to say. I decided to let him say it in his own time.

“You’ve spoken to this guy, the guy who took your wife and kid, right?”

I nodded.

“It’s the same guy? The same guy who did Tee Jean and the old woman?”

“He called me yesterday. It’s him.”

“He say anything?”

“The feds have it on tape. He says he’s going to do more.”

Morphy rubbed the back of his neck with his hand and squeezed his eyes shut tightly. I knew he was seeing Tante Marie in his head again.

“You going to stay here?”

“For a while, yes.”

“Could be the feds ain’t gonna like it.”

I smiled. “I know.”

Morphy smiled back. He reached beneath his seat and handed me a long brown envelope. “I’ll be in touch,” he said. I slipped the envelope under my jacket and stepped from the car. He gave a small wave as he drove away through the midday crowd.

I opened the envelope in my hotel room. Inside were a set of crime scene pictures and photocopied extracts of the police reports, all stapled together. Stapled separately was a copy of the coroner’s report. One section had been emphasized with a luminous yellow felt tip.

The coroner had found traces of ketamine hydrochloride in the bodies of Tante Marie and Tee Jean, equivalent to a dosage of one milligram per two pounds of weight. According to the report, ketamine was an unusual drug, a special type of anesthetic used for some minor surgical procedures. No one was too clear on its precise mode of action apart from the fact that it was a PCP analogue and worked on sites in the brain, affecting the central nervous system.

It was becoming the drug of choice in the clubs of New York and L.A. while I was still on the force, usually in capsules or tabs made by heating the liquid anesthetic to evaporate the water, leaving ketamine crystals. Users described a ketamine trip as “swimming in the K pool” since it distorted the perception of the body, creating a feeling that the user was floating in a soft yet supportive medium. Other side effects included hallucinations, distortions in the perception of space and time, and out-of-body experiences.

What the coroner did note was that ketamine could be used as a chemical restrainer on animals, since it induced paralysis and dulled pain while allowing the normal pharyngeal-laryngeal reflexes to continue. It was for this purpose, he surmised, that the killer had injected both Tante Marie and Tee Jean Aguillard with the drug.

When they were flayed and anatomized, the report concluded, Tante Marie and her son had been fully conscious.

34

WHEN I HAD FINISHED reading the coroner’s report, I put on my sweats and running shoes and did about four miles on Riverfront Park, back and forth past the crowds lining up to take a trip on the Natchez paddle steamer, the sound of its wheezing calliope sending tunes like messengers across the Mississippi. I was thick with sweat when I was done, and my knees ached. Even three years ago, four miles wouldn’t have troubled me to such a degree. I was getting old. Soon, I’d be looking at wheelchairs and feeling impending rain in my joints.

Back at the Flaisance, Rachel Wolfe had left a message to say that she would be flying in later that evening. The flight number and the arrival time were listed at the bottom of the message slip. I thought about Joe Bones and decided then that Rachel Wolfe might like some company on the flight down to New Orleans.

I called Angel and Louis.

The Aguillard family collected the bodies of Tante Marie, Tee Jean, and Florence later that day. A firm of Lafayette undertakers placed Tante Marie’s coffin into a wide-back hearse. Tee Jean and Florence lay side by side in a second.

The Aguillards, led by the eldest son, Raymond, and accompanied by a small group of family friends, followed the hearses in a trio of pickup trucks, dark-skinned men and women seated on pieces of sackcloth amid machine parts and farm tools. I stayed behind them as they slipped from the highway and made their way down the rutted track, past Tante Marie’s, where the police tape fluttered lightly in the breeze, and on to the house of Raymond Aguillard.

He was a tall, large-boned man in his late forties or early fifties, running to fat now but still an imposing figure. He wore a dark cotton suit, a white shirt, and a slim black tie. His eyes were red rimmed from crying. I had seen him briefly at Tante Marie’s the night the bodies were found, a strong man trying to hold his family together in the face of violent loss.

He spotted me as the coffins were unloaded and carried toward the house, a small group of men struggling with Tante Marie. I stood out, since I was the only white face in the crowd. A woman, probably one of Tante Marie’s daughters, shot me a cold look as she passed by, a pair of older women at each shoulder. When the bodies had been carried into the house, a raised, slatted-wood building not unlike the home of Tante Marie herself, Raymond kissed a small cross around his neck and walked slowly toward me.

“I know who you are,” he said, as I extended my hand. He paused for a moment before taking it in a short, firm grip.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “sorry about it all.”

He nodded. “I know that.” He walked on, past the white fence at the boundary of the house, and stood by the side of the road, staring out at the empty stretch of track. A pair of mallards flew overhead, their wing beats slowing as they approached the water below. Raymond watched them with a kind of envy, the envy that a man deeply grieving feels for anything untouched by his sorrow.

“Some of my sisters, they think maybe you brought this man with you. They think you got no right to be here.”

“Is that what you think?”

He didn’t answer. Then: “She felt him comin’. Maybe that’s why she sent Florence to the party, to get her away from him. And that’s why she sent for you: she felt him comin’ and I think she knowed who he was. Deep down, I think she knowed.” His voice sounded thick in his throat.

He fingered the cross gently, rubbing his thumb back and forth along its length. I could see that it had originally been ornately carved-it was still possible to discern some details of spirals at its edges-but for the most part it had been rubbed smooth by the action of this man’s hand over many years.

“I don’t blame you for what happened to my momma and my brother and sister. My momma, she always done what she believed was right. She wanted to find that girl and to stop the man that killed her. And that Tee Jean…” He smiled sadly. “The policeman said that he’d been hit three, maybe four times from behind, and there were still bruises on his knuckles where he tried to fight this man.”

Raymond coughed and then breathed deeply through his mouth, his head tipped back slightly like a man who has run a great distance in pain.

“He took your woman, your child?” he said. It was as much a statement as a question, but I answered it anyway.

“Yes, he took them. Like you said, Tante Marie believed that he took another girl too.”

He dug the thumb and forefinger of his right hand into the corners of his eyes and blinked out a tear.

“I know. I seen her.”

The world around me seemed to grow silent as I shut out the noise of the birds, the wind in the trees, the distant sound of water splashing on the banks. All I wanted to hear was Raymond Aguillard’s voice.

“You saw the girl?”

“That’s what I said. Down by a slough in Honey Island, three nights ago. Night before my momma died. Seen her other times too. My sister’s husband, he got hisself some traps down there.” He shrugged. Honey Island was a nature reserve. “You a superstitious man, Mista Parker?”

“I’m getting there,” I replied. “You think that’s where she is, down in Honey Island?”

“Could be. My momma’d say she didn’t know where she was, just that she was. She knew the girl was out there somewhere. I just don’t know how, Mista Parker. I never did understand my momma’s gift. But then I seen her, a figure out by a cypress grove and a kinda darkness over her face, like a hand was coverin’ it, and I knowed it was her.”

He looked down and, with the toe of his shoe, began picking at a stone embedded in the dirt. When he eventually freed it, sending it skidding into the grass, tiny black ants scurried and crawled from the hole, the entrance to their nest now fully exposed.

“Other people seen her too, I hear, folks out fishin’ or checking the hooch they got distillin’ in a shack some-wheres.” He watched as the ants swarmed around his foot, some of them climbing onto the rim of his sole. Gently, he lifted his foot, shook it, and moved it away.

There were seventy thousand acres of Honey Island, Raymond explained. It was the second-biggest swamp in Louisiana, forty miles long and eight miles wide. It was part of the floodplain of the Pearl River, which acts as a boundary line between Louisiana and Mississippi. Honey Island was better preserved than the Florida Everglades: there was no dredging allowed, no draining or timber farming, no development and no dams, and parts of Honey Island weren’t even navigable. Half of it was state owned; some was the responsibility of the Nature Conservancy. If someone was trying to dump a body in a place where it was unlikely to be discovered, then, tourist boats apart, Honey Island sounded like a good place to do it.

Raymond gave me directions to the slough and drew a rough map on the back of an opened-out Marlboro pack.

“Mista Parker, I know you’re a good man and that you’re sorry for what happened, but I’d be grateful to you if you didn’t come out here no more.” He spoke softly, but there was no mistaking the force in his voice. “And maybe you’d be kind enough not to turn up at the burial. My family, it’s gonna take us a long time to get over this.”

Then he lit the last cigarette from the pack, nodded a good-bye, and walked back to his house trailing smoke behind him.

I watched him as he walked away. A woman with steel-gray hair came out to the porch and placed her arm around his waist when he reached her. He put a big arm around her shoulders and held her to him as they walked into the house, the screen door closing gently behind them. And I thought of Honey Island and the secrets that it held beneath its green waters as I drove away from the Aguillard house, the dust rising behind me.

As I drove, the swamp was already preparing to reveal its secrets. Honey Island would yield a body within twenty-four hours, but it would not be the body of a girl.

35

I ARRIVED EARLY at Moisant Field so I browsed around the bookstore for a while, taking care to avoid tripping over the piles of Anne Rice novels. I had been sitting in the arrivals terminal for about an hour when Rachel Wolfe walked through the gates. She was wearing dark blue jeans, white sneakers, and a red-and-white Polo Sport top. Her red hair hung loose on her shoulders and her makeup had been so carefully applied that it was almost indiscernable.

The only luggage she carried herself was a brown leather shoulder bag. The rest of what I took to be her belongings was being toted by Angel and Louis, who walked slightly self-consciously at either side of her, Louis in a cream double-breasted suit with a snow white dress shirt open at the neck, Angel in jeans, battered Reebok high-tops, and a green check shirt that had not felt an iron since it left the factory many years before.

“Well, well,” I said, as they stood before me. “All human life is here.”

Angel raised his right hand, from which dangled three thick piles of books, tied together by string. The ends of his fingers were turning purple. “We brought half the New York Public Library with us as well,” he groaned. “Tied with string. I ain’t seen books tied with string since Little House on the Prairie stopped reruns.”

Louis, I noticed, was carrying a lady’s pink umbrella and a cosmetics case. He had the look of a man who is trying to pretend that a dog isn’t screwing his leg. “Don’t say a word, man,” he warned. “Not a word.”

Between them, the two men also carried two suitcases, two leather traveling bags, and a suit carrier. “Car’s parked outside,” I said as I walked with Rachel to the exit. “Might be just enough room for the bags.”

“They paged me at the airport,” whispered Rachel. “They were very helpful.” She giggled and glanced over her shoulder. Behind us, I heard the unmistakable sound of Angel tripping on a bag and swearing loudly.

We ditched the luggage at the Flaisance, despite Louis’s stated preference for the Fairmont at University Place. The Fairmont was where the Republicans usually stayed when they hit New Orleans, which was part of its appeal for Louis. He was the only gay, black, Republican criminal I knew.

“Gerald Ford stayed at the Fairmont,” he lamented as he surveyed the small suite he was to share with Angel.

“So?” I countered. “Paul McCartney stayed at the Richelieu and you don’t hear me demanding to stay there.” I left the door open and headed back to my own room for a shower.

“Paul who?” said Louis.

We ate in the Grill Room of the Windsor Court on Gravier Street, in deference to Louis’s wishes, its marbled floors and heavy Austrian drapes strangely uncomfortable for me after the informal setting of the smaller eateries in the Quarter. Rachel had changed into dark pants and a black jacket over a red top. It looked fine but the hot night air had taken its toll on her and she was still pulling the damp cloth of her top away from her body as we waited for the main courses.

As we ate, I explained to them about Joe Bones and the Fontenots. They would be a matter for Angel, Louis, and me. Rachel remained silent for much of our conversation, interjecting occasionally to clarify things that had been said by Woolrich or Morphy. She scribbled notes in a small, wire-bound notebook, her handwriting neat and even. At one point her hand brushed my bare arm lightly and she left it there for an instant, her skin warm against mine.

I watched Angel pulling at his lip as he considered what I had said. “This Remarr must be pretty dumb, dumber than our guy at least,” he said eventually.

“Because of the print?” I said.

He nodded. “Careless, very careless.” He wore the dissatisfied look of a respected theologian who has seen someone bring his calling into disrepute by identifying Jesus as an alien.

Rachel spotted the look. “It seems to bother you a lot,” she commented. I glanced at her. She had an amused expression on her face, but her eyes were calculating and slightly distant. She was playing over in her mind what I had told her, even as she engaged Angel in a conversation that he would usually have avoided. I waited to see how he would respond.

He smiled at her and tilted his head. “I have a certain professional interest in these things,” he admitted. He cleared a space in front of him and held up his hands before us.

“Anyone doing a B &E job-that’s breaking and entering, for the benefit of our more respectable listener-needs to take certain precautions,” began Angel. “The first and most obvious is to make sure that he-or she, B &E being an equal opportunity profession-doesn’t leave any fingerprints. So what do you do?”

“You wear gloves,” said Rachel. She leaned forward now, enjoying the lesson and putting aside any other thoughts.

“Right. Nobody, no matter how dumb, enters a place he shouldn’t be without wearing gloves. Otherwise, you leave visuals, you leave latents, you pretty much sign your name and confess to the crime.”

Visuals are the visible marks left on surfaces by a dirty or bloody hand, latents the invisible marks left by natural secretions of the skin. Visuals can be photographed or lifted using adhesive tape, but latents need to be dusted, typically with a chemical reagent like iodine vapor or ninhydrin solution. Electrostatic and fluorescence techniques are also useful, and in the search for latents on human skin, specialized X-ray photography can be used.

But if what Angel had said was correct, Remarr was too much of a professional to risk a job without gloves and then to leave not merely a latent, but a visual. He must have been wearing gloves, but something had gone wrong.

“You working it through in your head, Bird?” smirked Angel.

“Go on, Sherlock, baffle us with your brilliance,” I responded.

His smirk widened to a grin, and he continued. “It’s possible to get a fingerprint from inside a glove, assuming you have the glove. Rubber or plastic gloves are best for obtaining prints: your hands get sweaty under them.

“But what most people don’t know is that the exterior surface of a glove can act like a fingerprint as well. Say it’s a leather glove, then you got wrinkles, you got holes, you got scars, you got tears, and no two leather gloves are gonna be the same. Now, in the case of this guy Remarr, what we have is a print and no gloves. Unless Remarr can’t tie his shoelaces without falling over, we know that he was probably wearing gloves, but he still manages to leave a print. It’s a mystery.” He made a small, exploding gesture with his hands, like a magician making a rabbit disappear in a puff of smoke, then his face became serious.

“My guess is that Remarr was wearing only a single pair of gloves, probably latex. He imagined this was going to be an easy job: either he was gonna off the old lady and her son, or he was gonna put the frighteners on her, maybe leave a calling card in the house. Since the son, from what I hear, wasn’t the kind of guy to let anyone frighten his momma, I’d say Remarr went in there thinking that he might have to kill someone.

“But when he arrives, they’re either dead or they’re in the process of being killed. Again, my guess is they were already dead: if Remarr stumbled in on the killer, Remarr would be dead as well.

“So Remarr is going in, his one pair of gloves on, and maybe he spots the kid and it throws him. He probably starts to sweat. He goes into the house and finds the old lady. Bam! Second shock, but he goes to take a closer look, steadying himself as he leans over her. He touches blood and maybe considers wiping it away, but he figures wiping it away will only attract more attention to it and, anyway, he’s got his gloves.

“But the problem with latex gloves is that one pair isn’t enough. You wear them for too long and your prints start coming through. You get thrown, you start to sweat, the prints are gonna come through faster. Could be Remarr has been eating before he came out, maybe some fruit or some kind of pasta with vinegar. That causes extra moisture on the skin, so now Remarr is in real trouble. He’s left a print he doesn’t even know about, and now the cops, the feds, and difficult people like our good selves want to ask him about it. Ta-da!” He gave a small bow from the waist. Rachel gave him a round of applause. Louis just raised an eyebrow in resignation.

“Fascinating,” said Rachel. “You must read a lot of books.” Her tone was heavily ironic.

“He does, then Barnes and Noble gonna be grateful that their stolen stock being put to good use,” remarked Louis.

Angel ignored him. “Maybe I dabbled in these things, in my younger days.”

“Did you learn anything else, in your ‘younger’ days?” Rachel smiled.

“ Lot of things, some of them hard lessons,” said Angel with feeling. “Best thing I ever learned: don’t hold on to nothin’. If you don’t have it, can’t nobody prove you took it.

“And I have been tempted. There was this figure of a knight on a horse once. French, seventeenth century. Gold inlaid with diamonds and rubies. About this tall.” He held the palm of his hand flat about six inches above the table. “It was the most beautiful thing I ever saw.” His eyes lit up at the memory. He looked like a child.

He sat back in his chair. “But I let it go. In the end, you have to let things go. The things you regret are the things you hold on to.”

“So is nothing worth holding on to?” asked Rachel.

Angel looked at Louis for a while. “Some things are, yeah, but they ain’t made of gold.”

“That’s so romantic,” I said. Louis made choking noises as he tried to swallow his water.

Before us, the remains of our coffee lay cold in the cups. “Do you have anything to add?” I asked Rachel when Angel had finished playing to the gallery.

She glanced back through her notes. Her brow furrowed slightly. She held a glass of red wine in one hand and the light caught it, reflecting a streak of red across her breast like a wound.

“You said you had pictures, crime scene pictures?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Then I’d like to hold off until I’ve had a chance to see them. I have an idea based on what you told me over the phone, but I’d prefer to keep it to myself until I’ve seen the pictures and done a little more research. I do have one thing, though.” She took a second notebook from her bag and flicked through the pages to where a yellow Post-it note stuck out. “ ‘I lusted for her, but that has always been a weakness of my kind,’ ” she read. “ ‘Our sin was not pride, but lust for humanity.’ ”

She turned to me, but I already recognized the words. “They were the words this Traveling Man said to you when he called,” she said. I was aware of Angel and Louis moving forward in their chairs.

“It took a theologian in the archbishop’s residence to track down the reference. It’s pretty obscure, at least if you’re not a theologian.” She paused, then asked, “Why was the devil banished from heaven?”

“Pride,” said Angel. “I remember Sister Agnes telling us that.”

“It was pride,” said Louis. He glanced at Angel. “I remember Milton telling us that.”

“Anyway,” said Rachel pointedly, “you’re right, or partially right. From Augustine onward, the devil’s sin is pride. But before Augustine, there was a different viewpoint. Up until the fourth century, the Book of Enoch was considered to be part of the biblical canon. Its origins are a matter of dispute-it may have been written in Hebrew or Aramaic, or a combination of both-but it does seem to have provided a basis for some concepts that are still found in the Bible today. The Last Judgment may have been based on the Similitudes of Enoch. The fiery hell ruled by Satan also appears for the first time in Enoch.

“What is interesting for us is that Enoch takes a different view of the devil’s sin.” She turned a page of her notebook and began to read again.

“ ‘And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose…’”

She looked up again. “Now that’s from Genesis, which derives from a similar source as Enoch. The ‘sons of God’ were the angels, who gave in to sexual lust against the will of God. The leader of the sinning angels, the devil, was cast into a dark hole in the desert and his accomplices were thrown into the fire for their punishment. Their offspring, ‘evil spirits upon the earth,’ went with them. The martyr Justin believed that the children of the union between angels and human women were responsible for all evil on the earth, including murder.

“In other words, lust was the sin of the devil. Lust for humanity, the ‘weakness of our kind.’ ” She closed the notebook and permitted herself a small smile of triumph.

“So this guy believes he’s a demon,” said Angel eventually.

“Or the offspring of an angel,” added Louis. “Depends on how you look at it.”

“Whatever he is, or thinks he is, the Book of Enoch is hardly likely to turn up on Oprah’s book choice,” I said. “Any idea what his source might have been?”

Rachel reopened the notebook. “The most recent reference I could find is a nineteen eighty-three New York edition: The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: Enoch, edited by a guy called Isaac, appropriately enough,” she said. “There’s also an older translation from Oxford, published in nineteen thirteen by R. H. Charles.”

I noted the names. “Maybe Morphy or Woolrich can check with the University of New Orleans, see if anyone local has been expressing an interest in the obscure end of biblical studies. Woolrich might be able to extend the search to the other universities. It’s a start.”

We paid the bill and left. Angel and Louis headed off toward the lower Quarter to check out the gay night life while Rachel and I walked back to the Flaisance. We didn’t speak for a time, both of us conscious that we were on the verge of some intimacy.

“I get the feeling that I shouldn’t ask what those two currently do for a living,” said Rachel, as we paused at a crossing.

“Probably not. It’s best to view them as independent operators and leave it at that.”

She smiled. “They seem to have a certain loyalty to you. It’s unusual. I’m not sure that I understand it.”

“I’ve done things for them in the past, but if there ever was a debt, it was paid a long time ago. I owe them a lot.”

“But they’re still here. They still help when they’re asked.”

“I don’t think that’s entirely because of me. They do what they do because they like it. It appeals to their sense of adventure, of danger. In their own separate ways, they’re both dangerous men. I think that’s why they came: they sensed danger and they wanted to be part of it.”

“Maybe they see something of that in you.”

“I don’t know. Maybe they do.”

We walked through the courtyard of the Flaisance, stopping only to pat the dogs. Her room was three doors down from mine. Between our rooms were the room shared by Angel and Louis and one unoccupied single room. She opened the door and stood at the threshold. From inside, I could feel the coolness of the air-conditioning and could hear it pumping at full power.

“I’m still not sure why you’re here,” I said. My throat felt dry and part of me was not certain that it wanted to hear an answer.

“I’m still not sure either,” she said. She stood on her toes and kissed me gently, softly on the lips, and then she was gone.

I went to my room, took a book of Sir Walter Ralegh’s writings from my bag, and headed back out to the Napoleon House, where I took a seat by the portrait of the Little Corporal. I didn’t want to lie on my bed, conscious of the presence of Rachel Wolfe so near to me. I was excited and troubled by her kiss, and by the thought of what might follow.

Almost until the very end, Susan and I had enjoyed an incredible intimacy together. When my drinking truly began to take its toll on us, that intimacy had disintegrated. When we made love it was no longer totally giving. Instead, we seemed to circle each other warily in our lovemaking, always holding something back, always expecting trouble to rear its head and cause us to spring back into the security of our own selves.

But I had loved her. I had loved her until the end and I still loved her now. When the Traveling Man had taken her he had severed the physical and emotional ties between us, but I could still feel the remains of those ties, raw and pulsing at the very extremity of my senses.

Maybe this is common to all those who lose someone whom they have loved deeply. Making contact with another potential partner, another lover, becomes an act of reconstruction, a building not only of a relationship but also of oneself.

But I felt myself haunted by my wife and child. I felt them, not only as an emptiness or a loss, but as an actual presence in my life. I seemed to catch glimpses of them at the edges of my existence, as I drifted from consciousness to sleep, from sleep to waking. Sometimes, I tried to convince myself that they were simply phantoms of my guilt, creations born of some psychological imbalance.

Yet I had heard Susan speak through Tante Marie, and once, like a memory from a delirium, I had awakened in the darkness to feel her hand on my face and I had caught a trace of her scent beside me in the bed. More than that, I saw traces of Susan and Jennifer in every young wife, in each female child. In a young woman’s laughter, I heard the voice of my wife. In the footsteps of a little girl, I heard the echo of my daughter’s shoes.

I felt something for Rachel Wolfe, a mixture of attraction and gratitude and desire. I wanted to be with her but only, I thought, when my wife and child were at peace.

36

DAVID FONTENOT died that night. His car, a vintage Jensen Interceptor, was found on 190, the road that skirts Honey Island and leads down to the shores of the Pearl. The front tires of the car were flat and the doors were hanging open. The windshield had been shattered and the interior was peppered with 9 millimeter holes.

The two St. Tammany cops followed a trail of broken branches and flattened scrub to an old trapper’s shack made of bits of salvaged wood, its tin roof almost obscured by overhanging Spanish moss. It overlooked a bayou lined with gum trees, its waters thick with lime green duckweed and ringing with the sound of mallards and wood ducks.

The shack had been abandoned for a long time. Few people now trapped in Honey Island. Most had moved farther out into the bayous, hunting beaver, deer, and in some cases, alligators.

There were noises coming from the shack as the party approached, sounds of scuffling and thudding and heavy snorting drifting through the open door.

“Hog,” said one of the deputies.

Beside him, the local bank official who had called them in flicked the safety on his Ruger rifle.

“Shit, that won’t do no good against no hog,” said the second deputy. The local, a thick-set, balding man in a Tulane Green Wave T-shirt and an almost unused hunting jacket, reddened. He was carrying a 77V with a telescopic sight, what they used to call in Maine a “varmint rifle.” It was good for small game and some police forces even used it as a sniper rifle, but it wouldn’t stop a feral hog first time unless the shot was perfect.

They were only a few feet away from the shack when the hog sensed them. It erupted from the open door, its tiny, vicious eyes wild and blood dripping from its snout. The man with the Ruger dived into the bayou waters to avoid it as it came at him. The hog spun, cornered at the water’s edge by the party of armed men, then lowered its head and charged again.

There was an explosion in the bayou, then a second, and the hog went down. Most of the top of its head was gone and it twitched briefly on the ground, pawing at the dirt, until eventually it ceased to move. The deputy blew smoke theatrically from the long barrel of a Colt Anaconda, ejected the spent.44 Magnum cartridges with the ejector rod, then reloaded.

“Jesus,” said the voice of his partner. He was standing in the open doorway of the shack, his gun by his side. “Hog sure got at him, but it’s Dave Fontenot all right.”

The hog had ruined most of Fontenot’s face and part of his right arm was gnawed away, but even the damage caused by the hog couldn’t disguise the fact that someone had forced David Fontenot from his car, hunted him through the trees, and then cornered him in the shack, where he was shot in the groin, the knees, the elbows, and the head.

“Mon,” said the hog killer, exhaling deeply. “When Lionel hears about this, there’s gonna be hell to pay.”

I learned most of what had taken place during a hurried telephone conversation with Morphy and a little more from WDSU, the local NBC affiliate. Afterward, Angel, Louis, and I breakfasted at Mother’s on Poydras Street. Rachel had barely worked up the energy to answer the phone when we called her room, and had decided to sleep on and eat later in the morning.

Louis, dressed in an ivory-colored linen suit and a white T-shirt, shared my bacon and homemade biscuits, washed down with strong coffee. Angel opted for ham, eggs, and grits.

“Old folks eat grits, Angel,” said Louis. “Old folks and the insane.”

Angel wiped a white grit trail from his chin and gave Louis the finger.

“He’s not so eloquent first thing in the morning,” said Louis. “Rest of the day, he don’t have no excuse.”

Angel gave Louis the finger again, scraped the last of the grits from the bowl, and pushed it away.

“So, you figure Joe Bones took a preemptive strike against the Fontenots?” he said.

“Looks that way,” I replied. “Morphy figures he used Remarr to do the job-pulled him out of hiding, then squirreled him away again. He wouldn’t entrust a job like that to anyone else. But I don’t understand what David Fontenot was doing out by Honey Island without any backup. He must have known that Joe Bones would take a crack at him if the opportunity arose.”

“Could be one of his own people set him up, hauled him out there on some dead-end pretext, and let Joe Bones know he was coming?” said Angel.

It sounded plausible. If someone had drawn Fontenot out to Honey Island, then it must have been someone he trusted enough to make the trip. More to the point, that someone must have been offering something that Fontenot wanted, something to make him risk the drive to the reserve late at night.

I said nothing to Angel or Louis, but I was troubled that both Raymond Aguillard and David Fontenot had, in their own different ways, drawn my attention to Honey Island in a period of less than one day. I thought that, after I had spoken to Joe Bones, I might have to disturb Lionel Fontenot in his time of grief.

My cell phone rang. It was the desk clerk from the Flaisance, informing us that a delivery addressed to a Mr. Louis had arrived and a courier was waiting for us to sign. We took a taxi back to the hotel. Outside, a black transit van was parked with two wheels on the curb.

“Courier,” said Louis, but there were no markings on the van, nothing to identify it as a commercial vehicle.

In the lobby, the desk clerk sat nervously watching a huge black man who was squeezed into an easy chair. He was shaven-headed and wearing a black T-shirt with Klan Killer written in jagged white writing across the chest. His black combat trousers were tucked into nine-hole army boots. At his feet lay a long steel container, locked and bolted.

“Brother Louis,” he said, rising. Louis took out his wallet and handed over three hundred-dollar bills. The man tucked the money into the thigh pocket of his combats, removed a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses from the same pocket, and put them on before strolling out into the sunlight.

Louis motioned to the container. “If you gentlemen would like to take that up to the room,” he said. Angel and I took an end each and followed him up to the suite. The case was heavy and something inside rattled as we walked.

“Those UPS couriers are sure getting bigger,” I said, as I waited for him to open the door.

“It’s a specialized service,” said Louis. “There are some things the airlines just wouldn’t understand.”

When he had closed and locked the door behind us, he took a set of keys from the pocket of his suit and opened the case. It was separated into three layers, which opened up like those in a tool kit. On the first layer were the constituent parts of a Mauser SP66, a three-round heavy-barreled sniper rifle with a combined muzzle brake and flash hider. The parts were packed in a removable case. Beside it, a SIG P226 pistol and a shoulder holster lay in a fitted compartment.

In the second compartment sat two Calico M-960A minisubs, made in the good old U.S. of A., each handheld sub fitted with a short barrel that extended less than an inch and a half beyond the fore end. With the stock retracted, each gun measured a little over two feet in length and, empty, weighed just under five pounds. They were exceptionally lethal little guns, with a rate of fire of seven hundred and fifty rounds per minute. The third compartment contained an array of ammunition, including four one-hundred-round magazines of 9 millimeter Parabellum for the subs.

“Christmas present?” I asked.

“Yup,” said Louis, loading a fifteen-round magazine into the butt of the SIG. “I’m hoping to get a rail gun for my birthday.”

He handed Angel the case containing the Mauser, slipped on the holster, and inserted the SIG. He then relocked the case and went into the bathroom. As we watched, he removed the paneling from beneath the sink with a screwdriver and shoved the case into the gap before replacing the panel. When he was satisfied that it was back in place, we left.

“You think Joe Bones will be pleased to see a bunch of strangers show up on his doorstep?” asked Angel, as we walked to my rental.

“We ain’t strangers,” said Louis. “We’re just friends he ain’t met yet.”

Joe Bones owned three properties in Louisiana, including a weekend house at Cypremort Point, where his presence must have made the more respectable weekenders, with their expensive holiday houses bearing jokey names like Eaux-Asis and End of the Trail, distinctly uneasy.

His city residence lay across from Audubon Park, almost opposite the bus stop for the shuttle bus that took tourists to the New Orleans Zoo. I had taken a trip on the St. Charles streetcar to inspect the house, a brilliantly white confection adorned with black wrought iron balconies and a cupola topped with a gold weather vane. Finding Joe Bones inside a place like that was like finding a cockroach in a wedding cake. In the carefully maintained garden, a flower I couldn’t identify bloomed lushly. Its scent was sickly and heavy, its flower so large and red that it seemed more rotten than blooming, as if the flowers themselves might suddenly burst and send thick fluid down the branches of the plant, poisoning the aphids.

Joe Bones had deserted the house for the summer in favor of a restored plantation house out in West Feliciana Parish, over one hundred miles north of New Orleans. As impending hostilities with the Fontenots grew more and more likely, the decision to remain in West Feliciana allowed him to defend the country house with more force than he could in the city.

It was a white, eight-columned mansion set on about forty acres, bordered at two sides by an expanse of river flowing south toward the Mississippi. Four large windows looked out on a wide gallery, and the house was topped by two dormer windows set into its roof. An avenue of oaks led from a black iron gate through grounds set with camellias and azaleas until the trees stopped before a wide expanse of lawn. On the lawn, a small group of people stood around a barbecue or lounged on iron lawn furniture.

I spotted three security cameras within ten feet of the gate when we drew up, side-on. We had dropped Angel about half a mile back after cruising by the house once, and I knew he was already making for the stand of cypress that stood opposite the gate. In the event of anything going down with Joe Bones, I decided that I had a better chance of dealing with it with Louis rather than Angel by my side.

A fourth camera overlooked the gate itself. There was no intercom and the gate remained resolutely closed, even when Louis and I leaned against the car and waved.

After two or three minutes a converted golf cart came from behind the house and hummed down the oak-lined avenue toward us. Three men in chinos and sports shirts stepped from it. They made no attempt to hide their Steyr machine pistols.

“Hi,” I said. “We’re here to see Joe Bones.”

“There ain’t no Joe Bones here,” said one of the men. He was tanned and short, no more than five-six. His hair was braided tightly against his scalp, giving him a reptilian appearance.

“How about Mr. Joseph Bonanno, is he there?”

“What are you, cops?”

“We’re concerned citizens. We were hoping Mr. Bones would make a donation to the David Fontenot funeral fund.”

“He already gave,” said the guy by the golf cart, a fatter version of the Lizard Man. His colleagues at the gate laughed fit to burst a gut.

I moved closer to the gate. Lizard Man’s gun came up quickly.

“Tell Joe Bones that Charlie Parker is here, that I was in the Aguillard house on Sunday night, and that I’m looking for Remarr. You think funny man back there can remember all that?”

He stepped back from the gate and, without taking his eyes off us, relayed what I had said to the guy by the golf cart. He took a walkie-talkie from the rear seat, spoke into it for a moment, and then nodded at Lizard Man. “He says let ’em through, Ricky.”

“Okay,” said Ricky, taking a remote signaler from his pocket, “step back from the gate, turn around, and put your hands against the car. You packing, then tell me now. I find anything you haven’t told me about, I put a bullet in your head and feed you to the ’gators.”

We owned up to a Smith & Wesson and a SIG between us. Louis threw in an ankle knife for good measure. We left the car at the gate and walked behind the golf cart toward the house. One man sat in the back with his pistol pointing at us while Ricky walked behind us.

As we neared the lawn I could smell shrimp and chicken cooking on the barbecue. An iron table held an assortment of spirits and glasses. Abita and Heineken lay in a steel cooler packed with ice.

From the side of the house came a low growl, deep with viciousness and menace. At the end of a strong chain, which was anchored to a bolt set in concrete, was a huge animal. It had the thick coat of a wolf, flecked with the coloring of an Alsatian. Its eyes were bright and intelligent, which rendered its obvious savagery all the more threatening. It looked like it weighed at least one hundred and eighty pounds. Each time it tugged at its chain, it threatened to wrench the bolt from the ground.

I noticed that it seemed to be directing most of its attention at Louis. Its eyes focused on him intently and at one point it raised itself up on its hind legs in its efforts to strike at him. Louis looked at it with the detached interest of a scientist finding a curious new type of bacteria growing in his Petri dish.

Joe Bones speared a piece of spiced chicken with a fork and placed it on a china plate. He was only slightly taller than Ricky, with long dark hair swept back from his forehead. His nose had been broken at least once and a small scar twisted his upper lip on the left side. His white shirt was open to the waist and hung over a pair of Lycra running shorts. His stomach was hard and muscular, his chest and arms slightly overdeveloped for a man of his height. He looked mean and intelligent, like the animal on the chain, which probably explained how he had lasted for ten years at the top of the heap in New Orleans.

He placed some tomatoes, lettuce, and cold rice mixed with peppers beside the chicken and handed the plate to a woman seated nearby. She was older than Joe, I guessed, probably in her early or mid-forties. There was no darkness at her blond roots and she wore little or no makeup, although her eyes were obscured by a pair of Wayfarers. She wore a short-sleeved silk robe over a white blouse and white shorts. Like Joe Bones, she was barefoot. To one side of them stood two more men in shirts and chinos, each armed with a machine pistol. I counted two more on the balcony and one sitting beside the main door to the house.

“You want something to eat?” asked Joe Bones. His voice was low, with only a faint trace of Louisiana in it. He looked at me until I responded.

“No, thanks,” I said. I noticed that he didn’t offer any to Louis. I think Louis noticed too.

Joe Bones helped himself to some shrimp and salad, then motioned to the two guards to help themselves to what was left. They took turns to do so, each eating a breast of chicken with his fingers.

“Those Aguillard murders. A terrible thing,” said Joe Bones. He waved me toward the only empty seat left after he sat down. I exchanged a look with Louis, shrugged, and sat.

“Excuse me for presuming on an intimacy with you,” he continued, “but I hear that the same man may have been responsible for the deaths of your family.” He smiled almost sympathetically. “A terrible thing,” he repeated. “A terrible thing.”

I held his gaze. “You’re well informed about my past.”

“When someone new comes to town and starts finding bodies in trees, I like to make it my business to find out about them. They might be good company.” He picked a piece of shrimp from his plate and examined it briefly before starting to eat.

“I understand you had an interest in purchasing the Aguillards’ land,” I said.

Joe Bones sucked at the shrimp and placed the tail carefully to one side of his plate before responding. “I have a lot of interests, and that wasn’t Aguillard land. Just because some senile fuck decides to make up for a bad life by slipping land to the niggers doesn’t make it nigger land.” He spat the word “nigger” each time. His shell of courtesy had proved remarkably fragile and he seemed intent upon deliberately provoking Louis. It was an unwise course of action, even with guns around him.

“It seems that one of your men, Tony Remarr, may have been in the house the night that the Aguillards died. We’d be interested in talking to him.”

“Tony Remarr is no longer part of my operation,” said Joe Bones, returning to his formal mode of speech after the burst of profanity. “We agreed a mutual parting of the ways and I haven’t seen him in weeks. I had no idea he was in the Aguillard house until the police told me.”

He smiled at me. I smiled back.

“Did Remarr have anything to do with David Fontenot’s death?”

Joe Bones’s jaw tensed but he kept smiling. “I have no idea. I heard about David Fontenot on the news this morning.”

“Another terrible thing?” I suggested.

“The loss of a young life is always terrible,” he responded. “Look, I’m sorry about your wife and kid, I truly am, but I can’t help you. And frankly, now you’re getting rude, so I’d like you to take your nigger and get the fuck off my property.”

The muscles in Louis’s neck rippled, the only sign he gave that he had heard Joe Bones. Joe Bones leered at him, picked up a piece of chicken, and tossed it toward the beast on the chain. It ignored the tidbit until his owner snapped his fingers, when it fell on the chicken and devoured it in a single bite.

“You know what that is?” asked Joe Bones. He spoke to me, but his body language was directed at Louis. It expressed utter contempt. When I didn’t respond, he continued.

“It’s called a boerbul. A man named Peter Geertschen, a German, developed it for the army and antiriot squads in South Africa by crossing a Russian wolf with an Alsatian. It’s a white man’s watchdog. It sniffs out niggers.” He turned his gaze on Louis and smiled.

“Careful,” I said. “He might get confused and turn on you.” Joe Bones jerked in his chair as if he had been hit by a jolt of electricity. His eyes narrowed and searched my face for any indication that I was aware of a double meaning in what I had said. I stared right back at him.

“You better leave now,” said Joe Bones, with quiet, obvious menace. I shrugged and stood up, Louis moving close to me as I did so. We exchanged a look.

“Man got us on the run,” said Louis.

“Maybe, but if we leave like this he won’t respect us.”

“Without respect, a man got nothing,” agreed Louis.

He picked a plate from the stack on the table and held it above his head. It exploded in a shower of china fragments as the.300 Winchester cartridge impacted and buried itself in the wood of the house behind. The woman in the chair dived to the grass, the two goons moved to cover Joe Bones, and three men appeared running from the side of the house as the shot echoed in the air.

Ricky, the Lizard Man, was the first to reach us. He raised the pistol and his finger tightened on the trigger, but Joe Bones struck out at his gun arm, pushing it upward.

“No! You dumb fuck, you want to get me killed?” He scanned the treeline beyond his property, then turned back to me.

“You come in here, you shoot at me, you scare my woman. The fuck do you think you’re dealing with here?”

“You said the N-word,” said Louis quietly.

“He’s right,” I agreed. “You did say it.”

“I hear you got friends in New Orleans,” said Joe Bones, his voice threatening. “I got enough troubles without the feds crawling on me, but I see you or your”-he paused, swallowing the word-“friend anywhere near me again and I’ll take my chances. You hear?”

“I hear you,” I said. “I’m going to find Remarr, Joe. If it turns out that you’ve been holding out on us and this man gets away because of it, I’ll come back.”

“You make us come back, Joe, and we gonna have to hurt your puppy,” said Louis, almost sorrowfully.

“You come back and I’ll stake you out on the grass and let him feed on you,” snarled Joe Bones.

We backed away toward the oak-lined avenue, watching Joe Bones and his men carefully. The woman moved toward him to comfort him, her white clothes stained with grass. She kneaded gently at his trapezius with her carefully manicured hands, but he pushed her away with a hard shove to the chest. There was spittle on his chin.

Behind us, I heard the gate open as we retreated beneath the oaks. I hadn’t expected much from Joe Bones, and had got less, but we had succeeded in rattling his cage. My guess was that he would contact Remarr and that might be enough to flush him from wherever he was holed up. It seemed like a good idea. The trouble with good ideas is that nine times out of ten someone has had the same idea before you.

“I didn’t know Angel was such a good shot,” I said to Louis as we reached the car. “You been giving him lessons?”

“Uh-huh,” said Louis. He sounded genuinely shocked.

“Could he have hit Joe Bones?”

“Uh-uh. I’m surprised he didn’t hit me.”

Behind us, I heard the door open as Angel slid into the back seat, the Mauser already back in its case.

“So, we gonna start hangin’ out with Joe Bones, maybe shoot some pool, whistle at girls?”

“When did you ever whistle at girls?” asked Louis, be-mused, as we pulled away from the gate and headed toward St. Francisville.

“It’s a guy thing,” said Angel. “I can do guy things.”

37

IT WAS LATE afternoon when we got back to the Flaisance, where there was a message waiting from Morphy. I called him at the Sheriff’s Office and got passed on to a cell phone.

“Where you been?” he asked.

“Visiting Joe Bones.”

“Shit, why’d you do a thing like that?”

“Making trouble, I guess.”

“I warned you, man. Don’t be screwing with Joe Bones. You go alone?”

“I brought a friend. Joe didn’t like him.”

“What’d your friend do?”

“He got born to black parents.”

Morphy laughed. “I guess Joe is kind of sensitive about his heritage, but it’s good to remind him of it now and then.”

“He threatened to feed my friend to his dog.”

“Yeah,” said Morphy, “Joe sure does love that dog.”

“You got something?”

“Maybe. You like seafood?”

“No.”

“Good, then we’ll head out to Bucktown. Great seafood there, best shrimp around. I’ll pick you up in two hours.”

“Any other reason for seeing Bucktown other than seafood?”

“Remarr. One of his exes has a pad there. Might be worth a visit.”

Bucktown was pretty in a quaint sort of way, as long as you liked the smell of fish. I kept the window up to try to limit the damage but Morphy had his rolled right down and was taking deep, sinful breaths. All in all, Bucktown seemed an unlikely place for a man like Remarr to hole up, but that in itself was probably reason enough for him to choose it.

Carole Stern lived in a small camelback house, a single-story at the front against a two-story rear, set in a small garden a few blocks off Bucktown’s main street. According to Morphy, Stern worked in a bar on St. Charles but was currently serving time for possession of coke with intent to supply. Remarr was rumored to be keeping up the rental payments until she got out. We parked around the corner from the house and we clicked off the safeties of our guns in unison as we stepped from the car.

“You’re a little out of your territory here, aren’t you?” I asked Morphy.

“Hey, we just came out here for a bite to eat and decided to check on the off chance,” he said, with an injured look. “I ain’t steppin’ on no toes.”

He motioned me toward the front of the house while he took the back. I walked to the front door, which stood on a small raised porch, and peered carefully through the glass. It was caked with dirt, in keeping with the slightly run-down feel of the house itself. I counted five and then tried the door. It opened with a gentle creak and I stepped carefully into the hall. At the far end, I heard the tinkle of glass breaking and saw Morphy’s hand reach in to open the rear door.

The smell was faint, but obvious, like meat that has been left in the sunlight on a warm day. The downstairs rooms were empty and consisted only of a kitchen, a small room with a sofa and an old TV, and a bedroom with a single bed and a closet. The closet contained women’s clothes and shoes. The bed was covered only by a worn mattress.

Morphy took the stairs first. I stayed close behind, both of us with our guns pointing toward the second floor. The smell was stronger here now. We passed a bathroom with a dripping showerhead, which had stained the ceramic bath brown. On a sink unit beneath a small mirror stood some shaving foam, blades, and a bottle of Boss aftershave.

Three other doors stood partially open. On the right was a woman’s bedroom. It had white sheets on the bed, potted plants, which had begun to wither, and a series of Monet prints on the walls. There were cosmetics on a long dressing table and a white fitted closet ran the length of one wall. A window opposite looked out on a small, overgrown garden. There were more women’s clothes in the closet, and more shoes. Carole Stern was obviously funding some kind of shopping addiction by selling drugs.

The second door provided the source of the smell. A large open pot sat on a camper stove by a window facing on to the street. It contained scummy water in which a stew of some kind was cooking on a low heat. From the stench, the meat had been allowed to simmer for some time, probably most of the day. It smelled foul, like offal. Two easy chairs stood in the room on a new red carpet. A portable TV with a coat-hanger aerial sat blankly on a small table.

The third room was also at the front of the house facing onto the street, but its door was almost closed. Morphy took one side of the door. I took the other. He counted three and then nudged the door open with his foot and went in fast to the right-hand wall. I moved in low to the left, my gun level with my chest, my finger resting on the trigger.

The setting sun cast a golden glow over the contents of the room: an unmade bed, a suitcase open on the floor, a dressing table, a poster on the wall advertising a concert by the Neville Brothers in Tipitina’s, with the brothers’ signatures scrawled loosely across their images. The carpeted floor felt damp beneath my feet.

Most of the plaster had been removed from the ceiling and the roof beams lay exposed. I guessed Carole Stern had been considering some sort of remodeling before her prison sentence put her plans temporarily on hold. At the far end of the room, a series of what looked like climbing ropes had been strung over the beams and used to hold Tony Remarr in position.

His remains glowed with a strange fire in the dying sunlight. I could see the muscles and veins in his legs, the ten-dons in his neck, the yellow mounds of fatty deposits seeping at his waist, the muscles in his stomach, the shriveled husk of his penis. Huge masonry nails had been driven into the far wall of the room and he hung partially on them, one beneath each arm, while the ropes took the main weight of his body.

As I moved to the right I could see a third nail in the wall behind his neck, holding his head in place. The head faced to the right, in profile, supported by another nail beneath his chin. In places, his skull gleamed whitely through the blood. His eye sockets were almost empty and his gritted teeth were white against his gums.

Remarr had been totally flayed, carefully posed, and hung against the wall. His left hand stretched diagonally outward and down from his body. A long-bladed knife, like a butcher’s filleting tool but wider, heavier, hung from his hand. It looked like it had been glued in place.

But the viewer’s gaze was drawn, like Tony Remarr’s own blind stare, to the figure’s right hand. It stood at a right angle to his body until it reached the elbow. From there, the forearm was raised vertically, pulled upward by a rope around the wrist. In the fingers of his right hand and draped over his right arm, Tony Remarr held his own flayed skin. I could see the shape of the arms, the legs, the hair of his scalp, the nipples on his chest. Beneath the scalp, which hung almost at his knees, there were bloody edges where the face had been removed. The bed, the floor, the wall, all were shaded in red.

I looked to my left to see Morphy cross himself and softly say a prayer for the soul of Tony Remarr.

We sat against Morphy’s car drinking coffee from paper cups as the feds and the New Orleans police milled around the Stern house. A crowd of people, some local, some on their way to eat in Bucktown’s seafood joints, hung around the edges of the police cordon waiting to see the body being removed. They were likely to be disappointed: the crime scene was highly organized by the killer, and both the police and the feds were anxious to document it fully before allowing the body to be taken away.

Woolrich, his tan suit now restored to its former tarnished glory, came over to us and offered us the remains of a bag of donuts from his suit pocket. Behind the cordon, I could see his own Chevy, a red ’96 model that shone like new.

“Here, you must be hungry.” Both Morphy and I declined the offer. I still had visions of Remarr in my head and Morphy looked pale and ill.

“You speak to the locals?” asked Woolrich.

We both nodded. We had given lengthy statements to a pair of Homicide detectives from Orleans Parish, one of whom was Morphy’s brother-in-law.

“Then I guess you can go,” said Woolrich. “I’ll want to talk to both of you again, though.” Morphy wandered around to the driver’s side of his car. I moved to open the passenger door but Woolrich held my arm.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I think so.”

“It was a good hunch that Morphy followed, but he shouldn’t have brought you along. Durand’s gonna be on my back when he finds out that you were first on another crime scene.” Durand was the FBI’s special agent in charge in New Orleans. I had never met him but I knew what most SACs were like. They ruled their field offices like kingdoms, assigning agents to squads and giving the go-ahead to operations. The competition for SAC posts was intense. If nothing else, Durand was a tough customer.

“You’re still at the Flaisance?”

“Still there.”

“I’ll drop by. There’s something I want to bounce off you.”

He turned and walked back toward the Stern house. On his way through the gate, he handed the bag of crushed donuts to a pair of patrolmen sitting in their car. They took the bag reluctantly, holding it like it was a bomb. When Woolrich had entered the house, one of them climbed out of the car and threw the donuts in a trash can.

Morphy dropped me at the Flaisance. Before he left, I gave him my cell phone number. He wrote it in a small black notebook, bound tightly with a rubber band. “If you’re free tomorrow, Angie’s cooking dinner. It’s worth the trip. You taste her cooking and you won’t regret it.” The tone of his voice changed. “Besides, there’s some things I think we need to discuss.”

I told him it sounded okay, although part of me wanted never to see Morphy, Woolrich, or another cop again. He was about to pull away when I patted the roof of the car with my palm. Morphy leaned over and rolled down the window.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked. Morphy had gone to considerable lengths to involve me, to keep me posted on what was happening. I needed to know why. I think I also needed to know if I could trust him.

He shrugged. “The Aguillards died on my beat. I want to get the guy who killed them. You know something about him. He’s come at you, at your family. The feds are conducting their own investigation and are telling us as little as they can. You’re all I got.”

“Is that it?” I could see something more in his face, something that was almost familiar.

“No. I got a wife. I’m starting a family. You know what I’m sayin’?”

I nodded and let it go, but there was something else in his eyes, something that resonated inside me. I patted the roof of the car once again in farewell and watched as he drove away, wondering how badly Morphy wanted absolution for what he might have done.

38

AS I RETURNED to my room at the Flaisance I felt an overpowering sense of decay, which seemed to creep into my nostrils, almost stopping my breathing. It lodged itself beneath my nails and stained my skin. I felt it in the sweat on my back and saw it in the weeds breaking through the cracks in the pavement beneath my feet. It was as if the city were corroding around me. I went to my room and showered under a hot jet until my skin was red and raw, then changed into a sweater and chinos, called Angel and Louis in their room, and arranged to meet them in Rachel’s room in five minutes.

She answered the door with an ink-stained hand. She had a pencil tucked behind her ear, and a pair of pencils held her red hair back in a bun. There were dark rims under her eyes, which were red from reading.

Her room had been transformed. A Macintosh Power-Book stood open on the room’s only table, surrounded by a mass of paper, books, and notes. On the wall above it were diagrams, yellow Post-it notes, and a series of what appeared to be anatomy sketches. A pile of faxes lay on the floor by her chair, beside a tray of half-eaten sandwiches, a pot of coffee, and a stained cup.

I heard a knock on the door behind me. I opened it to admit Angel and Louis. Angel looked at the wall in disbelief. “Guy on the desk already thinks you’re crazy, with all the shit that’s been comin’ in on his fax. He sees this, he’s gonna call the cops.”

Rachel sat back in her chair and pulled the pencils from her bun, releasing her hair. She shook her tresses out with her left hand and then twisted her neck to ease her knotted muscles.

“So,” she said, “who wants to start?”

I told them about Remarr, and instantly, the tiredness went from Rachel’s face. She made me detail the position of the body twice and then spent a couple of minutes shuffling papers on her desk.

“There!” she said, handing me a sheet of paper with a flourish. “Is that it?”

It was a black-and-white illustration, marked at the top of the page, in old lettering: TAB. PRIMERA DEL LIB. SEGVNDO. At the bottom of the page, in Rachel’s handwriting, was written “Valverde 1556.”

The illustration depicted a flayed man, his left foot on a stone, his left hand holding a long knife with a hooked hilt, his right holding his own flayed skin. The outline of his face was visible on the skin and his eyes remained in his sockets, but with those exceptions, the illustration was profoundly similar to the position in which Remarr had been found. The various parts of the body were each marked with Greek letters.

“That’s it,” I said quietly as Angel and Louis peered silently over my shoulder. “That’s what we found.”

“The Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano,” said Rachel. “It was written by the Spaniard Juan de Valverde de Hamusco in 1556 as a medical textbook. This drawing”-she took the page and held it up so we could all see it-“is an illustration of the Marsyas myth. Marsyas was a satyr, a follower of the goddess Cybele. He was cursed when he picked up a bone flute discarded by Athene. The flute played itself, because it was still inspired by Athene, and its music was so beautiful that the peasants said it was greater even than that of Apollo himself.

“Apollo challenged Marsyas to a competition to be judged by the Muses, and Marsyas lost because he couldn’t play the flute upside down and sing at the same time.

“And so Apollo took his revenge on Marsyas. He flayed him alive and nailed his skin to a pine. According to the poet Ovid, at his moment of death Marsyas cried out, “Quid me mihi detrahis?”-which can be roughly translated as: “Who is it that tears me from myself?” The artist Titian painted a version of the myth. So did Raphael. My guess is that Remarr’s body will reveal traces of ketamine. To fulfill the myth, the flaying would have to be carried out while the victim was still alive-it’s hard to create a work of art if the subject keeps moving.”

Louis interrupted. “But in this picture he looks like he flayed himself. He’s holding the knife and the skin. Why did the killer choose this depiction?”

“This is just a guess, but maybe it’s because, in a sense, Remarr did flay himself,” I said. “He was at the Aguillard house when he shouldn’t have been. I think the Traveling Man was concerned at what he might have seen. Remarr was somewhere he shouldn’t have been, so he was responsible for what happened to him.”

Rachel nodded. “It’s an interesting point, but there may be something more to it, given what happened to Tee Jean Aguillard.” She handed me a pair of papers. The first was a photocopy of the crime scene photo of Tee Jean. The second was another illustration, this time marked DE DISSECT.

PARTIVM. At the bottom of the page, the date “ 1545” had been handwritten by Rachel.

The illustration depicted a man crucified against a tree, with a stone wall behind it. His head was cradled by the branches of the tree, his arms spread by further branches. The skin below his chest had been flayed, revealing his lungs, kidneys, and heart. Some unidentified organ, probably his stomach, lay on a raised platform beside him. His face was intact, but once again, the illustration matched the posture of Tee Jean Aguillard’s body.

“Marsyas again,” said Rachel. “Or at least an adaptation of the myth. That’s from Estienne’s De dissectione partium corporis humani, another early textbook.”

“Are you saying that this guy is killing according to a Greek myth?” asked Angel.

Rachel sighed. “It’s not that simple. I think the myth has resonances for him, for the basic reason that he’s used it twice. But the Marsyas theory breaks down with Tante Marie, and Bird’s wife and child. I found the Marsyas illustrations almost by accident, but I haven’t found a match yet for the other deaths. I’m still looking. The likelihood is that they are also based on early medical textbooks. If that’s the case, then I’ll find them.”

“It raises the possibility that we’re looking for someone with a medical background,” I said.

“Or a knowledge of obscure texts,” said Rachel. “We already know that he has read the Book of Enoch, or some derivative of it. It wouldn’t take a great deal of medical knowledge to carry out the kind of mutilation we’ve found on the bodies so far, but an assumption of some surgical skills, or even some mild familiarity with medical procedures, might not be totally amiss.”

“What about the blinding and the removal of the faces?” I asked. I pushed a flashing image of Susan and Jennifer to the back of my mind. “Any idea where they fit in?”

Rachel shook her head. “I’m still working on it. The face appears to be some form of token for him. Jennifer’s was returned because she died before he could start working on her, I’d guess, but also because he wanted to shock you personally. The removal could also indicate the killer’s disregard for them as individuals, a sign of his disregard for their own status as people. After all, when you remove a person’s face, you take away the most immediate representation of their individuality, their main physical distinguisher.

“As for the eyes, there is a myth that the image of the killer stays on the retina of the victim. There were lots of myths like that attached to the body. Even at the start of the last century, some scientists were still examining the theory that a murder victim’s body bled when it was in the same room as its killer. I need to do more work on it, then we’ll see.”

She stood up and stretched. “I don’t mean to sound callous, but now I want to take a shower. Then I want to go out and get something decent to eat. After that, I want to sleep for twelve hours.”

Angel, Louis, and I started to leave but she held up her hand to stop us. “There’s just one more thing. I don’t want to give the impression that this is just some freak copying violent images. I don’t know enough about this to make that kind of judgment and I want to consult some people who are more experienced in this area than I am. But I can’t help feeling that there’s some underlying philosophy behind what he’s doing, some pattern that he’s following. Until we find out what that is, I don’t think we’re going to catch him.”

I had my hand on the door handle when there was a knock at the door. I opened it slowly and blocked the view of the room with my body while Rachel cleared away her papers. Woolrich stood before me. In the light from the room, I noticed a thin growth of beard was forming on his face. “Clerk told me you might be here if you weren’t in your own room. Can I come in?”

I paused for a moment, then stepped aside. I noticed that Rachel was standing in front of the material on the wall, obscuring it from view, but Woolrich wasn’t interested in her. His eyes had fixed on Louis.

“I know you,” he said.

“I don’t think so,” said Louis. His eyes were cold.

Woolrich turned to me. “You bringing your hired killers to my town, Bird?”

I didn’t reply.

“Like I said, man, I think you’re making a mistake,” said Louis. “I’m a businessman.”

“Really? And what kind of business would you be in?”

“ Pest control,” said Louis.

The air seemed to crackle with tension, until Woolrich turned around and walked from the room. He stopped in the hall and gestured to me. “I need to talk to you. I’ll wait for you in the Café du Monde.”

I watched him go, then looked at Louis. He raised an eyebrow. “Guess I’m more famous than I thought.”

“Guess you are,” I said, and went after Woolrich.

I caught up with him on the street but he said nothing until we were seated and he had a beignet in front of him. He tore off a piece, sprinkling powdered sugar on his suit, then took a long gulp of coffee, which half drained the cup and left a brown stain along its sides. “C’mon, Bird,” he said. “What are you trying to do here?” He sounded weary and disappointed. “That guy, I know his face. I know what he is.” He chewed another piece of beignet.

I didn’t reply. We stared at each other until Woolrich looked away. He dusted sugar from his fingers and ordered another coffee. I had hardly touched mine.

“Does the name Edward Byron mean anything to you?” he said eventually, when he realized that Louis was not going to be a topic of discussion.

“It doesn’t ring any bells. Why?”

“He was a janitor in Park Rise. That’s where Susan had Jennifer, right?”

“Right.” Park Rise was a private hospital on Long Island. Susan’s father had insisted that we use it, arguing that its staff were among the best in the world. They were certainly among the best paid. The doctor who delivered Jennifer earned more in a month than I made in a year.

“Where’s this leading?” I asked.

“Byron was let go-quietly-following the mutilation of a corpse earlier this year. Someone performed an unauthorized autopsy on a female body. Her abdomen was opened and her ovaries and Fallopian tubes removed.”

“No charges were pressed?”

“The hospital authorities considered it, then decided against it. Surgical gloves with traces of the dead woman’s blood and tissue on them were found in a bag in Byron’s locker. He argued that someone was trying to frame him. The evidence wasn’t conclusive-theoretically, someone could have planted that stuff in his locker-but the hospital let him go anyway. No court case, no police investigation, nothing. The only reason we have any record of it is because the local cops were investigating the theft of drugs from the hospital around the same time, and Byron’s name was noted on the report. Byron was dismissed after the thefts began and they pretty much ceased, but he had an alibi each time there were found to be drugs missing.

“That was the last anyone heard of Byron. We have his Social Security number, but he hasn’t claimed unemployment, paid tax, dealt with state government, or visited a hospital since he was dismissed. His credit cards haven’t been used since October nineteenth, ninety-six.”

“What brings his name up now?”

“Edward Byron is a native of Baton Rouge. His wife-his ex-wife, Stacey-still lives there.”

“Have you spoken to her?”

“We interviewed her yesterday. She says she hasn’t seen him since last April, that he owes her six months’ alimony. The last check was drawn on a bank in East Texas but his old lady thinks he may be living in the Baton Rouge area, or somewhere nearby. She says he always wanted to come back here, that he hated New York. We’ve also put out photos of him, taken from his employee record at Park Rise.”

He handed me a blown-up picture of Byron. He was a handsome man, his features marred only by a slightly receding chin. His mouth and nose were thin, his eyes narrow and dark. He had dark brown hair, swept from left to right. He looked younger than thirty-five, his age when the picture was taken.

“It’s the best lead we’ve got,” said Woolrich. “Maybe I’m telling you because I figure you have a right to know. But I’m telling you something else as well: you keep away from Mrs. Byron. We’ve told her not to talk to anyone in case the press get wind of it. Secondly, stay away from Joe Bones. His guy Ricky was caught on one of our taps swearing blue hell about some stunt you pulled today, but you won’t get away with it a second time.”

He laid some money on the table. “Your little team back there got anything that might help us?”

“Not yet. We figure a medical background, maybe a sexual pathology. If I get anything more, I’ll let you know. I’ve got a question for you, though. What drugs were taken from Park Rise?”

He tilted his head to one side and twisted his mouth slightly, as if debating with himself whether or not to tell me.

“Ketamine hydrochloride. It’s related to PCP.” I gave no indication that I already knew about the drug. The feds would tear Morphy a new asshole if they knew he had been feeding me details like that, although they must have already had their suspicions. Woolrich paused for a moment and then went on. “It was found in the bodies of Tante Marie Aguillard and her son. The killer used it as a form of anesthetic.”

He spun his coffee cup on its saucer, waiting until it came to rest with the handle pointing in my direction.

“Are you scared of this guy, Bird?” he asked quietly. “Because I sure am. You remember that conversation we had about serial killers, when I brought you to meet Tante Marie?”

I nodded.

“Back then, I thought I’d seen it all. These killers were abusers and rapists and dysfunctionals who had crossed some line, but they were so pathetic that they were still recognizably human. But this one…”

He watched a family pass by in a carriage, the driver urging the horse on with the reins while he gave them his own history of Jackson Square. A child, a small, dark-haired boy, was seated at the edge of the family group. He watched us silently as they passed by, his chin resting on his bare forearm.

“We were always afraid that one would come who was different from the others, who was motivated by something more than a twisted, frustrated sexuality or wretched sadism. We live in a culture of pain and death, Bird, and most of us go through life without ever really understanding that. Maybe it was only a matter of time before we produced someone who understood that better than we did, someone who saw the world as just one big altar on which to sacrifice humanity, someone who believed he had to make an example of us all.”

“And do you believe that this is him?”

“ ‘I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ Isn’t that what the Bhagavadgita says? ‘I am become Death.’ Maybe that’s what he is: pure Death.”

He moved toward the street. I followed him, then remembered my slip of paper from the previous night. “Woolrich, there is one more thing.” He looked testy as I gave him the references for the Book of Enoch.

“What the fuck is the Book of Enoch?”

“It’s part of the Apocrypha. I think he may have some knowledge of it.”

Woolrich folded the paper and put it in the pocket of his pants.

“Bird,” he said, and he almost smiled, “sometimes I’m torn between keeping you in touch with what’s happening and not telling you anything.” He grimaced, then sighed as if to indicate that this was something that just wasn’t worth arguing about. “Stay out of trouble, Bird, and tell your friends the same.” He walked away, to be swallowed up by the evening crowds.

I knocked on Rachel’s door, but there was no reply. I knocked a second time, harder, and I heard some noises from inside the room. She answered the door with a towel wrapped around her body and her hair hidden by a second, smaller towel. Her face was red from the heat of the shower and her skin glowed.

“Sorry,” I said. “I forgot that you’d be showering.”

She smiled and waved me in.

“Take a seat. I’ll get dressed and let you buy me dinner.” She took a pair of gray pants and a white cotton shirt from the bed, picked some matching white underwear from her case, and stepped back into the bathroom. She didn’t close the door fully behind her so that we could talk while she dressed.

“Should I ask what that exchange was about?” she said.

I walked to her balcony window and looked out on the street below.

“What Woolrich said about Louis is true. It’s not as simple as that, maybe, but he has killed people in the past. Now, I’m not so sure. I don’t ask, and I’m not in a position to pass judgment on him. But I trust both Angel and Louis. I asked them to come because I know what they’re good at.”

She came out of the bathroom buttoning her shirt, her damp hair hanging. She dried her hair with a travel dryer, then applied a little makeup. I had seen Susan do the same things a thousand times, but there was a strange intimacy in watching Rachel perform them in front of me. I felt something stir inside me, a tiny yet significant shift in my feelings toward her. She sat on the edge of the bed and slipped her bare feet into a pair of black slingbacks, her finger moving inside each one to ease the progress of her heel. As she leaned foward, moisture glistened on the small of her back. She caught me looking at her and smiled cautiously, as if afraid of misinterpreting what she had seen. “Shall we go?” she said.

I held the door open for her as we left, her shirt brushing my hand with a sound like water sizzling on hot metal.

We ate in Mr. B’s on Royal Street, the big mahogany room cool and dark. I had steak, tender and luscious, while Rachel ate blackened redfish, the spices causing her to gasp at the first bite. We talked of little things, of plays and films, of music and reading. It emerged that we had both attended the same performance of The Magic Flute at the Met in ’91, both of us alone. I watched her as she sipped her wine, the reflected light playing on her face and dancing in the darkness of her pupils like moonlight seen from a lakeshore.

“So, you often follow strange men to distant lands?”

She smiled. “I bet you’ve been waiting to use that line all your life.”

“Maybe I use it all the time.”

“Oh puh-lease. Next thing you’ll be wielding a club and asking the waiter to step outside.”

“Okay, guilty as charged. It’s been a while.”

I felt myself redden and caught something playful but uncertain in her glance-a kind of sadness, a fear of hurting and being hurt. Inside me, something twisted and stretched its claws, and I felt a little tear in my heart.

“I’m sorry. I know almost nothing about you,” I said quietly.

She reached out gently and brushed along the length of my left hand, from the wrist to the end of the little finger. She followed the curves of my fingers, delicately tracing the lines and whorls of my fingerprints, her touch soft as a leaf. At last, she let her hand rest on the table, the tips of her fingers resting on top of my own, and began to speak.

She was born in Chilson, near the foothills of the Adirondacks. Her father was a lawyer, her mother taught kindergarten. She liked basketball and running, and her prom date got the mumps two days before the prom, so her best friend’s brother went with her instead and tried to feel her breast during “Only the Lonely.” She had one brother of her own, Curtis, ten years her elder. For five of his twenty-eight years, Curtis had been a cop. He was two weeks short of his twenty-ninth birthday when he died. “He was a detective with the State Police, newly promoted. He wasn’t even on duty the day he was killed.” She spoke without hesitation, not too slowly, not too quickly, as if she had gone over the story a thousand times, examining it for flaws, tracing its beginning, its resolution, cutting all extraneous detail from it until she was left with the gleaming core of her brother’s murder, the hollow heart of his absence.

“It was a quarter after two, a Tuesday afternoon. Curtis was visiting some girl in Moriah-he always had two or three girls trailing him at any one time. He just broke their hearts. He was carrying a bunch of flowers, pink lilies bought in a store five doors from the bank. He heard some shouting and saw two people come running from the bank, both armed, both masked, a man and a woman. There was another man sitting in a car, waiting for them to come out.

“Curtis was drawing his gun when they saw him. They both had sawed-offs and they didn’t hesitate. The man emptied both barrels into him and then, while he lay dying on the ground, the woman finished him off. She shot him in the face, and he was so handsome, so lovely.”

She stopped talking and I knew that this was a story she had told only in her mind, that it was something not to be shared, but to be safeguarded. Sometimes, we need our pain. We need it to call our own.

“When they caught them, they had three thousand dollars. That was all they got from the bank, all that my brother was worth to them. The woman had been released from an institution the week before. Someone decided that she no longer posed a threat to the community.”

She lifted her glass and drained the last of her wine. I signaled for more and she remained silent as the waiter refilled her glass.

“And here I am,” she said at last. “Now I try to understand, and sometimes I get close. And sometimes, if I’m lucky, I can stop things from happening to other people. Sometimes.”

I found that her hand was now gripped tightly in mine, and I could not recall how that had happened. Holding her hand, I spoke for the first time in many years about leaving New York and the move to Maine with my mother.

“Is she still alive?”

I shook my head. “I got in trouble with a local big shot named Daddy Helms,” I said. “My grandfather and my mother agreed that I should go away to work for the summer, until things quieted down. A friend of his ran a store in Philly, so I worked there for a while, stocking shelves, cleaning up at night. I slept in a room above the store.

“My mother began taking physiotherapy for a trapped nerve in her shoulder, except it turned out that she had been misdiagnosed. She had cancer. I think she knew, but she chose not to say anything. Maybe she thought that if she didn’t admit it to herself, she could fool her system into giving her more time. Instead, one of her lungs collapsed as she left the therapist’s office.

“I came back two days later on a bus. I hadn’t seen her in two months and when I tried to find her in the hospital ward, I couldn’t. I had to check the names on the ends of the beds because she had changed so much. She lasted six weeks after that. Toward the end, she became lucid, even with the painkillers. It happens a lot, I believe. It can fool you into thinking they’re getting better. It’s like the cancer’s small joke. She was trying to draw a picture of the hospital the night before she died, so she would know where she was going when it was time to leave.”

I sipped some water. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know why all those things should have come back to me.”

Rachel smiled and I felt her hand tighten again on mine.

“And your grandfather?”

“He died eight years ago. He left me his house in Maine, the one I’m trying to fix up.” I noticed that she didn’t ask me about my father. I guessed that she knew all there was to know.

Later, we walked slowly back through the crowds, the music from the bars blending together into one blast of sound in which familiar tunes could sometimes be identified. When we came to the door of her room we held each other for a while, then kissed softly, her hand on my cheek, before we said good night.

Despite Remarr and Joe Bones and my exchanges with Woolrich, I slept peacefully that night, my hand still holding the specter of her own.

39

IT WAS A COOL, clear morning and the sound of the St. Charles streetcar carried on the air as I ran. A wedding limousine passed me on its way to the cathedral, white ribbons rippling on its hood. I jogged west along North Rampart as far as Perdido, then back through the Quarter along Chartres. The heat was intense, like running with my face in a warm, damp towel. My lungs struggled to pull in the air and my system rebelled, struggling to reject it, but still I ran.

I was used to training three or four times each week, alternating circuits for a month or so with a split bodybuilding workout. After a few days outside my training regimen I felt bloated and out of condition, as if my system was full of toxins. Given the choice between exercise and colon cleansers, I opted for exercise as the less uncomfortable option.

Back at the Flaisance I showered and changed the dressing on my wounded shoulder; it still ached a little, but the wounds were closing. Finally, I left a batch of clothes at the local laundry, since I hadn’t figured on staying quite so long in New Orleans and my underwear selection was becoming pretty limited.

Stacey Byron’s number was in the phone book-she hadn’t reverted to her maiden name, at least not as far as the phone company was concerned-so Angel and Louis volunteered to take a trip to Baton Rouge and see what they could find out from her, or about her. Woolrich wouldn’t be pleased, but if he wanted her left in peace then he shouldn’t have said anything at all.

Rachel e-mailed details of the kind of illustrations she was seeking to two of her research students at Columbia and Father Eric Ward, a retired professor in Boston who had lectured at Loyola in New Orleans on Renaissance culture. Instead of hanging around waiting for a response, she decided to come with me to Metairie, where David Fontenot was due to be buried that morning.

We were silent as we drove. The subject of our growing intimacy and what it might imply had not come up between us, but it seemed that we were both acutely aware of it. I could see something of it in Rachel’s eyes when she looked at me. I thought that she could probably see the same in mine.

“So what else do you want to know about me?” she asked.

“I guess I don’t know too much about your personal life.”

“Apart from the fact that I’m beautiful and brilliant.”

“Apart from that,” I admitted.

“By personal, do you mean sexual?”

“It’s a euphemism. I don’t want to seem pushy. If it makes you happier you can start with your age, since you didn’t tell me last night. The rest will seem easy by comparison.”

She gave me a twisted grin and the finger. I chose to ignore the finger.

“I’m thirty-three but I admit to thirty, if the lighting is right. I have a cat and a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side, but no one to share it with currently. I do step aerobics three times a week and I like Chinese food, soul music, and cream ale. My last relationship ended six months ago and I think my hymen may be growing back.”

I arched an eyebrow at her and she laughed. “You do look shocked,” she said. “You need to get out more.”

“Sounds like you do, too. Who was the guy?”

“A stockbroker. We’d been seeing each other for over a year and we agreed to live together on a test basis. He had a one-bed, I had a two-bed, so he moved in with me and we used the second bedroom as a shared study.”

“Sounds idyllic.”

“It was. For about a week. It turned out that he couldn’t stand the cat, he hated sharing a bed with me because he said I kept him awake by turning over all the time, and all my clothes started to smell of his cigarettes. That clinched it. Everything stank: the furniture, the bed, the walls, the food, the toilet paper, even the cat. Then he came home one evening, told me he was in love with his secretary, and moved to Seattle with her three months later.”

“ Seattle ’s nice, I hear.”

“Fuck Seattle. I hope it falls into the sea.”

“At least you’re not bitter.”

“Very funny.” She looked out of her window for a while and I felt an urge to reach out and touch her, an urge enhanced by what she said next. “I still feel reluctant to ask you too many questions,” she said, gently. “After what happened.”

“I know.” Slowly, I extended my right hand and touched her lightly on the cheek. Her skin was smooth and slightly moist. She leaned her head toward me, increasing the pressure against my hand, and then we were pulling up outside the entrance to the cemetery and the moment was gone.

Branches of the Fontenots had lived in New Orleans since the late nineteenth century, long before the family of Lionel and David had moved to the city, and the Fontenots had a large vault in Metairie Cemetery, the largest of the city’s cemeteries, at Metairie Road and Pontchartrain Boulevard. The cemetery covered one hundred and fifty acres and was built on the old Metairie racecourse. If you were a gambling man, it was an appropriate final resting place, even though it proved that, in the end, the odds are always stacked in favor of the house.

New Orleans cemeteries are strange places. While most cemeteries in big cities are carefully manicured and encourage discreet headstones, the dead citizens of New Orleans rested in ornate tombs and spectacular mausoleums. They reminded me of Père Lachaise in Paris, or the Cities of the Dead in Cairo, where people still lived among the bodies. The resemblance was echoed by the Brunswig tomb at Metairie, which was shaped like a pyramid and guarded by a sphinx.

It was not simply the funerary architecture of Spain and France that had caused the cemeteries to develop the way they did. Most of the city was below sea level, and until the development of modern drainage systems, graves dug in the ground had rapidly filled with water. Aboveground tombs were the natural solution.

The Fontenot funeral had already entered the cemetery when we arrived. I parked away from the main body of vehicles and we walked past the two police cruisers at the gate, their occupants’ eyes masked by shades. We followed the stragglers past the four statues representing Faith, Hope, Charity, and Memory, at the base of the long Moriarity tomb, until we came to a Greek Revival tomb marked with a pair of Doric columns. FONTENOT was inscribed on the lintel above the door.

It was impossible to tell how many Fontenots had come to rest in the family vault. The tradition in New Orleans was to leave the body for a year and a day, after which the vault was reopened, the remains moved to the back, and the rotting casket removed to make way for the next occupant. A lot of the vaults in Metairie were pretty crowded by this point.

The wrought iron gate, inlaid with the heads of angels, stood open and the small party of mourners had surrounded the vault in a semicircle. A man I guessed to be Lionel Fontenot towered above them. He was wearing a black, single-breasted suit and a thick black tie. His face had been weathered to a reddish brown, and deep lines etched his forehead and snaked out from the corners of his eyes. His hair was dark but streaked with gray at the temples. He was a big man, certainly six-three at least and weighing close to two hundred and forty pounds, maybe two-fifty. His suit seemed to struggle to contain him.

Beyond the mourners, ranged at intervals around the vaults and tombs, or standing beneath trees scanning the cemetery, were four hard-faced men in dark jackets and trousers. Their pistols caused the jackets to bulge slightly. A fifth man, a dark overcoat hanging loosely on his shoulders, turned at an old cypress and I caught a glimpse of the tell-tale sights of an M16-based submachine gun concealed beneath its folds. Two others stood at either side of Lionel Fontenot. The big man wasn’t taking any chances.

The mourners, both black and white, young white men in snappy black suits, old black women wearing black dresses gilded with lace at the neckline, grew silent as the priest began to read the rites of the dead from a tattered prayer book with gold-edged pages. There was no wind to carry away his words and they hung in the air around us, reverberating from the surrounding tombs like the voices of the dead themselves.

“Our Father, who art in heaven…”

The pallbearers moved forward, struggling awkwardly to fit the casket through the narrow entrance to the vault. As it was placed inside, a pair of New Orleans policemen appeared between two round vaults about eighty feet west of the funeral party. Two more emerged from the east and a third pair moved slowly down past a tree to the north. Rachel followed my glance.

“An escort?”

“Maybe.”

“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth…”

I felt uneasy. They could have been sent to ensure that Joe Bones wasn’t tempted to disturb the mourners, but something was wrong. I didn’t like the way they moved. They looked uncomfortable in the uniforms, as if their shirt collars were too tight and their shoes pinched.

“Forgive us our trespasses…”

Fontenot’s men had spotted them too, but they didn’t look too concerned. The policemen’s arms hung loosely by their sides and their guns remained in their holsters. They were about thirty feet away from us when something warm splashed my face. An elderly moonfaced woman in a tight black dress, who had been sobbing quietly beside me, spun sideways and tumbled to the ground, a dark hole in her temple and a damp glistening in her hair. A chip of marble flew from the vault, the area around it stained a vivid red. The sound of the shot came almost simultaneously, a dull subdued noise like a fist hitting a punching bag.

“But deliver us from evil…”

It took the mourners a few seconds to realize what was happening. They looked dumbly at the fallen woman, a pool of blood already forming around her head as I pushed Rachel into the space between two vaults, shielding her with my body. Someone screamed and the crowd began to scatter as more bullets came, whining off the marble and stone. I could see Lionel Fontenot’s bodyguards rush to protect him, pushing him to the ground as the bullets bounced from the tomb and rattled its iron gate.

Rachel covered her head with her arms and crouched to try to make herself a smaller target. Over my shoulder, I saw the two cops to the north separate and pick up machine pistols concealed in the bushes at either side of the avenue. They were Steyrs, fitted with sound suppressors: Joe Bones’s men. I saw a woman try to run for the cover of the out-spread wings of a stone angel, her dark coat whipping around her bare legs. The coat puffed twice at the shoulder and she sprawled face forward on the ground, her hands outstretched. She tried to drag herself forward but her coat puffed again and she was gone.

Now there were pistol shots and the rattle of a semiautomatic as Fontenot’s men returned fire. I drew my own Smith & Wesson and joined Rachel as a uniformed figure appeared in the gap between the tombs, the Steyr held in a two-handed grip. I shot him in the face and he crumpled to the ground.

“But they’re cops!” said Rachel, her voice almost drowned by the exchange of fire around us.

I reached out and pushed her down further. “They’re Joe Bones’s men. They’re here to take out Lionel Fontenot.” But it was more than that: Joe Bones wanted to sow chaos and to reap blood and fear and death from the consequences. He didn’t simply want Lionel Fontenot dead. He also wanted others to die-women, children, Lionel’s family, his associates-and for those left alive to remember what had taken place and to fear Joe Bones more because of it. He wanted to break the Fontenots and he would do it here, beside the vault where they had buried generations of their dead. This was the action of a man who had moved beyond reason and passed into a dark, flame-lit place, a place that blinded his vision with blood.

Behind me, there was a scuffling, tumbling sound and one of Fontenot’s men, the overcoated man with the semi-automatic, fell to his knees beside Rachel. Blood bubbled from his mouth and I heard her scream as he fell forward, his head coming to rest by her feet. The M16 lay on the grass beside him. I reached for it but Rachel got to it first, a deep, unquenchable instinct for survival now guiding her actions. Her mouth and eyes were wide as she fired a burst over the prone frame of the bodyguard.

I flung myself to the end of the tomb and aimed in the same direction, but Joe Bones’s man was already down. He lay on his back, his left leg spasming and a bloody pattern etched across his chest. Rachel’s hands were shaking as the adrenaline coursed through her system. The M16 began to fall from her fingers. Its strap became entangled in her arm and she shook herself furiously to release it. Behind her, I could see mourners running low through the avenues of tombs. Two white women dragged a young black man by his arms over the grass. The belly of his white shirt was smeared with blood.

I figured that there must have been a fourth set of Joe Bones’s men who approached from the south and fired the first shots. At least three were down: the two killed by Rachel and me and a third who lay sprawled by the old cypress. Fontenot’s man had taken one of them out before he was hit himself.

I helped Rachel to her feet and moved her quickly to a grimy vault with a corroded gate. I struck at the lock with the butt of the M16 and it gave instantly. She slipped inside and I handed her my Smith & Wesson and told her to stay there until I came back for her. Then, gripping the M16, I ran east past the back of the Fontenot tomb, using the other vaults as cover. I didn’t know how many shots were left in the M16. The selector switch was set for three-round bursts. Depending on the magazine capacity, I might have anything between ten and twenty rounds left.

I had almost reached a monument topped by the figure of a sleeping child when something hit me on the back of the head and I stumbled forward, the M16 slipping from my grasp. Someone kicked me hard in the kidneys, the pain lancing through my body as far as the shoulder. I was kicked again in the stomach, which forced me on to my back. I looked up to see Ricky standing above me, the reptilian coils of his hair and his small stature at odds with the NOPD uniform. He had lost his hat and the side of his face was cut slightly where he had been hit by splinters of stone. The muzzle of his Steyr pointed at my chest.

I tried to swallow but my throat seemed to have constricted. I was conscious of the feel of the grass beneath my hands and the glorious pain in my side, sensations of life and existence and survival. Ricky raised the Steyr to point it at my head.

“Joe Bones says hello,” he said. His finger tightened on the trigger in the same instant as his head jerked back, his stomach thrusting forward and his back arching. A burst of fire from the Steyr raked the grass beside my head as Ricky fell to his knees and then toppled sideways, his body lying prone across my left leg. There was a jagged red hole in the back of his shirt.

Behind him, Lionel Fontenot stood in a marksman’s stance, the pistol in his hand slowly coming down. There was blood on his left hand and a bullet hole in the upper left arm of his suit. The two bodyguards who had stood beside him at the cemetery walked quickly from the direction of the Fontenot tomb. They glanced at me, then turned their attention back to Fontenot. I could hear the sound of sirens approaching from the west.

“One got away, Lionel,” said one. “The rest are dead.”

“What about our people?”

“Three dead, at least. More injured.”

Beside me, Ricky stirred slightly and his hand moved feebly. I could feel his body move against my leg. Lionel Fontenot walked over and stood above him for a moment before shooting him once in the back of the head. He looked at me curiously once more, then picked up the M16 and tossed it to one of his men.

“Now go help the wounded,” he said. He cradled his injured left arm with his right hand and walked back toward the Fontenot tomb.

My rib ached as I returned to where I had left Rachel, after kicking Ricky’s corpse from my leg. I approached carefully, conscious of the Smith & Wesson I had left with her. When I reached the tomb, Rachel was gone.

I found her about fifty yards away, crouching beside the body of a young girl who was barely beyond her teens. As I approached, Rachel reached for the gun by her side and spun toward me.

“Hey, it’s me. You okay?”

She nodded and returned the gun to its resting place. I noticed that she had kept her hand pressed on the young girl’s stomach for the entire exchange.

“How is she?” I asked, but as I looked over her shoulder, I knew the answer. The blood oozing from the gunshot wound was almost black. Liver shot. The girl, shivering uncontrollably, her teeth gritted in agony, was not going to live. Around us, mourners were emerging from hiding, some sobbing, some trembling with shock. I saw two of Lionel Fontenot’s men running toward us, both with pistols, and I took hold of Rachel’s arm.

“We have to go. We can’t afford to wait for the cops to arrive.”

“I’m staying. I’m not leaving her.”

“Rachel.” She looked at me. I held her gaze and we shared our knowledge of the girl’s impending death. “We can’t stay.”

The two Fontenots were beside us now. One of them, younger than the other, dropped to his knee beside the girl and took her hand. She gripped it tightly and he whispered her name. “Clara,” he said. “Hold on, Clara, hold on.”

“Please, Rachel,” I repeated.

She took the younger man’s hand and pressed it against Clara’s stomach. The girl cried out as the pressure was reapplied.

“Keep your hand there,” hissed Rachel. “Don’t take it away until the medics get here.”

She picked up the gun and handed it to me. I took it from her, slipped the safety, and put it back in my holster. We made our way from the focus of the mayhem, until the shouting had diminished, then I stopped and she reached out and held me tightly. I cradled her in my arms and kissed the top of her head and breathed in the scent of her. She squeezed me and I gasped as the pain in my ribs increased dramatically.

Rachel pulled back quickly. “Are you hurt?”

“I took a kick, nothing else.” I held her face in my hands. “You did all that you could for her.”

She nodded but her mouth trembled. The girl had an importance to her that went beyond the simple duty to save her life. “I killed that man,” she said.

“He would have killed us both. You had no choice. If you hadn’t done it, you’d be dead. Maybe I’d be dead too.” It was true, but it wasn’t enough, not yet. I held her tightly as she cried, the pain in my side inconsequential beside her own suffering.

40

I HAD NOT THOUGHT of Daddy Helms in many years, not until I spoke of him to Rachel the previous night and recalled the part he played in my absence during my mother’s lingering death.

Daddy Helms was the ugliest man I had ever seen. He ran most of Portland from the late sixties to the early eighties, building up a modest empire that had started with Daddy Helms boosting liquor warehouses and moved on to take in the sale of drugs over three states.

Daddy Helms weighed over three hundred pounds and suffered from a skin ailment that had left him with raised bumps all over his body, but most visible on his face and hands. They were a deep red color and formed a kind of scaly skin over his features, blurring them so that the observer always seemed to be seeing Daddy Helms through a red mist. He wore three-piece suits and Panama hats and always smoked Winston Churchill cigars, so you smelled Daddy Helms before you saw him. If you were smart enough, this usually gave you just enough time to be somewhere else before he arrived.

Daddy Helms was mean, but he was also a freak. If he had been less intelligent, less bitter, and less inclined toward violence, he would probably have ended up living in a little house in the woods of Maine and selling Christmas trees door-to-door to sympathetic citizens. Instead, his ugliness seemed to be an outward manifestation of some deeper spiritual and moral blight within himself, a corruption that made you think that Daddy Helms’s skin might not be the worst thing about him. There was a rage inside him, a fury at the world and its ways.

My grandfather, who had known Daddy Helms since he was a young boy and was generally a man who empathized with those around him, even the criminals he was forced to arrest when he served as a sheriff’s deputy, could see nothing but evil in Daddy Helms. “I used to think maybe it was his ugliness that made him what he is,” he said once, “that the way he behaves is because of the way he looks, that he’s finding a way to strike back at the world he sees around him.” He was sitting on the porch of the house that he shared with my grandmother, my mother, and me, the house in which we had all lived since my father’s death. My grandfather’s basset hound, Doc-named after the country singer Doc Watson for no reason other than that my grandfather liked his rendition of the song “ Alberta ”-lay curled at his feet, his ribs expanding in deep sleep and small yelps occasionally erupting from his jowls as he enjoyed dog dreams.

My grandfather took a sip of coffee from a blue tin mug and then laid it down by his feet. Doc stirred slightly, opened one bleary eye to make sure he wasn’t missing anything interesting, and then went back to his dreams.

“But Daddy Helms isn’t like that,” he continued. “Daddy Helms just has something wrong with him, something I can’t figure. Only thing I wonder is what he might have made of himself if he weren’t so damn ugly. I reckon he could have been the president of the United States, if he’d wanted to be and if people could have beared to look at him, ’cept he would’ve been more like Joe Stalin than John Kennedy. You oughta have stayed outta his way, boy. You learned a hard lesson yesterday, a hard lesson at the hands of a hard man.”

I had come from New York with the idea that I was a tough guy, that I was smarter and faster and, if it came down to it, harder than those I would come up against in the Maine boondocks. I was wrong. Daddy Helms taught me that.

Clarence Johns, a kid who lived with his drunk father near Maine Mall Road, learned that lesson too. Clarence was amiable but dumb, a natural sidekick. We had been hanging out together for about a year, firing off his air rifle on lazy summer afternoons, drinking beers stolen from his old man’s stash. We were bored and we let everybody know it, even Daddy Helms.

He had bought an old, run-down bar on Congress Street and was slowly working to transform it into what he imagined would be a pretty high-class establishment. This was before the refurbishment of the port area, before the arrival of the T-shirt stores, the craft shops, the art house cinema, and the bars that serve free nibbles to the tourist crowd between five and seven. Maybe Daddy Helms had a vision of what was to come, for he replaced all of the old windows in the bar, put a new roof on the place, and bought up furnishings from some old Belfast church that had been deconsecrated.

One Sunday afternoon, when Clarence and I were feeling particularly at odds with the world, we sat on the wall at the back of Daddy Helms’s half-finished bar and broke just about every goddamned window in the place, flinging stones with pinpoint accuracy at the new panes. Eventually, we found an old abandoned septic tank, and, in a final act of vandalism, we hoisted it through the large arched window at the back of the premises, which Daddy Helms had intended would span the bar itself like a fan.

I didn’t see Clarence for a few days after that and thought nothing of the consequences until one night, as we walked down St. John with an illicitly bought six-pack of beer, three of Daddy Helms’s men caught us and dragged us toward a black Cadillac Eldorado. They cuffed our hands and put duct tape over our mouths and tied dirty rags over our eyes, then dumped us in the trunk and closed it. Clarence Johns and I lay side by side as we were carried away and I was conscious of the sour, unwashed smell from him, until I realized that I probably smelled the same.

But there were other smells in that trunk beyond oil and rags and the sweat of two teenage boys. It smelled of human excrement and urine, of vomit and bile. It smelled of the fear of impending death and I knew, even then, that a lot of people had been brought for rides in that Cadillac.

Time seemed to fade away in the blackness of the car, so that I couldn’t tell how far we had traveled until it ground to a halt. The trunk was opened and I could hear waves crashing to my left and could taste the salt in the air. We were hauled from the trunk and dragged through bushes and over stones. I could feel sand beneath my feet, and, beside me, I heard Clarence Johns start to whimper, or maybe it was my own whimperings I heard. Then we were thrown facedown on the sand and there were hands at my clothes, my shoes. My shirt was ripped from me and I was stripped from the waist down, kicking frantically at the unseen figures around me until someone punched me hard with his knuckles in the small of the back and I stopped kicking. The rag was pulled away from my eyes and I looked up to see Daddy Helms standing above me. Behind him, I could see the silhouette of a large building: the Black Point Inn. We were on Western Beach at Prouts Neck, part of Scarborough itself. If I had been able to turn, I would have seen the lights of Old Orchard Beach, but I was not able to turn.

Daddy Helms held the butt of his cigar in his deformed hand and smiled at me. It was a smile like light flashing on a blade. He wore a white three-piece suit, a gold watch chain snaking across his vest, and a red-and-white spotted bow tie arranged neatly at the collar of his white cotton shirt. Beside me, Clarence Johns’s shoes scuffled in the sand as he tried to gain enough purchase to raise himself up, but one of Daddy Helms’s men, a blond-haired savage called Tiger Martin, placed the sole of his foot on Clarence’s chest and forced him back on to the sand. Clarence, I noticed, was not naked.

“You Bob Warren’s grandson?” Daddy Helms asked after a while. I nodded. I thought I was going to choke. My nostrils were filled with sand and I couldn’t seem to get enough air into my lungs.

“You know who I am?” asked Daddy Helms, still looking at me.

I nodded again.

“But you can’t know who I am, boy. You knew me, you wouldn’ta done what you did to my place. ‘Less you’re a fool, that is, and that’s worse than not knowin’.”

He turned his attention briefly to Clarence, but he didn’t say anything to him. I thought I caught a flash of pity in his eyes as he looked at Clarence. Clarence was dumb, there was no doubt about that. For a brief instant, I seemed to be looking at Clarence with new eyes, as if he alone was not part of Daddy Helms’s gang and all five of us were about to do something terrible to him. But I was not with Daddy Helms and the thought of what was about to happen brought me back again. I felt the sand beneath my skin and I watched as Tiger Martin came forward, carrying a heavy-looking black garbage bag in his arms. He looked to Daddy Helms, Daddy Helms nodded, and then the bag was tipped upside down and the contents poured over my body.

It was earth, but something else too: I sensed thousands of small legs moving on me, crawling through the hairs on my legs and groin, exploring the crevasses of my body like tiny lovers. I felt them on my tightly closed eyes and shook my head hard to clear them away. Then the biting started, tiny pinpoints of pain on my arms, my eyelids, my legs, even my penis, as the fire ants began to attack. I felt them crawling into my nostrils, and then the biting started there as well. I twisted and writhed, rubbing myself on the sand in an effort to kill as many of them as I could, but it was like trying to remove the sand itself, grain by grain. I kicked and spun and felt tears running down my cheeks and then, just as it seemed that I couldn’t take any more, I felt a gloved hand on my ankle and I was dragged through the sand toward the surf. My wrists were freed and I plunged into the water, ripping the tape from my mouth, ignoring the pain as it tore my lips in my desire to rub and scratch myself. I submerged my head as the waves crashed above me, and still it seemed that I felt threadlike legs moving on me and felt the final bites of the insects before they drowned. I was shouting in pain and panic and then I was crying too, crying in shame and hurt and anger and fear.

For days afterward, I found the remains of ants in my hair. Some of them were longer than the nail on my middle finger, with barbed pincers that curved forward to embrace the skin. My body was covered in raised bumps, almost an imitation of those of Daddy Helms himself, and the inside of my nose felt tender and swollen.

I pulled myself from the water and staggered onto the sand. Daddy Helms’s men had gone back to the car, leaving only Clarence and me on the beach with Daddy Helms himself. Clarence was untouched. Daddy Helms saw the realization in my face and he smiled as he puffed on his cigar.

“We found your friend last night,” he said. He placed a thick, melted-wax hand on Clarence’s shoulders. Clarence flinched, but he didn’t move. “He told us everything. We didn’t even have to hurt him.”

The pain of betrayal superseded the bites and the itching, the lingering sensation of movement on my skin. I looked at Clarence Johns with new eyes, adult eyes. He stood on the sand, his arms wrapped around his body, shivering. His eyes were filled with a pain that sang out from the depths of his being. I wanted to hate him for what he had done, and Daddy Helms wanted me to hate him, but instead I felt only a deep emptiness and a kind of pity.

And I felt a kind of pity, too, for Daddy Helms, with his ravaged skin and his mounds and folds of heavy flesh, forced to visit this punishment on two young men because of some broken glass, punishing them not only physically but by severing the bonds of their friendship.

“You learned two lessons here tonight, boy. You learned not to fuck with me, ever, and you learned something about friendship. In the end, the only friend you got is yourself, ’cause all the others, they’ll let you down in the end. We all stand alone, in the end.” Then he turned and waddled through the marram and dunes, back to his car.

They left us to walk back to Route 1, my clothes torn and soaked through from the seawater. We said nothing to each other, not even when we parted at the gate to my grandfather’s property and Clarence headed off into the night, his cheap plastic shoes slapping on the road. We didn’t hang out together after that and I largely forgot Clarence until he died in a failed robbery attempt at a computer warehouse on the outskirts of Austin twelve years later. Clarence was working as a security guard. He was shot by the raiders as he tried to defend a consignment of PCs.

When I entered my grandfather’s house I took some antiseptic from the medicine cabinet, then stripped and stood in the bath, rubbing the liquid into the bites. It stung. When I had finished, I sat in the empty bath and wept, and that was where my grandfather found me. He said nothing for a while, then disappeared and came back with a red bowl containing a paste made from baking soda and water. He rubbed it painstakingly across my shoulders and chest, my legs and arms, then poured a little into my hand so I could rub it into my groin. He wrapped me in a white cotton sheet and sat me down in a chair in the kitchen, before pouring us each a large glass of brandy. It was Remy Martin, I remember, XO, the good stuff. It took me some time to finish it, but neither of us spoke a word. As I stood to go to bed, he patted me lightly on the head.

“A hard man,” repeated my grandfather, draining the last of his coffee. He stood and the dog rose with him.

“You want to walk the dog with me?”

I declined. He shrugged his shoulders and I watched him as he walked down the porch steps, the dog already running ahead of him, barking and sniffing and looking back to make sure the old man was following, then running on farther again.

Daddy Helms died two years later of stomach cancer. When he died, it was estimated that he had been involved, directly or indirectly, with over forty killings, some of them as far south as Florida. There was no more than a handful of people at his funeral.

I thought of Daddy Helms again as Rachel and I made our way from the killings in Metairie. I don’t know why. Maybe I felt there was something of his rage in Joe Bonanno, a hatred of the world that stemmed from something rotten inside him. I remembered my grandfather, I remembered Daddy Helms, and I recalled the lessons they had tried to teach me, lessons that I still had not yet fully learned.

41

OUTSIDE THE MAIN cemetery gate, the New Orleans police were corralling witnesses and clearing the way for the injured to be carried to waiting ambulances. TV crews from WWDL and WDSU were trying to talk with survivors. I stayed close to one of Lionel Fontenot’s men, the one who had been entrusted with the care of the M16, as we approached the gates at an angle. We followed him until he arrived at a portion of ruptured fencing by the highway, then made his way through it to a waiting Lincoln. As he drove away, Rachel and I climbed over the fence and walked back toward our car, unspeaking, approaching it from the west. It was parked away from the main center of activity and we were able to slip off without attracting any attention.

“How did that happen?” asked Rachel in a quiet voice as we drove back into the city. “There should have been police. There should have been someone to stop them…” Her voice trailed away and she remained silent as we drove back to the Quarter, her hands clasped across her upper body. I didn’t disturb her.

One of a number of things had happened. Someone in charge could have screwed up by assigning insufficient police to Metairie, believing that Joe Bones would never try to take out Lionel Fontenot at his brother’s funeral in front of witnesses. The guns had been stashed either late the previous night or early that morning, and the cemetery had not been searched. It could also have been the case that Lionel warned off the cops, just as he had warned off the media, anxious not to turn his brother’s funeral into a circus. The other possibility was that Joe Bones had paid off or threatened some or all of the cops at Metairie and they had turned their backs while his men went about their business.

When we reached the hotel, I took Rachel to my room-I didn’t want her surrounded by the images she had pinned to the walls of her own room. She went straight to the bathroom and closed the door behind her. I could hear the sound of the shower starting up. She stayed there for a long time.

When she eventually emerged, she had a big white bath towel draped around her from her breasts to her knees and was drying her hair with a smaller towel. Her eyes were red as she looked at me, then her chin trembled and she began to cry again. I held her, kissing the top of her head, then her forehead, her cheeks, her lips. Her mouth was warm as she responded to the kiss, her tongue darting around my teeth and entwining with my own tongue. I pressed hard against her, pulling the towel from her as I did. Her fingers fumbled at my belt and my zipper, then reached inside and held me tightly. Her other hand worked at the buttons on my shirt as she kissed my neck and ran her tongue across my chest and around my nipples.

I kicked off my shoes and leaned over awkwardly to try to take off my socks. Damn socks. She smiled a little as I almost fell over while removing the left one and then I was on top of her as she pushed down my pants and shorts.

Her breasts were small, her hips slightly wide, the small triangle of hair at their center a deep, fiery red. She tasted sweet. When she came, her back arched high and her legs wrapped around my thighs, I felt like I had never been held so tightly, or loved so hard.

Afterward, she slept. I slipped from the bed, put on a T-shirt and jeans, and took the key to her room from her bag. I walked barefoot down the gallery to the room, closed the door behind me, and stood for a time before the pictures on the wall. Rachel had bought a large draftsman’s pad on which to work out patterns and ideas. I took two sheets from it, taped them together, and added them to the images on the wall. Then, surrounded by pictures of the anatomized Marsyas and photocopies of the crime-scene photos of Tante Marie and Tee Jean, I took a felt-tip and began to write.

In one corner I wrote the names of Jennifer and Susan, a kind of pang of regret and guilt hitting me as I wrote Susan’s name. I tried to put it from my mind and continued writing. In another corner I put the names of Tante Marie, Tee Jean, and slightly to one side, Florence. In the third corner I wrote Remarr’s name and in the fourth I placed a question mark and the word “girl” beside it. In the center I wrote “Trav Man” and then, like a child drawing a star, I added a series of lines emanating from the center and tried to write down all that I knew, or thought I knew, about the killer.

When I had finished, the list included a voice synthesis program or unit; the Book of Enoch; a knowledge of Greek myths / early medical texts; a knowledge of police procedures and activities, based on what Rachel had said following the deaths of Jennifer and Susan, the fact that he had known that the feds were monitoring my cell phone, and the killing of Remarr. Initially I thought that if he had seen Remarr at the Aguillard house, then Remarr would have died there and then, but I reconsidered on the basis that the Traveling Man would have been reluctant to remain at the scene or to engage an alert Remarr, and had decided to wait for another chance. The other option was that the killer had found out about the fingerprint and, somehow, the killer had also later found Remarr.

I added other elements based on standard assumptions: white, male killer, probably somewhere between his twenties and forties; a Louisiana base from which to strike at Remarr and the Aguillards; a change of clothing, or coveralls worn over his own clothes, to protect him from the blood; and access to and knowledge of ketamine.

I drew another line from Trav Man to the Aguillards, since the killer knew that Tante Marie had been talking, and a second line connecting him to Remarr. I added a dotted line to Jennifer and Susan, and wrote Edward Byron’s name with a question mark beside it. Then, on impulse, I added a third dotted line and wrote David Fontenot’s name between those of the Aguillards and Remarr, based only on the Honey Island connection and the possibility that, if the Traveling Man had lured him to Honey Island and tipped off Joe Bones that David Fontenot would be there, then the killer was someone known to the Fontenot family. Finally, I wrote Edward Byron’s name on a separate sheet and pinned it beside the main diagram.

I sat on the edge of Rachel’s bed and breathed in the scent of her in the room as I looked at what I had written, shifting the pieces around in my head to see if they would match up anywhere. They didn’t, but I made one more addition before I returned to my own room to wait for Angel and Louis to return from Baton Rouge: I drew a light line between David Fontenot’s name and the question mark representing the girl in the swamp. I didn’t know it then, but by drawing that line I had made the first significant leap into the world of the Traveling Man.

I returned to my own room and sat by the balcony, watching Rachel in her uneasy sleep. Her eyelids moved rapidly and once or twice she let out small groans and made pushing movements with her hands, her feet scrambling beneath the blankets. I heard Angel and Louis before I saw them, Angel’s voice raised in what seemed to be anger, Louis responding in measured tones with a hint of mockery beneath them.

Before they could knock, I opened the door and indicated that we should talk in their room. They hadn’t heard about the shootings at Metairie since, according to Angel, they hadn’t been listening to the radio in the rental car. His face was red as he spoke and his lips were pale. I don’t think that I had ever seen him so angry.

In their room, the bickering started again. Stacey Byron, a bottle blonde in her early forties who had kept her figure remarkably well for a woman of her age, had apparently come on to Louis in the course of their interrogation of her. Louis had, in a manner, responded.

“I was pumping her for information,” he explained, his mouth twitching in amusement as he looked sideways at Angel. Angel was unimpressed.

“Sure you wanted to pump her, but the only information you were after was her bra size and the dimensions of her ass,” he spat. Louis rolled his eyes in exaggerated bafflement and I thought, for a moment, that Angel was going to strike him. His fists bunched and he moved forward slightly before he managed to restrain himself.

I felt sorry for Angel. While I didn’t believe there was anything in Louis’s courting of Edward Byron’s wife, beyond the natural response of any individual to the favorable attentions of another and Louis’s belief that, by leading her on, she might give away something about her ex-husband, I knew how much Louis mattered to Angel. Angel’s history was murky, Louis’s more so, but I remembered things about Angel, things that I sometimes felt Louis forgot.

When Angel was sent down to Rikers Island, he attracted the attentions of a man named William Vance. Vance had killed a Korean shopkeeper in the course of a botched robbery in Brooklyn and that was how he ended up in Rikers, but there were other things suspected of him: that he had raped and killed an elderly woman in Utica, mutilating her before she died; that he may have been linked to a similar killing in Delaware. There was no proof, other than rumor and conjecture, but when the opportunity came to put Vance away for the killing of the Korean, the DA, to his credit, seized it.

And for some reason, Vance decided that he wanted Angel dead. I heard that Angel had dissed him when Vance had tried to get it on with him, that he had knocked out one of Vance’s teeth in the showers. But there was no telling with a man like Vance: the workings of his mind were obscure and confused by hatred and strange, bitter longing. Now Vance didn’t just want to rape Angel: he wanted to kill him, and kill him slowly. Angel had pulled three to five. After one week in Rikers, the odds of him surviving his first month had plummeted.

Angel had no friends on the inside and fewer still outside, so he called me. I knew that it pained him to do so. He was proud and I think that, under ordinary circumstances, he would have tried to work out his problems for himself. But William Vance, with his tattoos of bloodied knives on his arms and a spider’s web over his chest, was far from ordinary.

I did what I could. I pulled Vance’s files and copied the transcripts of his interrogation over the Utica killing and a number of similar incidents. I copied details of the evidence assembled against him and the account of an eyewitness who later retracted after Vance made a call and threatened to fuck her and her children to death if she gave evidence against him. Then I took a trip to Rikers.

I spoke to Vance through a transparent screen. He had added an india ink tattoo of a tear below his left eye, bringing the total number of tattooed tears to three, each one representing a life taken. A spider’s silhouette was visible at the base of his neck. I spoke to him softly for about ten minutes. I warned him that if anything happened to Angel, anything at all, I would make sure that every con in the place knew that he was only a hair’s breadth away from sexual homicide charges involving old, defenseless women. Vance had five years left to serve before he became eligible for parole. If his fellow inmates found out what he was suspected of doing, there were men who could ensure that he would have to spend those five years in solitary to avoid death. Even then, he would have to check his food every day for powdered glass, would have to pray that a guard’s attention didn’t wander for an instant while he was being escorted to the yard for his hour’s recreation, or while he was being brought to the prison doctor when the stress began to take its toll on his health.

Vance knew all this and yet, two days after we spoke, he tried to castrate Angel with a shank. Only the force of Angel’s heel connecting with Vance’s knee saved him, although Angel still needed twenty stitches across his stomach and thigh after Vance slashed wildly at him as he fell to the ground.

Vance was taken in the shower the next morning. Persons unknown held him down, used a wrench to hold his mouth open, and then pumped water mixed with detergent into his body. The poison destroyed his insides, tearing apart his stomach and almost costing him his life. For the remainder of his life in prison he was a shell of a man, racked by pains in his gut that made him howl in the night. It had taken one telephone call. I live with that too.

After he was released, Angel hooked up with Louis. I’m not even sure how these two solitary creatures met, exactly, but they had now been together for six years. Angel needed Louis, and in his way, Louis needed Angel too, but I sometimes thought that the balance of the relationship hinged on Angel. Men and men, men and women, whatever the permutation, in the end one partner always feels more than the other and that partner usually suffers for it.

It emerged that they hadn’t learned much from Stacey Byron. The cops had been watching the house from the front but Louis and Angel, dressed in the only suit he owned, had come in from the back. Louis had flashed his fitness club membership and his smile as he told Mrs. Byron that they were just conducting a routine search of her garden and they spent the next hour talking to her about her ex-husband, about how often Louis worked out, and in the end, whether or not he’d ever had a white woman. It was at that point that Angel had really started to get annoyed.

“She says she hasn’t seen him in four months,” said Louis. “Says that last time she saw him, he didn’t say much, just asked after her and the kids and took some old clothes from the attic. Seems he had a carrier bag from some drugstore in Opelousas and the feds are concentrating their search there.”

“Does she know why the feds are looking for him?”

“Nope. They told her that he might be able to assist them with information on some unsolved crimes. She ain’t dumb, though, and I fed her a little more to see if she’d bite. She said that he always had an interest in medical affairs; seems he might have had ambitions to be a doctor at one time, although he didn’t have the education to be a tree surgeon.”

“Did you ask her if she thought he could kill?”

“I didn’t have to. Seems he threatened to kill her once, while they were arguing over the terms of the divorce.”

“Did she remember what he said?”

Louis nodded deeply, once.

“Uh-huh. He said he’d tear her fucking face off.”

Angel and Louis parted on bad terms, with Angel retiring to Rachel’s room while Louis sat on the balcony of their room and took in the sounds and smells of New Orleans, not all of them pleasant.

“I was thinking of getting a bite to eat,” he said. “You interested?”

I was surprised. I guessed that he wanted to talk but I had never spent time with Louis without Angel being present as well.

I checked on Rachel. The bed was empty and I could hear the shower running. I knocked gently on the door.

“It’s open,” she said.

When I entered, she had the shower curtain wrapped around her. “Suits you,” I said. “Clear plastic is in this season.”

The sleep hadn’t done her any good. There were dark rings under her eyes and she still looked shaky. She made a halfhearted effort to smile, but it was more like a grimace of pain than anything else.

“You want to go out and eat?”

“I’m not hungry. I’m going to do some work, then take two sleeping pills and try to sleep without dreaming.”

I told her that Louis and I were heading out, then went to tell Angel. I found him flicking through the notes Rachel had made. He motioned to my chart on the bedroom wall. “ Lot of blank spaces on that.”

“I still have one or two details to work out.”

“Like who did it and why.” He gave me a twisted grin.

“Yeah, but I’m trying not to get too hung up on minor problems. You okay?”

He nodded. “I think this whole thing is gettin’ to me, all this…” He waved an arm at the illustrations on the wall.

“Louis and I are heading out to eat. You wanna come?”

“Nah, I’d only be the lemon. You can have him.”

“Thanks. I’ll break the bad news of my sexual awakening to the Swimsuit Illustrated models tomorrow. They’ll be heartbroken. Look after Rachel, will you? This hasn’t been one of her better days.”

“I’ll be right along the hall.”

Louis and I sat in Felix’s Restaurant and Oyster Bar on the corner of Bourbon and Iberville. There weren’t too many tourists there; they tended to gravitate toward the Acme Oyster House across the street, where they served red beans and savory rice in a hollowed-out boat of French bread, or a classier French Quarter joint like Nola. Felix’s was plainer. Tourists don’t care much for plain. After all, they can get plain at home.

Louis ordered an oyster po’boy and doused it in hot sauce, sipping an Abita beer between bites. I had fries and a chicken po’boy, washed down with mineral water.

“Waiter thinks you’re a sissy,” commented Louis as I sipped my water. “The ballet was in town, he’d hit on you for tickets.”

“Shows what he knows,” I replied. “You’re confusing things by not conforming to the stereotype. Maybe you should mince more.”

His mouth twitched and he raised his hand for another Abita. It came quickly. The waiter performed the neat trick of making sure we weren’t left waiting for anything while trying to spend as little time as possible in the vicinity of our table. Other diners chose to take the scenic route to their tables rather than pass too close to us and those forced to sit near us seemed to eat at a slightly faster pace than the rest. Louis had that effect on people. It was as if there was a shell of potential violence around him, and something more: the sense that, if that violence erupted, it would not be the first time that it had done so.

“Your friend Woolrich,” he said as he drained the Abita halfway with one mouthful. “You trust him?”

“I don’t know. He has his own agenda.”

“He’s a fed. They only got their own agendas.” He eyed me over the top of the bottle. “I think, if you were climbing a rock with your friend and you slipped, found yourself dangling on the end of the rope with him at the other end, he’d cut the rope.”

“You’re a cynic.”

His mouth twitched again. “If the dead could speak, they’d call all cynics realists.”

“If the dead could speak, they’d tell us to have more sex while we can.” I picked at my fries. “The feds have anything on you?”

“Suspicions, maybe; nothing more. That’s not really what I’m getting at.”

His eyes were unblinking and there was no warmth in them now. I think that, if he had believed Woolrich was close to him, he would have killed him and it would not have cost him another thought afterward.

“Why is Woolrich helping us?” he asked, eventually.

“I’ve thought about that too,” I said. “I’m not sure. Part of it could be that he empathizes with the need to stay in touch with what’s going on. If he feeds me information, then he can control the extent of my involvement.”

But I knew that wasn’t all. Louis was right. Woolrich had his own agenda. He had depths to him that I only occasionally glimpsed, as when the different shifting colors on the surface of the sea hint at the sharp declivities and deep spaces that lie beneath. He was a hard man to be with in some ways: he conducted his friendship with me on his own terms, and in the time I had known him, months had gone by without any contact from him. He made up for this with a strange loyalty, a sense that, even when he was absent from their lives, he never forgot those closest to him.

But as a fed, Woolrich played hardball. He had progressed to assistant SAC by making collars, by attaching his name to high-profile operations, and by fixing other agents’ wagons when they got in his way. He was intensely ambitious and maybe he saw the Traveling Man as a way of reaching greater heights: SAC, assistant director, a deputy directorship, maybe even to eventually becoming the first agent to be appointed directly to the post of director. The pressure on him was intense, but if Woolrich were to be responsible for bringing an end to the Traveling Man, he would be assured a bright, powerful future within the Bureau.

I had a part to play in this, and Woolrich knew it and felt it strongly enough that he would use whatever friendship existed between us to bring about an end to what was taking place. “I think he’s using me as bait,” I said at last. “And he’s holding the line.”

“How much you think he’s holding back?” Louis finished his beer and smacked his lips appreciatively.

“He’s like an iceberg,” I replied. “We’re only seeing the ten percent above the surface. Whatever the feds know, they’re not sharing it with the local cops and Woolrich sure isn’t sharing it with us. There’s something more going on here, and only Woolrich and maybe a handful of feds are privy to it. You play chess?”

“In my way,” he replied dryly. Somehow, I couldn’t see that way including a standard board.

“This whole thing is like a chess game,” I continued. “Except we only get to see the other player’s move when one of our pieces is taken. The rest of the time, it’s like playing in the dark.”

Louis raised a finger for the check. The waiter looked relieved.

“And our Mr. Byron?”

I shrugged. I felt strangely distant from what was happening. Part of it was because we were players on the periphery of the investigation, but part of it was also because I needed that distance to think. In one way, what had taken place with Rachel that afternoon, and what it meant to my feelings of grief and loss about Susan, had given me some of that distance.

“I don’t know.” We were only beginning to construct a picture of Byron, like a figure at the center of a jigsaw puzzle around which other pieces might interlock. “We’ll work our way toward him. First, I want to find out what Remarr saw the night Tante Marie and Tee Jean were killed. And I want to know why David Fontenot was out at Honey Island alone.”

It was clear now that Lionel Fontenot would move against Joe Bones. Joe Bones knew that too, which was why he had risked an assault at Metairie. Once Lionel was back in his compound, he would be out of the reach of Joe Bones’s men. The next move was Lionel’s.

The check arrived. I paid and Louis left a deliberately overgenerous twenty-dollar tip. The waiter looked at the bill like Andrew Jackson was going to bite his finger when he tried to lift it.

“I think we’re going to have to talk to Lionel Fontenot,” I said as we left. “And Joe Bones.”

Louis actually smiled. “Joe ain’t gonna be too keen on talking to you, seeing as how his boy tried to put you in the ground.”

“I kinda figured that,” I replied. “Could be that Lionel Fontenot might help us out there.”

We walked back to the Flaisance. The streets of New Orleans aren’t the safest in the world but I didn’t think that anyone would bother us.

I was right.

42

I SLEPT LATE the next morning. Rachel had returned to her own room to sleep. When I knocked, her voice sounded harsh with tiredness. She told me she wanted to stay in bed for a while, and when she felt better, she would go out to Loyola again. I asked Angel and Louis to watch out for her, then drove from the Flaisance.

The incident at Metairie had left me shaken, and the prospect of facing Joe Bones again was unappealing. I also felt a crushing sense of guilt for what had happened to Rachel, for what I had drawn her into and for what I had forced her to do. I needed to get out of New Orleans, at least for a short time. I wanted to clear my head, to try to see things from a different angle. I ate a bowl of chicken soup in the Gumbo Shop on St. Peter and then headed out of the city.

Morphy lived about four miles from Cecilia, a few miles northwest of Lafayette. He had bought and was refurbishing a raised plantation home by a small river, a budget version of the classic old Louisiana houses that had been built at the end of the nineteenth century, a blend of French Colonial, West Indian, and European architectural influences.

The house presented a strange spectacle. Its main living quarters were on top of an aboveground basement area, which had once been used for storage and as protection from flooding. This section of the house was brick and Morphy had reworked the arched openings with what looked like hand-carved frames. The living quarters above, which would usually have been weatherboard or plaster-covered, had been replaced with timber slats. A double-pitched roof, which had been partially reslated, extended over the gallery.

I had called ahead and told Angie I was on my way. Morphy had just got home when I arrived. I found him in the yard at the rear of the house, benching two hundred in the evening air.

“What do you think of the house?” he asked as I approached, not even pausing in his reps as he spoke.

“It’s great. Looks like you still have some way to go before it’s finished.”

He grunted with the effort of the final rep as I acted as spotter, slotting the bar back onto its rest. He stood up and stretched, then looked at the back of his house with barely concealed admiration.

“It was built by a Frenchman in eighteen eighty-eight,” he said. “He knew what he was doing. It’s built on an east-west axis, with principal exposure to the south.” He pointed out the lines of the building as he spoke. “He designed it the way the Europeans designed their houses, so that the low angle of the sun in winter would heat the building. Then, in the summer, the sun would only shine on it in the morning and evening. Most American houses aren’t built that way, they just put ’em up whatever way suits ’em, throw a stick in the air and see where it lands. We were spoiled by cheap energy. Then the Arabs came along and hiked up their prices and people had to start thinking again about the layout of their houses.”

He smiled. “Don’t know how much good an east-west house does around here, though. Sun shines all the goddamn time anyway.”

When he had showered, we sat at a table in the kitchen with Angie and talked as she cooked. Angie was almost a foot smaller than her husband, a slim, dark-skinned woman with auburn hair that flowed down her back. She was a junior school teacher, but she did some painting in her spare time. Her canvases, dark, impressionistic pieces set around water and sky, adorned the walls of the house.

Morphy drank a bottle of Breaux Bridge and I had a soda. Angie sipped a glass of white wine as she cooked. She cut four chicken breasts into about sixteen pieces and set them to one side as she set about preparing the roux.

Cajun gumbo is made with roux, a glutinous thickener, as a base. Angie poured peanut oil into a cast iron skillet over a high flame, added in an equal amount of flour, and beat it with a whisk continuously so it wouldn’t burn, gradually turning the roux from blond to beige and through mahogany until it reached a dark chocolate color. Then she took it off the heat and allowed it to cool, still stirring.

While Morphy looked on, I helped her chop the trinity of onion, green pepper, and celery and watched as she sweated them in oil. She added a seasoning of thyme and oregano, paprika and cayenne, onion and garlic salt, then dropped in thick pieces of chorizo. She added the chicken and more spices, until their scent filled the room. After about half an hour, she spooned white rice onto plates and poured the thick rich gumbo over it. We ate in silence, savoring the flavors in our mouths.

When we had washed and dried the dishes, Angie left us and went to bed. Morphy and I sat in the kitchen and I told him about Raymond Aguillard and his belief that he had seen the figure of a girl at Honey Island. I told him of Tante Marie’s dreams and my feeling that, somehow, David Fontenot’s death at Honey Island could be linked to the girl.

Morphy didn’t say anything for a long time. He didn’t sneer at visions of ghosts, or at an old woman’s belief that the voices she heard were real. Instead, all he said was: “You sure you know where this place is?”

I nodded.

“Then we’ll give it a try. I’m free tomorrow, so you better stay here tonight. We got a spare room you can use.” I called Rachel at the Flaisance and told her what I intended to do the next day and where in Honey Island we were likely to be. She said that she would tell Angel and Louis, and that she felt a little better for her sleep. It would take her a long time to get over the death of Joe Bones’s man.

It was early morning, barely ten before seven, when we prepared to leave. Morphy wore heavy steel-toed Caterpillar work boots, old jeans, and a sleeveless sweatshirt over a long-sleeved T-shirt. The sweat was dappled with paint and there were patches of tar on the jeans. His head was freshly shaved and smelled of witch hazel.

While we drank coffee and ate toast on the gallery, Angie came out in a white robe and rubbed her husband’s clean scalp, smirking at him as she took a seat beside him. Morphy acted like it annoyed the hell out of him, but he doted on her every touch. When we rose to go, he kissed her deeply with the fingers of his right hand entwined in her hair. Her body instinctively rose from the chair to meet him, but he pulled away laughing and she reddened. It was only then that I noticed the swelling at her belly: she was no more than five months gone, I guessed. As we walked across the grass at the front of the house, she stood on the gallery, her weight on one hip and a light breeze tugging at her robe, and watched her husband depart.

“Been married long?” I asked, as we walked toward a cypress glade that obscured the view of the house from the road.

“Two years in January. I’m a contented man. Never thought I would be, but that girl changed my life.” There was no embarrassment as he spoke and he acknowledged it with a smile.

“When is the baby due?”

He smiled again. “Late December. Guys held a party for me when they found out, to celebrate the fact that I was shooting live ones.”

An old Ford truck was parked in the glade, with a trailer attached on which a wide, flat-bottomed aluminum boat lay covered in tarpaulin, its engine tilted forward so that it rested on the bed. “Toussaint’s brother dropped it over late last night,” he explained. “Does some hauling on the side.”

“Where’s Toussaint?”

“In bed with food poisoning. He ate some bad shrimp, least that’s how he tells it. Personally, I think he’s just too damn lazy to give up his morning in bed.”

In the back of the truck, beneath some more tarpaulin, were an axe, a chain saw, two lengths of chain, some strong nylon rope, and a cooler. There was also a dry suit and mask, a pair of waterproof flashlights, and two air tanks. Morphy added a flask of coffee, some water, two sticks of French bread, and four chicken breasts coated in K-Paul’s Cajun spices, all contained in a waterproof bag, then climbed into the driver’s seat of the truck and started her up. She belched smoke and rattled a bit, but the engine sounded good and strong. I climbed in beside him and we drove toward Honey Island, a Clifton Chenier tape on the truck’s battered stereo.

We entered the reserve at Slidell, a collection of shopping malls, fast food joints, and Chinese buffets on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain named for the Democratic senator John Slidell. In the 1844 federal election, Slidell arranged for two steamboats to carry a bunch of Irish and German voters from New Orleans to Plaquemines Parish to vote. There was nothing illegal about that; what was illegal was letting them vote at all the other polling stations along the route.

A mist still hung over the water and the trees as we unloaded the boat at the Pearl River ranger station, beside a collection of run-down fishing shacks that floated near the bank. We loaded the chains, rope, chain saw, the diving gear, and the food. In a tree beside us, the early morning sun caught the threads of a huge, intricate web, at the center of which lay, unmoving, a golden orb spider. Then, with the sound of the motor blending with the noise of insects and birds, we moved onto the Pearl.

The banks of the river were lined with high tupelo gum, water birch, willows, and some tall cypress with trumpet creeper vines, their red flowers in bloom, winding up their trunks. Here and there trees were marked with plastic bottles, signs that catfish lines had been sunk. We passed a village of riverside homes, most of them down-at-the-heel, with flat-bottomed pirogues tied up outside them. A blue heron watched us calmly from the branches of a cypress; on a log beneath him, a yellow-bellied turtle lay soaking up the sun.

I still had Raymond Aguillard’s map but it took us two attempts to find the trevasse, the trappers’ channel that he had marked. There was a stand of gum trees at its entrance, their swollen buttresses like the bulbs of flowers, with a sole green ash leaning almost across the gap. Further in, branches weighed down with Spanish moss hung almost to the surface of the water and the air was redolent with the mingled scents of growth and decay. Misshapen tree trunks surrounded by duckweed stood like monuments in the early morning sun. East, I could see the gray dome of a beaver lodge, and as we watched, a snake slithered into the water not five feet from us.

“Diamondback,” said Morphy.

Around us, water dripped from cypress and tupelo, and birdsong echoed in the trees.

“Any chance of ’gators here?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Maybe. Don’t bother people much, though, unless people bother them. There’s easier pickings in the swamps. If you see any while I’m down there, fire a shot to let me know what’s happening.”

The bayou started to narrow until it was barely wide enough to allow the boat passage. I felt the bottom scrape on a tree trunk resting below us. Morphy killed the engine and we used our hands and a pair of wooden paddles to pull ourselves through.

It seemed then that we might somehow have made a mistake in our map reading, because we were faced with a wall of wild rice, the tall, green stalks like blades in the water. There was only one narrow gap visible, big enough for a child to pass through. Morphy shrugged and restarted the engine, aiming us for the gap. I used the paddle to beat back the rice stalks as we moved forward. Something splashed close by us and a dark shape, like a large rat, sliced through the water.

“Nutria,” said Morphy. I could see the big rodent’s nose and whiskers now as it stopped beside a tree trunk and sniffed the air inquisitively. “Taste worse than ’gators. I hear we’re trying to sell their meat to the Chinese since no one else wants to eat it.”

The rice blended into sharp-edged grass that cut at my hands as I worked the paddle, and then the boat was free and we were in a kind of lagoon formed by a gradual accumulation of silt, its banks surrounded mainly by gum and willows that dragged the fingers of their branches in the water. There was some almost firm ground at the eastern edge, near some arrowroot lilies, with wild pig tracks in the dirt, the animals attracted by the promise of the arrowroot at the lilies’ base. Further in, I could see the rotting remains of a T-cutter, probably one of the craft that had originally cut the channel. Its big V-8 engine was gone, and there were holes in its hull.

We tied the boat up at a sole red swamp maple that was almost covered with resurrection fern, waiting for the rains to bring it back to life. Morphy stripped down to a pair of Nike cycling shorts, rubbed himself down with grease, and put the dry suit on. He added the flippers, then strapped on the tank and tested it. “Most of the waters around here are no more than ten, maybe fifteen feet deep, but this place is different,” he said. “You can see it in the way the light reflects on the water. It’s deeper, twenty feet or more.” Leaves, sticks, and logs floated on the water, and insects flitted above the surface. The water looked dark and green.

He washed the mask in the swamp water then turned to me. “Never thought I’d be looking for swamp ghosts on my day off,” he said.

“Raymond Aguillard says he saw the girl here,” I replied. “David Fontenot died up the river. There’s something here. You know what you’re looking for?”

He nodded. “Probably a container of some sort, heavy, sealed.”

Morphy flicked on the flashlight, slipped on his mask, and began sucking bottled air. I tied one end of the climbing rope to his belt and another to the trunk of the maple, yanked it firm, then patted him on the back. He raised a thumb and waded into the water. Two or three yards out, he began to dive and I started to feed the rope out through my hands.

I had had little experience of diving, beyond a few basic lessons taken during a holiday with Susan on the Florida Keys. I didn’t envy Morphy, swimming around in that swamp. During my teens, we went swimming in the Saco River, south of the Portland city limits, during the summer. Long, lean pike dwelt in those waters, vicious things that brought a hint of the primeval with them. When they brushed your bare legs, it made you think of stories you had heard about them biting small children or dragging swimming dogs down to the bottom of the river.

The waters of Honey Island swamp were like another world compared to the Saco. With its glittering snakes and its cowens, the name the Cajuns give to the swamp’s snapping turtles, Honey Island seemed so much more feral than the backwaters of Maine. But there were alligator gar here too, and scaled shortnoses, as well as perch and bass and bowfins. And ’gators.

I thought of these things as Morphy disappeared below the surface of the bayou, but I also thought of the young girl who might have been dumped in these waters, where creatures she couldn’t name bumped and clicked against the side of her tomb while others searched for rust holes through which to get at the rotting meat inside.

Morphy surfaced after five minutes, indicated the short, northeastern bank, and shook his head. Then he submerged again and the line on the ground snaked south as he swam. After another five minutes the rope began to pull out quickly. Morphy broke the surface again, but this time some distance from where the rope entered the water. He swam back to the bank, removed the mask and mouthpiece, and breathed in short gasps as he gestured back toward the southern end of the bayou.

“We got a couple of metal boxes, maybe four feet long, two feet wide, and eighteen inches deep, dumped down there,” he said. “One’s empty, the other’s locked and bolted. Maybe a hundred yards away there’s a bunch of oil barrels marked with red fleurs-de-lys. They belong to the old Brevis Chemical Company, used to operate out of West Baton Rouge until a big fire in eighty-nine put it out of business. That’s it. Nothing else down there.”

I looked out toward the edge of the bayou, where thick roots lay obscured beneath the water.

“Could we pull in the box using the rope?” I asked.

“Could do, but that box is heavy and if we bust it open while hauling it in we’ll destroy whatever’s inside. We’ll have to bring the boat out and try to haul it up.”

It was getting very warm now, although the trees on the bank provided some shade from the sun. Morphy took two bottles of still mineral water from the cooler and we drank them sitting on the bank. Then Morphy and I got into the boat and took it out to his marker.

Twice the box caught on some obstacle on the bottom as I tried to pull it up, and I had to wait for Morphy to signal before I could start hauling it in again. Eventually, the gray metal box broke the surface of the water, Morphy pushing up from beneath before he went back down to tie the marker rope to one of the oil barrels in case we had to search them.

I brought the boat back to the landing and dragged the box up onto the shore. The chain and lock securing it were old and rusted, probably too old to yield anything of any use to us. I took the axe and struck at the rusty lock that held the chain in place. It broke as Morphy walked onto the bank. He knelt beside me, the air tank still on his back and the mask pushed up on his forehead as I pulled at the lid of the box. It was stuck fast. I took the blunt head of the axe and struck upward along the edges until the lid lifted.

Inside was a consignment of breech-loading Springfield.50 caliber rifles and the bones of what seemed to be a small dog. The butts of the rifles had almost rotted but I could still see the letters LNG on the metal butt plates.

“Stolen rifles,” said Morphy, pulling one free and examining it. “Maybe eighteen seventy or eighteen eighty. The authorities probably issued a stolen arms proclamation after these were taken and the thief dumped them or left them there with the intention of coming back.”

He prodded at the dog’s skull with his fingers. “The bones are an indicator of some kind. Pity nobody been seein’ the Hound of the Baskervilles out here, else we’d have the whole mystery cleared up.” He looked at the rifles, then back out toward the oil drums. He sighed, then began to swim out to the marker.

Hauling in the drums was a laborious process. The chain slipped off three times as we tried to pull in the first drum. Morphy came back for a second chain and wrapped it, parcel style, around the drum. The boat almost overturned when I tried to open the barrel while I was still on the water, so we were forced to bring it back to dry land. When we eventually got it to the bank, brown and rusting, it contained only stale oil. The drums had a hole for loading and pouring the oil, but the entire lid could also be pried off. When we opened the second drum it didn’t even contain oil, just some stones that had been used to weigh the barrel down.

By now, Morphy was exhausted. We stopped for a time to eat some of the chicken and bread, and drink some of the coffee. It was now past midday and the heat in the bayou was heavy and draining. After we had rested, I offered to do some of the diving. Morphy didn’t refuse, so I handed him my shoulder holster, then suited up and strapped on the spare tank.

The water was surprisingly cool as I slipped into it. As it reached my chest, it almost took my breath away. The chains were heavy across my shoulder as I guided myself along the marker rope with one hand. When I reached the spot where the rope entered the water, I slipped the flashlight from my belt and dived.

The water was deeper than I expected and very dark, the duckweed above me blocking out the sunlight in patches. At the periphery of my vision, fish twisted and spun. The barrels, of which five remained, all piled in a heap, were gathered around the submerged trunk of an ancient tree, its roots buried deep in the bottom of the bayou. Any boat that might have been using the bayou bank to land on would have avoided the tree, which meant that the barrels were in no danger of being disturbed. The water at the base of the tree was darker than the rest, so that without the flashlight the barrels would have been invisible.

I wrapped the top barrel in chains and yanked once to test its weight. It tumbled from the top of the pile, yanking the rope from my grasp as it headed for the bottom. The water muddied, and dirt and vegetation obscured my vision, and then everything went black as oil began to leak from the drum. I was kicking back to get into clearer water when I heard the dull, echoing sound of a gunshot from above me. For a moment, I thought that Morphy might be in trouble until I remembered what the gunshot was supposed to signal and realized that it was I, not Morphy, who was in trouble.

I was breaking for the surface when I saw the ’gator. It was small, maybe only six feet long, but the flashlight beam caught the wicked-looking teeth jutting out along its jaws and its light-colored underbelly. It was as disoriented by the oil and dirt as I was, but it seemed to be angling toward my flashlight. I clicked it off and instantly lost sight of the ’gator as I made a final kick for the surface.

When I broke the water the marker rope was fifteen feet in front of me, Morphy beside it.

“Come on!” he shouted. “There’s no other landing around you.”

I splashed hard as I swam to him, all the time aware of the reptile cruising beneath me. As I splashed, I spotted it on the surface to my left, about twenty feet away from me. I could see the scales of its back, its hungry eyes and the line of its jaw pointed in my direction. I turned on my back so I could keep the ’gator in my sight and kicked out, sometimes using the rope to pull myself along, at other times using my hands.

I was still five feet from the boat when the ’gator moved, working its way swiftly through the water in my direction. I spat the mouthpiece out.

“Shoot it, goddammit,” I shouted. I heard the boom of a gun and a spume of water kicked up in front of the ’gator, then a second. The creature stopped short and then a sprinkling of pink and white fell to my right and it turned in that direction. It reached the objects just as a second shower fell, farther away to the right, and I felt the boat against my back and Morphy’s hands helping me to haul myself up. We turned for the bank as Morphy sent a third handful of marshmallows into the air. When I looked at him, he was grinning as he popped a last marshmallow into his mouth. Out on the bayou, the ’gator was snapping at the last of the candy.

“Scared you, huh?” Morphy smiled as I shrugged off the air tank and lay flat on the bottom of the boat.

I nodded and kicked off a flipper.

“I think you’re going to have to get your dry suit cleaned,” I said.

We sat on a log and watched the ’gator for a while. It cruised the bayou looking for more marshmallows, eventually settling for a wait-and-see policy, which consisted of it lying partially submerged near the marker rope. We sipped coffee from tin cups and finished off the last of the chicken.

“You should have shot it,” I said.

“This is a nature reserve and there are laws about killing ’gators,” responded Morphy testily. “Not much point in having a nature reserve if people can come in when they please and shoot all the wildlife.”

We sipped the coffee some more, until I heard the sound of a boat coming our way through the rice and grass.

“Shit,” said a familiar Brooklyn drawl as the prow of the boat broke the grass, “it’s the Donner Party.”

Angel emerged first, then Louis behind him, controlling the rudder. They moved steadily toward us and tied up at the maple. Angel splashed into the water, then followed our gaze out to the ’gator. He caught one sight of the partially submerged reptile and ran awkwardly onto the bank, his knees high and his elbows pumping.

“Man, what is this, Jurassic Park?” he said. He turned to Louis, who jumped from his boat to ours and then onto the bank. “Hey, didn’t you tell your sister not to be swimmin’ in no strange ponds?”

Angel was dressed in his usual jeans and battered sneakers, with a denim jacket over a Doonesbury T-shirt that depicted Duke and the motto Death Before Unconsciousness. Louis was wearing crocodile-skin boots, black Levi’s, and a white collarless Liz Claiborne shirt.

“We dropped by to see how you were,” said Angel, casting anxious glances out at the ’gator after I had introduced him to Morphy. He held a bag of donuts in his hand.

“Our friend’s gonna be real upset if he sees you wearing one of his relatives, Louis,” I said.

Louis sniffed and approached the water’s edge. “Is there a problem?” he asked at last.

“We were diving and then Wally Gator appeared and we weren’t diving anymore,” I explained.

Louis sniffed again. “Hmm,” he said. Then he drew his SIG and blew the tip of the ’gator’s tail off. The reptile thrashed in pain and the water around it turned bright red. Then it turned and headed off into the bayou, trailing blood behind it. “You should have shot it,” he said.

“Let’s not get into it,” I responded. “Roll up your sleeves, gentlemen, we’re going to need some help.”

I still had the dry suit on so I offered to keep diving.

“Trying to prove to me that you ain’t chicken?” grinned Morphy.

“Nope,” I said, as we untied the boat. “Trying to prove it to myself.”

We rowed out to the marker rope and then I dived down with the hook and chains, leaving Angel topside with Morphy and his gun in case the ’gator showed up again. Louis joined us in the second boat. A thick black film of oil had formed on the surface of the water and hung in the depths below. The barrels had scattered when the topmost drum fell. I checked the ruptured barrel with the flashlight but it appeared to contain nothing except the oil that remained.

It was laborious work, tying the barrel and hauling it up each time, but with two boats it meant that we could transport two barrels at a time to the bank. There was probably an easier way to do it, but we hadn’t figured it out.

The sun was growing low and the waters were bathed in gold when we found her.

43

IT SEEMS TO ME now that when I touched the barrel for the first time to attach the chains, something coursed through my system and tightened in my stomach like a fist. I felt a jolt. A blade flashed before my eyes and the depths were colored by a fountain of blood, or perhaps it was simply the dying sun on the water above reflected on my mask. I closed my eyes for a moment and felt movement around me, not just the water of the bayou or the fish in its depths but another swimmer who twisted around my body and legs. I thought I felt her hair brush my cheek but when I reached out I caught only swamp weed in my hand.

This barrel was heavier than the others, weighed down, as we would discover, with masonry bricks that had been split neatly in half. It would need the combined efforts of Morphy and Angel to pull it up.

“It’s her,” I said to Morphy. “We’ve found her.” And then I swam down to the barrel and maneuvered it slowly over the rocks and tree trunks at the bottom as we brought it up. We all seemed to handle this barrel more gently than the rest, as if the girl inside was merely sleeping and we didn’t want to disturb her, as if she was not long decayed but had been laid within it only yesterday. On the bank, Angel took the crowbar and carefully applied it to the rim of the lid, but it refused to move. He examined it more closely.

“It’s been sealed,” he said. He scraped the crowbar over the surface of the barrel and checked the mark left. “The barrel’s been treated with something as well. That’s why it’s in better condition than the others.”

It was true. The barrel had hardly rusted and the fleur-delys on its side was as clear and bright as if it had been painted only days before.

I thought for a moment. We could use the chain saw to cut it, but if I was right and the girl was inside, I didn’t want to damage the remains. We could also have called for assistance from the local cops, or even the feds. I suggested it, more out of duty than desire, but even Morphy declined. He might have been concerned at the embarrassment that would be caused if the barrel was empty, but when I looked in his eyes I could see that wasn’t the case. He wanted us to take it as far as we could.

In the end, we tested the barrel by gently tapping along its length with the axe. From the difference in sound, we judged as best we could where we could safely cut. Morphy carefully made an incision near the sealed end of the barrel, and using a combination of chain saw and crowbar, we cut an area that was roughly half the circumference, then pushed it up with the crowbar and shined a flashlight inside.

The body was little more than bones and shreds of material, the skin and flesh entirely rotted away. She had been dumped in headfirst and her legs had been broken to fit her into the space. When I shined the beam to the far end of the barrel, I glimpsed bared teeth and strands of hair. We stood silently beside her, surrounded by the lapping water and the sounds of the swamp.

It was late that night when I got back to the Flaisance. While we waited for the Slidell police and the rangers, Angel and Louis departed, with Morphy’s agreement. I stayed on to give my statement and back up Morphy’s version of what had taken place. On Morphy’s advice, the locals called the FBI. I didn’t wait around. If Woolrich wanted to talk, he knew where to find me.

The light was still on in Rachel’s room as I passed, so I stopped and knocked. She opened the door wearing a pink Calvin Klein nightshirt, which stopped at mid-thigh level.

“Angel told me what happened,” she said, opening the door wider to let me enter. “That poor girl.” She hugged me and then ran the shower in the bathroom. I stayed in there for a long time, my hands against the tiles, letting the water roll over my head and back.

After I had dried myself, I wrapped the towel around my waist and found Rachel sitting on the bed, leafing through her papers. She cocked an eyebrow at me.

“Such modesty,” she said, with a little smile.

I sat on the edge of the bed and she wrapped her arms around me from behind. I felt her cheek and her warm breath against my back. “How are you feeling?” I asked.

Her grip tightened a little. “Okay, I think.”

She turned me around so that I was facing her. She knelt on the bed before me, her hands clasped between her legs, and bit her lip. Then she reached out and gently, almost tentatively, ran her hand through my hair.

“I thought you psychology types were supposed to be good at all this,” I said.

She shrugged. “I get just as confused as everybody else, except I know all the terminology for my confusion.” She sighed. “Listen, what happened yesterday…I don’t want to put pressure on you. I know how hard all this is for you, because of Susan and-”

I held my hand against her cheek and rubbed her lips gently with my thumb. Then I kissed her and felt her mouth open beneath mine. I wanted to hold her, to love her, to drive away the vision of the dead girl.

“Thanks,” I said, my mouth still against her, “but I know what I’m doing.”

“Well,” she said, as she eased back slowly on the bed, “at least one of us does.”

The following morning, the remains of the girl lay on a metal table, curled fetally by the constriction of the barrel as if to protect herself for eternity. On the instructions of the FBI, she had been brought to New Orleans, weighed and measured, X-rayed, and fingerprinted. The body bag in which she had been removed from Honey Island had been examined for debris that might have fallen from her while she was being transported.

The clean tiles, the shining metal tables, the glinting medical instruments, the white lights hanging above them all seemed too harsh, too relentless in their mission to expose, to examine, to reveal. It seemed a final indignity, after the terrors of her final moments, to display her here in the sterility of this room, with these men looking upon her. A part of me wanted to cover her with a shroud and carry her carefully, gently, to a dark hole beside flowing water, where green trees would shade the ground under which she lay and where no one would disturb her again.

But another part of me, the rational part, knew that she deserved a name, that she needed an identity to put an end to the anonymity of her sufferings and, perhaps, to close in on the man who had reduced her to this. And so we stood back as the gowned coroner and his assistants moved in with their tapes and their blades and their white-gloved hands.

The pelvis is the most easily recognizable distinguishing feature between the male and female skeletons. The greater sciatic notch, situated behind the inominate bone-which itself consists of the hip, the ischium, the ilium, and the pubis-is wider in the female, with a subpubic angle roughly the size of that between the thumb and forefinger. The pelvic outlet is also larger in the female but the thigh sockets are smaller, the sacrum wider.

Even the female skull is different from that of the male, a reflection in miniature of the physical differences between the two sexes. The female skull is as smooth and rounded as the female breast, yet smaller than the male skull; the forehead is higher and more rounded; the eye sockets, too, are higher and the edges less sharply defined; the female jaw, palate, and teeth are smaller.

The skeletal remains before us conformed to the general pelvic and skull rules governing the female body. In estimating the age of the body at the time of death, the ossification centers, or areas of bone formation, were examined, as were the teeth. The femur of the girl’s body was almost completely fused at the head, although there was only partial joining of the collarbone to the top of the breastbone. After an examination of the sutures on her skull, the coroner estimated her age at twenty-one or twenty-two. There were marks on her forehead, the base of her jaw, and on her left cheekbone, where the killer had cut through to the bone as he removed her face.

Her dental features were recorded, a process known as forensic odontology, to be checked against missing persons files, while samples of bone marrow and hair were removed for possible use in DNA profiling. Then Woolrich, Morphy, and I watched as the remains were wheeled away, covered in a plastic wrap. We exchanged a few words before we each went our separate way, but to be honest, I don’t recall what they were. All I could see was the girl. All I could hear was the sound of water in my ears.

If the DNA profiling and the dental records failed to reveal her identity, Woolrich had decided that facial reconstruction might prove valuable, using a laser reflected from the skull to establish the contours, which could then be compared against a known skull of similar dimensions. He decided to contact Quantico to make the initial arrangements as soon as he had had time to wash and grab a cup of coffee.

But facial reconstruction proved unnecessary. It took less than two hours to identify the body of the young woman in the swamp. Although she had been lying in the dark waters for almost seven months, she had been reported missing only three months before.

Her name was Lutice Fontenot. She was Lionel Fontenot’s half sister.

44

THE FONTENOT COMPOUND lay five miles east of Delacroix. It was approached via a raised private road, newly built, which wound through swamps and decaying trees until it reached an area that had been cleared of all vegetation and was now only dark earth. High fencing, topped with razor wire, enclosed two or three acres, at the center of which lay a low, single-story, horseshoe-shaped concrete building. A black convertible and three black Explorers were parked in a line in the concrete lot created by the arms of the building. To the rear was an older house, a standard single-story wooden dwelling with a porch and what looked like a series of parallel linked rooms. No one seemed to be around as I pulled the rented Taurus up to the compound gate, Louis in the passenger seat beside me. Rachel had taken the other rental with her on a final visit to Loyola University.

“Maybe we should have called ahead,” I said as I looked at the silent compound.

Beside me, Louis raised his hands slowly above his head and gestured in front of him with his chin. Two men, dressed in jeans and faded shirts, stood before us pointing Heckler & Koch HK53s with retracted stocks. I caught two more in the rearview mirror and a fifth, wearing an axe in his belt, opposite the passenger window. They were hard, weathered-looking men, some of them with beards already tinged with gray. Their boots were muddy and their hands were the hands of manual laborers, scarred in places.

I watched as a man of medium height, dressed in a blue denim shirt, jeans, and work boots, walked toward the gate from the main compound building. When he reached the gate he didn’t open it but stood watching us through the fencing. He had been burned at some point: the skin on the right of his face was heavily scarred, the right eye useless, and the hair hadn’t grown back on that side of his scalp. A fold of skin hung over his dead eye, and when he spoke, he did so out of the left side of his mouth.

“What you want here?” The voice was heavily accented: Cajun stock.

“My name’s Charlie Parker,” I replied through the open window. “I’m here to see Lionel Fontenot.”

“Who this?” He motioned at Louis with a finger.

“Count Basie,” I said. “The rest of the band couldn’t make it.”

Pretty Boy didn’t crack a smile, or even a half smile. “Lionel don’t see no one. Get yo’ ass outta here ’fo you get hurt.” He turned and walked back toward the compound.

“Hey,” I said. “You accounted for all of Joe Bones’s goons at Metairie yet?”

He stopped and turned back to us.

“What you say?” He looked like I’d just insulted his sister.

“I figure you have two bodies at Metairie that no one can account for. If there’s a prize, I’d like to claim it.”

He seemed to consider this for a moment, then: “You a joker? You are, I don’t think you funny.”

“You don’t think I’m funny?” I said. There was an edge to my voice now. His left eyelid flickered and an H &K ended up two inches from my nose. It smelled like it had been used recently. “Try this for funny: I’m the guy who hauled Lutice Fontenot from the bottom of Honey Island swamp. You want to tell Lionel that, see if he laughs?”

He didn’t reply, but pointed an infrared signaler at the compound gate. It opened almost noiselessly.

“Get outta the car,” he said. Two of the men kept our hands in view and their guns trained on us as we opened the car doors, then two others came forward and frisked us against the car, looking for wires and weapons. They handed Louis’s SIG and knife and my S &W to the scarred guy, then checked the interior of the car for concealed weapons. They opened the hood and trunk and checked under the car.

“Man, you like the Peace Corps,” whispered Louis. “Make friends wherever you go.”

“Thanks,” I replied. “It’s a gift.”

When they were satisfied that it was clean, we were allowed to drive slowly up to the compound with one of Fontenot’s men, the axe man, in the back. Two men walked alongside the car. We parked beside the jeeps and were escorted up to the older house.

On the porch, waiting for us with a china cup of coffee in his hand, was Lionel Fontenot. The burn victim went up to him and spoke a few words in his ear, but Lionel stopped him with a raised hand and turned the hard stare on us. I felt a raindrop fall on my head and within seconds we were standing in a downpour. Lionel left us in the rain. I was wearing my blue linen Liz Claiborne suit and a white shirt with a blue silk-knit tie. I wondered if the dye would run. The rain was heavy and the dirt around the house was already turning to mud when Lionel ordered his men to leave, took a seat on the porch, and indicated with a nod of his head that we should come up. We sat on a pair of wooden chairs with woven seats while Lionel took a wooden recliner. The burn victim stood behind us. Louis and I moved our chairs slightly as we sat so that we could keep him in view.

An elderly black maid, with a face that I recognized from the Metairie funeral party, emerged from the house with a silver coffeepot and sugar and cream in a matching set, all on an ornate silver tray. There were three china cups and saucers on the tray. Multicolored birds chased one another’s tails around the rim of the cups, and a heavy silver spoon with a sailing ship at the end lay neatly positioned beneath the handle of each one. The maid placed the tray on a small wicker table and then left us.

Lionel Fontenot was wearing a pair of black cotton pants and a white shirt with an open collar. A matching black jacket lay over the back of his chair and his brogues were newly polished. He leaned over the table and poured three cups of coffee, added two sugars to one, and then handed it wordlessly to the burn victim.

“Cream and sugar?” he asked, looking to Louis and me in turn.

“Black’s fine,” I said.

“Likewise,” said Louis.

Lionel handed us each a cup. It was all very polite. Above us, the rain hammered on the porch roof.

“You want to tell me how you came to be looking for my sister?” Lionel said at last. He looked like someone who finds a strange guy cleaning the windshield of his car and can’t decide whether to tip him a buck or hit him with a tire iron. He held his cup with his little finger cocked while he sipped his coffee. I noticed that the burn victim did the same.

I told Lionel some of what I knew then. I told him about Tante Marie’s visions and her death and about the stories of the ghost of a girl at a Honey Island slough. “I think the man who killed your sister killed Tante Marie Aguillard and her son. He also killed my wife and my little girl,” I said. “That’s how I came to be looking for your sister.”

I didn’t say that I was sorry for his pain. He probably knew that anyway. If he didn’t, then it wasn’t worth saying.

“You take out two men at Metairie?”

“One,” I answered. “Someone else killed the other.”

Lionel turned to Louis. “You?”

Louis didn’t reply.

“Someone else,” I repeated.

Lionel put his cup down and spread his hands. “So why are you here now? You want my gratitude? I’m going to New Orleans now to take away my sister’s body. I don’t know that I want to thank you for that.” He turned his face away. There was pain in his eyes, but no tears. Lionel Fontenot didn’t look like a man with well-developed tear ducts.

“That’s not why I’m here,” I said quietly. “I want to know why Lutice was reported missing only in the last three months. I want to know what your brother was doing out at Honey Island on the night he was killed.”

“My brother,” he said. Love and frustration and guilt chased one another in his voice like the birds on his pretty cups. Then he seemed to catch himself. I think he was about to tell me to go to hell, to keep out of his family’s business if I wanted to stay alive, but I held his gaze and for a while he said nothing.

“I got no reason to trust you,” he said.

“I can find the man who did this,” I said. My voice was low and even. Lionel nodded, more to himself than to me, and appeared to make his decision.

“My sister left at the end of January, start of February,” he began. “She didn’t like”-he waved his left hand gently at the compound-“all this. There was trouble with Joe Bones, some people got hurt.” He paused and chose his next words carefully. “One day she closed her bank account, packed a bag, and left a note. She didn’t tell us to our faces. David wouldn’t have let her leave anyways.

“We tried to trace her. We looked up friends in the city, even people she knew in Seattle and Florida. There was nothing, not a trace. David was real cut up about her. She was our half sister. When my momma died, my father married again. Lutice came out of that marriage. When my father and her momma died-that was in nineteen eighty-three, in an automobile accident-we took care of her, David especially. They were real close.

“Few months back, David started having dreams about Lutice. He didn’t say nothing at first, but he got thinner and paler and his nerves started to play at him. When he told me, I thought he was going crazy and told him so, but the dreams just kept comin’. He dreamed of her underwater, he said, heard her banging against metal in the night. He was sure that something had happened to her.

“But what could we do? We had searched half of Louisiana. I’d even made approaches to some of Joe Bones’s men, to see if there was something that maybe needed to be sorted out. There was nothing. She was gone.

“Next thing I knew, he reported her missing and we had the cops crawling over the compound. Mon, I nearly killed him that day, but he insisted. He said something had happened to Lutice. He was beyond reason by then, and I had to take care of things on my own, with Joe Bones hangin’ over me like a sword ’bout to fall.”

He looked to the burn victim.

“ Leon here was with him when the call came. He wouldn’t say nothin’ about where he was goin’, just took off in his damned yellow car. When Leon tried to stop him, he pulled a gun on him.” I glanced at Leon. If he felt any guilt about what had happened to David Fontenot, he kept it well hidden.

“Any idea who made the call?” I asked.

Lionel shook his head.

I put my cup on the tray. The coffee was cold and untasted.

“When are you going to hit Joe Bones?” I asked. Lionel blinked like he had just been slapped, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw Leon step forward.

“The hell you talkin’ about?” said Lionel.

“You’ve got a second funeral coming up, at least as soon as the police release your sister’s body. Either you won’t have too many mourners or the funeral will be overrun with police and media. Whatever happens, I figure you’ll try to take out Joe Bones before then, probably at his place in West Feliciana. You owe him for David, and anyway, Joe won’t rest easy until you’re dead. One of you will try to finish it.”

Lionel looked at Leon. “They clean?” Leon nodded.

Lionel leaned forward. There was menace in his voice. “The fuck does any of this have to do with you?”

I wasn’t fazed by him. The threat of violence was in his face, but I needed Lionel Fontenot.

“You heard about Tony Remarr’s death?”

Lionel nodded.

“Remarr was killed because he was out at the Aguillard place after Tante Marie and her son were murdered,” I explained. “His fingerprints were found in Tante Marie’s blood, Joe Bones heard about it, and told Remarr to lie low. But the killer found out-I don’t know how yet-and I think he used your brother to lure Remarr into making the hit so he could take him out. I want to know what Remarr told Joe Bones.”

Lionel considered what I had said. “And you can’t get to Joe Bones without me.”

Beside me, Louis’s mouth twitched. Lionel caught the movement.

“That’s not entirely true,” I said. “But if you’re going to be calling on him anyway, we might tag along.”

“I go calling on Joe Bones, his fucking place is gonna be real fucking quiet by the time I leave,” said Lionel softly.

“You do what you have to do,” I replied. “But I need Joe Bones alive. For a while.”

Lionel stood and buttoned the top of his shirt. He took a wide black silk tie from the inside pocket of his jacket and began to put it on, using his reflection in the window to check the knot.

“Where you staying?” he asked. I told him, and gave Leon the number of my phone. “We’ll be in touch,” said Lionel. “Maybe. Don’t come out here again.”

Our discussions appeared to be at an end. Louis and I were almost at the car when Lionel spoke again. He pulled on his jacket and adjusted the collar, then smoothed down the lapels.

“One thing,” he said. “I know Morphy out of St. Martin was there when Lutice was found. You got cop friends?”

“Yeah. I got federal friends too. That a problem?”

He turned away. “Not as long as you don’t make it one. If you do, the crabs gonna be feeding on you and your buddy.”

Louis fooled around with the car radio until he found a station that seemed to be playing back-to-back Dr. John. “This is music, right?” he said.

The music segued uneasily from “Makin’ Whoopee” to “Gris Gris Gumbo Ya-Ya” and John’s throaty rumble filled the car. Louis flicked the presets again, until he found a country station playing three in a row from Garth Brooks.

“This be the devil’s music,” mumbled Louis. He turned the radio off and tapped his fingers on the dash.

“You know,” I said, “you don’t have to hang around if you don’t want to. Things could get difficult, or Woolrich and the feds could decide to make them difficult for you.” I knew that Louis was what Angel diplomatically referred to as semiretired. Money, it appeared, was no longer an issue. The “semi” indicated that it might have been replaced by something else, although I wasn’t sure yet what that was.

He looked out the window, not at me. “You know why we’re here?”

“Not entirely. I asked, but I wasn’t sure that you’d come.”

“We came because we owe you, because you’d look out for us if we needed it, and because someone has to look out for you after what happened to your woman and your little girl. More than that, Angel thinks that you’re a good man. Maybe I think so too and maybe I think that what you brought to an end with the Modine bitch, what you’re trying to bring to an end here, they’re things that should be brought to an end. You understand me?”

It was strange to hear him talk this way, strange and affecting. “I think I understand,” I replied quietly. “Thank you.”

“You are going to end this thing here?” he said.

“I think so, but we’re missing something, a detail, a pattern, something.” I kept catching glimpses of it, like a rat passing under streetlights. I needed to find out more about Edward Byron. I needed to talk to Woolrich.

Rachel met us in the main hall of the Flaisance House. I guessed that she had been watching for the car. Angel lounged beside her eating a Lucky Dog, which looked like the business end of a baseball bat topped with onion, chili, and mustard.

“The FBI came,” said Rachel. “Your friend Woolrich was with them. They had a warrant. They took everything: my notes, the illustrations, everything they could find.” She led the way to her room. The walls had been stripped of their notes. Even the diagram I had drawn was gone.

“They searched our room too,” remarked Angel to Louis. “And Bird’s.” My head jerked up as I thought of the case of guns. Angel spotted the move. “We ditched them soon as your FBI friend put the stare on Louis. They’re in a storage depot on Bayonne. We both have keys.”

I noticed that Rachel seemed more irritated than upset as we followed her to her room. “Am I missing something here?”

She smiled. “I said they took everything they could find. Angel saw them coming. I hid some of the notes in the waistband of my jeans, under my shirt. Angel took care of most of the rest.”

She took a small pile of papers from under her bed and waved them with a small flourish. She kept one separate in her hand. It was folded over once.

“I think you might want to see this,” she said, handing the paper to me. I unfolded it and felt a pain in my chest.

It was an illustration of a woman seated naked on a chair. She had been split from neck to groin and the skin on each side had been pulled back so that it hung over her arms like the folds of a gown. Across her lap lay a young man, similarly opened but with a space where his stomach and other internal organs had been removed. Apart from the detail of the anatomization and the alteration in the sex of one of the victims, it resembled in its essence what had been done to Jennifer and Susan.

“It’s Estienne’s Pietà,” said Rachel. “It’s very obscure, which is why it took so long to track down. Even in its day, it was regarded as excessively explicit and, more to the point, blasphemous. It bore too much of a resemblance to the figure of the dead Christ and Mary for the liking of the church authorities. Estienne nearly burned for it.”

She took the illustration from me and looked at it sadly, then placed it on her bed with the other papers. “I know what he’s doing,” she said. “He’s creating memento mori, death’s-heads.” She sat on the edge of the bed and put her hands together beneath her chin, as if in prayer.

“He’s giving us lessons in mortality.”

IV

45

IN THE MEDICAL SCHOOL of the Complutense University of Madrid there is an anatomical museum, founded by King Carlos III. Much of its collection derives from the efforts of Dr. Julián de Velasco in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Dr. Velasco was a man who took his work seriously. He was reputed to have mummified the corpse of his own daughter, just as William Harvey was assisted in his discovery of circulation by his decision to autopsy the bodies of his own father and sister.

The long rectangular hall is arrayed with glass cases of exhibits: two giant skeletons, the wax model of a fetal head, and at one point, two figures labeled despellejados. They are the “flayed men,” who stand in dramatic poses, displaying the movement of the muscles and the tendons without the white veil of the skin to hide it from the eye of the beholder. Vesalius, Valverde, Estienne, their forebears, their peers, their successors, worked in the knowledge of this tradition. Artists such as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci created their own écorchés, as they termed their drawings of flayed figures, basing their work on their own participation in dissections.

And the figures they created were more than merely anatomical specimens: they served, in their way, as reminders of the flawed nature of our humanity, a reminder of the body’s capacity for pain and, eventually, mortality. They warned of the futility of the pursuits of the flesh, the reality of disease and pain and death in this life, and the promise of something better in the next.

In eighteenth-century Florence, the practice of anatomical modeling reached its peak. Under the patronage of the Abbot Felice Fontana, anatomists and artists worked side by side to create natural sculptures from beeswax. Anatomists exposed the cadavers, the artists poured the liquid plaster, and molds were created. Layers of wax were placed into them, with pig fat used to alter the temperature of the wax where necessary, allowing a process of layering that reproduced the transparency of human tissue.

Then, with threads and brushes and fine point, the lineaments and striations of the body were reproduced. Eyebrows and eyelashes were added, one by one. In the case of the Bolognese artist Lelli, real skeletons were used as a frame for his wax creations. The emperor of Austria, Joseph II, was so impressed by the collection that he ordered 1,192 models, to promote medical teaching in his own country. By contrast, Frederik Ruysch, professor of anatomy at the Atheneum Illustre in Amsterdam, used chemical fixatives and dyes to preserve his specimens. His house contained an exhibition of the skeletons of infants and children in various poses, reminders of the transience of life.

Yet nothing could compare to the reality of the actual human body exposed to view. Public demonstrations of anatomization and dissection attracted huge crowds, some of them in carnival disguise. Ostensibly, they were there to learn. In reality, the dissection was little more than an extension of the public execution. In England, the Murder Act of 1752 provided a direct link between the two events by permitting the bodies of murderers to be anatomically dissected, and postmortem penal dissection became a form of further punishment for the criminal, who would now be denied a proper burial. In 1832, the Anatomy Act extended the deprivation of the poor into the next life by allowing the confiscation of the bodies of dead paupers for dissection.

So death and dissection walked hand in hand with the extension of scientific knowledge. But what of pain? What of the Renaissance disgust with the workings of the female body, which led to a particularly morbid fascination with the uterus? In the acts of flaying and anatomization, the realities of suffering, sex, and death were not far away.

The interior of the body, when revealed, speaks to us of mortality. But how many of us can ever bear witness to our own interiors? We see our own mortality only through the prism of the mortality of others. Even then, it is only in exceptional circumstances, in cases of war, or violent accidental death, or murder, when the viewer is a witness to the act itself or its immediate consequences, that mortality in all its deep red reality is made clear to us.

In his violent, pain-filled way, Rachel believed, the Traveling Man was trying to break down these barriers. In killing his victims in this way, he was making them aware of their own mortality, exposing to them their own interiors, introducing them to the meaning of true pain; but they also served as a reminder to others of their own mortality and the final, dreadful pain that would someday find them.

The Traveling Man crisscrossed the boundaries between torture and execution, between intellectual and physical curiosity and sadism. He was part of the secret history of mankind, the history recorded in the thirteenth-century Anatomia Magistri Nicolai Physici, which observed that the ancients practiced dissection upon both the living and the dead, binding condemned criminals hand and foot and gradually dissecting them, beginning with their legs and arms and moving on to their internal organs. Celsus and Augustine made similar allegations about live dissections, still contested by medical historians.

And now the Traveling Man had come to write his own history, to offer his own blending of science and art, to make his own notes on mortality and to create a Hell within the human heart.

All this Rachel explained as we sat in her room. Outside, it had grown dark and the strains of music floated on the air.

“I think the blinding may be related to ignorance, a physical representation of a failure to understand the reality of pain and death,” she said. “But it indicates just how far the killer himself is removed from ordinary humanity. We all suffer, we all experience death in various ways before we die ourselves. He believes that only he can teach us this.”

“That, or he believes we’ve lost sight of it and need to be reminded, that it’s his role to tell us just how inconsequential we are,” I added. Rachel nodded her assent.

“If what you say is true, then why was Lutice Fontenot dumped in a barrel?” It was Angel. He sat by the balcony, staring out on to the street below.

“ ’Prentice work,” said Rachel. Louis cocked an eyebrow but stayed silent.

“This Traveling Man believes he’s creating works of art: the care he takes in displaying the bodies, their relation to old medical texts, the links with mythology and artistic representations of the body all point in that direction. But even artists have to start somewhere. Poets, painters, sculptors all serve an apprenticeship of sorts, formal or otherwise. The work they create during their apprenticeships may go on to influence their later work, but it’s usually not for public display. It’s a chance to make mistakes without criticism, to see what you can and cannot achieve. Maybe that’s what Lutice Fontenot was to him: ’prentice work.”

“But she died after Susan and Jennifer,” I added softly.

“He took Susan and Jennifer because he wanted to, but the results were unsatisfactory. I think he used Lutice to practice again before he returned to the public arena,” she answered, not looking at me. “He took Tante Marie and her son for a combination of reasons, out of both desire and necessity, and this time he had the time he needed to achieve the effect for which he was searching. He then had to kill Remarr, either because of what he actually saw or the mere possibility that he might have seen something, but again he created a memento mori out of him. He’s practical, in his way: he’s not afraid to make a virtue out of necessity.”

Angel looked unhappy with the thrust of Rachel’s words. “But what about the way most of us react to death?” he began. “It makes us want to live. It even makes us want to screw.”

Rachel glanced at me, then returned to her notes.

“I mean,” continued Angel, “what does this guy want us to do? Stop eating, stop loving, because he’s got a thing about death and he thinks the next world is going to be something better?”

I picked up the illustration of the Pietà again and examined the detail of the bodies, the carefully labeled interiors, and the placid expressions on the faces of the woman and the man. The faces of the Traveling Man’s victims had looked nothing like this. They were contorted in their final agonies.

“He doesn’t give a damn about the next world,” I said. “He’s only concerned with the damage he can do in this one.”

I stood and joined Angel at the window. Beneath us, the dogs scampered and sniffed in the courtyard. I could smell cooking and beer and imagined that, beneath it all, I could smell the mass of humanity itself, passing us by.

“Why hasn’t he come after us? Or you?” It was Angel. His words were directed at me, but it was Rachel who answered.

“Because he wants us to understand,” she said. “Everything he’s done is an attempt to lead us to something. All of this is an effort to communicate, and we’re the audience. He doesn’t want to kill us.”

“Yet,” said Louis softly.

Rachel nodded once, her eyes locked on mine. “Yet,” she agreed quietly.

I arranged to meet Rachel and the others later in Vaughan ’s. Back in my room, I called Woolrich and left a message on his machine. He returned the call within five minutes and told me he’d meet me at the Napoleon House within the hour.

He was as good as his word. Shortly before ten he appeared, dressed in off-white chinos and carrying a matching jacket over his arm, which he put on as soon as he entered the bar.

“Is it chilly in here, or is it just the reception?” There was sleep caked at the corners of his eyes and he smelled sour and unwashed. He was no longer the assured figure I recalled from Jenny Orbach’s apartment, wresting control of the room from a group of vaguely hostile cops. Instead he looked older, more uncertain. Taking Rachel’s papers in the way he did was out of character for him; the old Woolrich would have taken them anyway, but he would have asked for them first.

He ordered an Abita for himself and another mineral water for me.

“You want to tell me why you seized materials from the hotel?”

“Don’t look on it as a seizure, Bird. Consider it as borrowing.” He sipped at his beer and looked at himself in the mirror. He didn’t seem to like what he saw.

“You could just have asked,” I said.

“Would you have given it to me?”

“No, but I’d have discussed what was there.”

“I don’t think that Durand would have been too impressed with that. Frankly, I wouldn’t have been too impressed either.”

“Durand called it? Why? You have your own profilers, your own agents on it. Why were you so sure that we could add something?”

He spun around on his stool and leaned close to me, close enough that I could smell his breath. “Bird, I know you want this guy. I know you want him for what he did to Susan and Jennifer, to the old woman and her son, to Florence, to Lutice Fontenot, maybe even to that fuck Remarr. I’ve tried to keep you in touch with what’s been going down and you’ve walked all over this case like a fucking child in new boots. You’ve got an assassin staying in the room next door, God alone knows what his pal does, and your lady friend is collecting graphic medical imagery like box tops. You ain’t given me shit, so I did what I had to do. You think I’m holding back on you? With the shit you’re pulling, you’re lucky I don’t put you back on a plane to Noo Yawk.”

“I need to know what you know,” I said. “What are you holding back about this guy?”

We were almost head to head now. Then Woolrich grimaced and leaned back.

“Holding back? Jesus, Bird, you’re unbelievable. Here’s something: Byron’s wife? You want to know what she majored in when she was at college? Art. Her thesis was on Renaissance art and depictions of the body. You think that might have included medical representations, that maybe that was where her ex got some of his ideas?”

He took a deep breath and a long swig of beer. “You’re bait, Bird. You know it, and I know it. And I know something else too.” His voice was cold and hard. “I know you were at Metairie. There’s a guy in the morgue with a bullet hole in his head and the cops have the remains of a ten millimeter Smith & Wesson bullet that was dug out of the marble behind him. You want to tell me about that, Bird? You want to tell me if you were alone in Metairie when the killing started?”

I didn’t reply.

Then: “You screwing her, Bird?”

I looked at him. There was no mirth in his eyes and he wasn’t smiling. Instead, there was hostility and distrust. Whatever I needed to know about Edward Byron and his ex-wife, I would have to find out myself. If I had hit him then, we would have hurt each other badly. I didn’t waste any more words on him and I didn’t look back as I left the bar.

I took a cab to Bywater and stopped off right outside Vaughan ’s Lounge on the corner of Dauphine and Lesseps. I paid the five-dollar cover at the door. Inside, Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Swingers were lost in a rhapsody of New Orleans brass and there were plates of red beans scattered on the tables. Rachel and Angel were dancing around chairs and tables while Louis looked on with a long-suffering expression. As I approached, the tempo of the music slowed a little and Rachel made a grab for me. I moved with her for a while as she stroked my face, and I closed my eyes and let her. Then I sipped a soda and thought my own thoughts until Louis moved from his seat and sat beside me.

“You didn’t have much to say back in Rachel’s room,” I said.

He nodded. “It’s bullshit. All this stuff, the religion, the medical drawings, they’re all just trappings. And maybe he believes them and maybe he don’t. Sometimes it’s nothing to do with mortality, it’s to do with the beauty of the color of meat.”

He took a sip of beer.

“And this guy just likes red.”

Back at the Flaisance, I lay beside Rachel and listened to her breathing in the dark.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “About our killer.”

“And?”

“I think the killer may not be male.”

I raised myself up on my elbows and looked at her. I could see the whites of her eyes, wide and bright.

“Why?”

“I’m not sure, exactly. There just seems to be something almost feminine about the sensibility of whoever is committing these crimes, a… sensitivity to the interconnectedness of things, to their potential for symbolism. I don’t know. I guess I’m thinking out loud, but it’s not a sensibility typical of a modern male. Maybe “female” is wrong-I mean, the hallmarks, the cruelty, the capacity to overpower, all point to a male-but it’s as close as I can get, at least for now.”

She shook her head and then was silent again.

“Are we becoming a couple?” she asked at last.

“I don’t know. Are we?”

“You’re avoiding the question.”

“No, not really. It’s not one that I’m used to answering, or that I ever thought that I’d have to answer again. If you’re asking if I want us to stay together, then the answer is yes, I do. It worries me a little, and I’m bringing in more baggage than the handlers at JFK, but I want to be with you.”

She kissed me softly.

“Why did you stop drinking?” she asked, adding: “Since we’re having this heart-to-heart.”

I started at the question. “Because if I took one drink now, I’d wake up in Singapore with a beard a week later,” I replied.

“It doesn’t answer the question.”

“I hated myself and that made me hate others, even the people closest to me. I was drinking the night Susan and Jennifer were killed. I’d been drinking a lot, not just that night but other nights too. I drank because of a lot of things, because of the pressure of the job, because of my failings as a husband, as a father, and maybe other things as well, things from way back. If I hadn’t been a drunk, Susan and Jennifer might not have died. So I stopped. Too late, but I stopped.”

She didn’t say anything else. She didn’t say, “It wasn’t your fault,” or, “You can’t blame yourself.” She knew better than that.

I think I wanted to say more, to try to explain to her what it was like without alcohol, about how I was afraid that, without alcohol, each day would now leave me with nothing to look forward to. Each day would simply be another day without a drink. Sometimes, when I was at my lowest ebb, I wondered if my search for the Traveling Man was just a way to fill my days, a way to keep me from going off the rails.

Later, as she slept, I lay on the bed, on top of the sheets, and thought about Lutice Fontenot and bodies turned into art, before I, too, faded into sleep.

46

I SLEPT BADLY that night, wound up by my conversation with Woolrich and troubled by dreams of dark water. The next morning, I had breakfast alone after tracking down what seemed to be the only copy of the New York Times in Orleans Parish, over at Riverside News, by the Jax Brewery. Later, I met Rachel at Café du Monde and we walked through the French Market, wandering between the stalls of T-shirts and CDs and cheap wallets, and on to the fresh produce at the Farmers’ Market. There were pecans like dark eyes, pale, shrunken heads of garlic, melons with dark red flesh that held the gaze like a wound. White-eyed fish lay packed in ice beside crawfish tails; headless shrimp rested by racks of “’gator on a stick” and murky tanks in which baby alligators lay on display. There were stalls loaded with eggplants and militones, sweet onions and elephant toe garlic, fresh Roma tomatoes and ripe avocadoes.

Over a century before, this had been a two-block stretch of Gallatin Street on the riverfront docks between Barracks and Ursuline. Outside of maybe Shanghai and the Bowery, it was one of the toughest places in the world, a strip of brothels and lowlife gin mills where hard-faced men mixed with harder women and anyone without a weapon had taken a wrong turning somewhere that he was bound to regret.

Gallatin is gone now, erased from the map, and instead tourists mix with Cajun fishermen from Lafayette and beyond, come to sell their wares surrounded by the thick, heady smell of the Mississippi. The city was like that, it seemed: streets disappeared; bars opened and, a century later, were gone; buildings were torn down or burned to the ground and others rose to take their place. There was change, but the spirit of the city remained the same. On this muggy summer morning, it seemed to brood beneath the clouds, feeling the people as a passing infection that it would cleanse from itself with rain.

The door of my room was slightly ajar when we returned through the courtyard. I motioned Rachel against the wall and drew my Smith & Wesson, keeping to the sides of the wooden stairway so that the steps wouldn’t creak. The noise of Ricky’s Steyr sending bullets raking past my ear had stayed with me. “Joe Bones says hello.” I figured that if Joe Bones tried to say hello again, I could spare enough powder to blow him back to Hell.

I listened at the door but no sounds came from inside. If it had been the maid in my room, she’d have been whistling and bumping, maybe listening to a blues station on her tinny portable radio. If there was a maid in my room now, she was either asleep or levitating.

I hit the door hard with my shoulder and entered fast, my gun at arm’s length, scanning the room with the sight. It came to rest on the figure of Leon sitting in a chair by the balcony, flicking through a copy of GQ that Louis had passed on to me. Leon didn’t look like the kind of guy who bought much on GQ’s recommendation, unless the Q had made a big play for the JCPenney contract. Leon glanced at me with even less interest than he gave to GQ. His damaged eye glistened beneath its fold of skin like a crab peering out of a shell.

“When you’re finished, there are hairs in the shower and the closet door sticks,” I said.

“Room falls down around your ears, I could give a fuck,” he replied. That Leon, what a kidder.

He threw the magazine on the floor and looked past me to Rachel, who had followed me into the room. His eyes didn’t register any interest there either. Maybe Leon was dead and no one had worked up the guts to tell him.

“She’s with me,” I said. Leon looked like he could have keeled over from apathy.

“Ten tonight, at the nine-sixty-six junction at Starhill. You et ton ami noir. Anyone else, Lionel cornhole you both with a shotgun.”

He stood to leave. As I moved aside to let him pass, I made a pistol of my finger and thumb and fired it at him. There was a flash of steel in each of his hands and two barb-edged knives appeared inches from each of my eyes. I could see the tops of the spring loaders in his sleeves. That explained why Leon didn’t seem to feel the need to carry a gun.

“Impressive,” I said, “but it’s only funny until someone loses an eye.” Leon ’s dead right eye seemed to gaze into my soul, as if to rot it and turn it to dust, then he left. I couldn’t hear his footsteps as he walked down the gallery.

“A friend of yours?” asked Rachel.

I walked out of the room and looked down at the already empty courtyard. “If he is, I’m lonelier than I thought.”

When Louis and Angel returned from a late breakfast, I went to their door and knocked. A couple of seconds went by before there was a response.

“Yeah?” shouted Angel.

“It’s Bird. You two decent?”

“Jeez, I hope not. C’mon in.”

Louis sat upright in bed, reading the Times-Picayune. Angel sat beside him outside the sheets, naked but for a towel across his lap.

“The towel for my benefit?”

“I’m afraid you might become confused about your sexuality.”

“Might take away what little I have.”

“Very witty for a man screwing a psychologist. Why don’t you just pay your eighty bucks an hour like everyone else?”

Louis gave us both bored looks over the top of his newspaper. Maybe Leon and Louis were related way back.

“Lionel Fontenot’s boy just paid me a visit,” I said.

“The beauty queen?” asked Louis.

“None other.”

“We on?”

“Tonight at ten. Better get your stuff out of hock.”

“I’ll send my boy.” He kicked Angel in the leg from beneath the sheets.

“The ugly queen?”

“None other,” said Louis.

Angel continued to watch his game show. “It’s beneath my dignity to comment.”

Louis returned to his paper. “You got a lot of dignity for a guy with a towel on his dick.”

“It’s a big towel,” sniffed Angel.

“Waste of a lot of good towel space, you ask me.”

I left them to it. Back in my room, Rachel was standing by the wall, her arms folded and a fierce expression on her face.

“What happens now?” she asked.

“We go back to Joe Bones,” I said.

“And Lionel Fontenot kills him,” she spat. “He’s no better than Joe Bones. You’re only siding with him out of expediency. What will happen when Fontenot kills him? Will things be any better?”

I didn’t answer. I knew what would happen. There would be a brief disturbance in the drug trade, as Fontenot renegotiated existing deals or ended them entirely. Prices would go up and there would be some killing, as those who felt strong enough to challenge him for Joe Bones’s turf made their play. Lionel Fontenot would kill them; of that I had no doubt.

Rachel was right. It was only expediency that made me side with Lionel. Joe Bones knew something about what had happened the night Tante Marie died, something that could bring me a step closer to the man who had killed my wife and child. If it took Lionel Fontenot’s guns to find out what that was, then I would side with the Fontenots.

“And Louis will stand beside you,” said Rachel quietly. “My God, what have you become?”

Later, I drove to Baton Rouge, Rachel accompanying me at my insistence. We were uneasy together, and no words were exchanged. Rachel contented herself with looking out of the window, her elbow resting against the door, her right hand supporting her cheek. The silence between us remained unbroken until we reached exit 166, heading for LSU and the home of Stacey Byron. Then I spoke, anxious that we should at least try to clear the air between us.

“Rachel, I’ll do what I have to do to find whoever killed Susan and Jennifer,” I said. “I need this, else I’m dead inside.”

She did not reply immediately. For a while, I thought she was not going to reply at all.

“You’re already dying inside,” she said at last, still staring out the window. I could see her eyes, reflected in the glass, following the landscape. “The fact that you’re prepared to do these things is an indication of that.”

She looked at me for the first time. “I’m not your moral arbiter, Bird, and I’m not the voice of your conscience. But I am someone who cares about you, and I’m not sure how to deal with these feelings right now. Part of me wants to walk away and never look back, but another part of me wants, needs, to stay with you. I want to stop this thing, all of it. I want it all to end, for everybody’s sake.” Then she turned away again and left me to deal with what she had said.

Stacey Byron lived in a small white clapboard house with a red door and peeling paint, close to a small mall with a big supermarket, a photo shop, and a twenty-four-hour pizzeria. This area by the LSU campus was populated mainly by students, and some of the houses now had stores on their first floor, selling used CDs and books or long hippie dresses and overwide straw hats. As we drove by Stacey Byron’s house and pulled into a parking space in front of the photo shop, I spotted a blue Probe parked close by. The two guys sitting in the front seats looked bored beyond belief. The driver had a newspaper folded in four resting on the wheel and was sucking on a pencil as he tried to do the crossword. His partner tapped a rhythm on the dashboard as he watched the front door of Stacey Byron’s house.

“Feds?” asked Rachel.

“Maybe. Could be locals. This is donkey work.”

We watched them for a while. Rachel turned on the radio and we listened to an AOR station: Rush, Styx, Richard Marx. Suddenly, the middle of the road seemed to be running straight through the car, musically speaking.

“Are you going in?” asked Rachel.

“May not have to,” I replied, nodding at the house.

Stacey Byron, her blond hair tied back in a ponytail and her body encased in a short white cotton dress, emerged from the house and walked straight toward us, a straw shopping basket over her left arm. She nodded at the two guys in the car. They tossed a coin and the one in the passenger seat, a medium-sized man with a small belly protruding through his jacket, got out of the car, stretched his legs, and followed her toward the mall.

She was a good-looking woman, although the short dress was a little too tight at the thighs and dug slightly into the fat below her buttocks. Her arms were strong and lean, her skin tanned. There was a grace to her as she walked: when an elderly man almost collided with her as she entered the supermarket, she spun lightly on her right foot to avoid him.

I felt something soft on my cheek and turned to find Rachel blowing on it.

“Hey,” she said, and for the first time since we left New Orleans there was a tiny smile on her lips. “It’s rude to lech when you’re with another woman.”

“It’s not leching,” I said, as we climbed from the car, “it’s surveillance.”

I wasn’t sure why I had come here, but Woolrich’s remarks about Stacey Byron and her interest in art made me want to see her for myself, and I wanted Rachel to see her as well. I didn’t know how we might get to talk to her but I figured that these things had a habit of working themselves out.

Stacey took her time browsing in the aisles. There was an aimlessness about her shopping as she picked up items, glanced at the labels, and then discarded them. The cop followed about ten feet behind her, then fifteen, before his attention was distracted by some magazines. He moved to the checkout and took up a position where he could see down two aisles at once, limiting his care of Stacey Byron to the occasional glance in her direction.

I watched a young black man in a white coat and a white hat with a green band stacking prepackaged meat. When he had emptied the tray and marked off its contents on a clipboard, he left the shop floor through a door marked Staff Only. I left Rachel to watch Byron and followed him. I almost hit him with the door as I went through, since he was squatting to pick up another plastic tray of meat. He looked at me curiously.

“Hey, man,” he said, “you can’t come in here.”

“How much do you earn an hour?” I asked.

“Five twenty-five. What’s it to you?”

“I’ll give you fifty bucks if you lend me your coat and that clipboard for ten minutes.”

He thought it over for a few seconds, then said: “Sixty, and anyone asks I’ll say you stole it.”

“Done,” I said, and counted out three twenties as he took off the coat. It fitted a bit tightly across the shoulders, but no one would notice as long as I left it unbuttoned. I was stepping back onto the shop floor when the young guy called me.

“Hey, man, ’nother twenty, you can have the hat.”

“For twenty bucks, I could go into the hat business myself,” I replied. “Go hide in the men’s room.”

I found Stacey Byron by the toiletries, Rachel close by.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” I said, as I approached, “can I ask you some questions?”

Up close, she looked older. There was a network of broken veins beneath her cheekbones and a fine tracery of lines surrounded her eyes. There were tight lines, too, around her mouth, and her cheeks were sunken and stretched. She looked tired and something else: she looked threatened, maybe even scared.

“I don’t think so,” she said, with a false smile, and started to step around me.

“It’s about your ex-husband.”

She stopped then and turned back, her eyes searching for her police escort. “Who are you?”

“An investigator. What do you know about Renaissance art, Mrs. Byron?”

“What? What do you mean?”

“You studied it in college, didn’t you? Does the name Valverde mean anything to you? Did your husband ever use it? Did you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please, leave me alone.” She backed away, knocking some cans of deodorant to the floor.

“Mrs. Byron, have you ever heard of the Traveling Man?”

Something flashed in her eyes and behind me I heard a low whistle. I turned to see the fat cop moving down the aisle in my direction. He passed Rachel without noticing her and she began moving toward the door and the safety of the car, but by then I was already heading back to the staff area. I dumped the coat and walked straight through and on to the back lot, which was crowded with trucks making deliveries, before slipping around the side of the mall where Rachel already had the car started. I stayed low as we drove off, turning right instead of passing Stacey Byron’s house again. In the side mirror I could see the fat cop looking around and talking into his radio, Byron beside him.

“And what did we achieve there?” asked Rachel.

“Did you see her eyes when I mentioned the Traveling Man? She knew the name.”

“She knows something,” agreed Rachel. “But she could have heard it from the cops. She looked scared, Bird.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But scared of what?”

That evening, Angel removed the door panels of the Taurus and we strapped the Calicos and the magazines into the space behind them, then replaced the panels. I cleaned and loaded my Smith & Wesson in the hotel room while Rachel watched.

I put the gun in my shoulder holster and wore a black Alpha Industries bomber jacket over my black T-shirt and black jeans. With my black Timberlands, I looked like the doorman at a nightclub.

“Joe Bones is living on borrowed time. I couldn’t save him if I wanted to,” I told her. “He was dead from the moment the Metairie hit went wrong.”

Rachel spoke. “I’ve decided. I’m leaving in a day or two. I don’t think I can be part of this any longer, the things you’re doing, the things I’ve done.” She wouldn’t look at me and there was nothing that I could say. She was right, but she wasn’t simply preaching. I could see her own pain in her eyes. I could feel it every time we made love.

Louis was waiting by the car, dressed in a black sweat top and black denim jacket over dark jeans and Ecco boots. Angel checked the door panels one last time to make sure they slipped off without any trouble, then stood beside Louis.

“You don’t hear anything from us by three A.M., you take Rachel and clear out of the hotel. Book into the Pontchartrain and get the first plane out in the morning,” I said. “I don’t want Joe Bones trying to even up scores if this turns bad. Handle the cops whatever way you think is best.”

He nodded, exchanged a look with Louis, and went back into the Flaisance. Louis put an Isaac Hayes tape into the stereo and we rolled out of New Orleans to the strains of “Walk On By.”

“Dramatic,” I said.

He nodded. “We the men.”

Leon lounged by a gnarled oak, its trunk knotted and worn, as we reached the Starhill intersection. Louis’s left hand was hanging loosely by his side, the butt of the SIG jutting from beneath the passenger seat. I had slipped the Smith & Wesson into the map compartment on the driver’s door as we approached the meeting place. Seeing Leon alone against the tree didn’t make me feel any better.

We slowed and turned onto a small side road that ran past the oak tree. Leon didn’t seem to register our presence. I killed the engine and we sat in the car, waiting for him to make a move. Louis had his hand on the SIG now and drew it up so that it lay along his thigh.

We looked at each other. I shrugged and got out of the car, leaning against the open door with the Smith & Wesson within reach. Louis climbed from the passenger side, stretched slightly to show Leon that his hands were empty, and then rested against the side of the car, the SIG now on the seat beside him.

Leon hauled himself from the tree and walked toward us. Other figures emerged from the trees around us. Five men, H &Ks hanging from their shoulders, long-bladed hunting knives at their belts, surrounded the car.

“Up against the car,” said Leon. I didn’t move. From around us came the sound of safeties clicking.

“Don’t move, you die now,” he said. I held his gaze, then turned and put my hands on the roof of the car. Louis did the same. As he stood behind me, Leon must have seen the SIG on the passenger seat but he didn’t seem concerned. He patted my chest, beneath my arms, and checked my ankles and thighs. When he was satisfied that I wasn’t wearing a wire, he did a similar check on Louis, then stepped back.

“Leave the car,” he instructed. Headlights shone as engines started up around us. A brown Dodge sedan and a green Nissan Patrol burst through from behind the treeline, followed by a flatbed Ford pickup with three pirogues lashed down on the bed. If the Fontenot compound was under surveillance, then whoever was responsible needed his eyesight tested.

“We got some stuff in the car,” I said to Leon. “We’re gonna take it out.” He nodded and watched as I removed the minisubs from behind the door panels. Louis took two magazines and handed one to me. The long cylinder stretched over the rear end of the receiver as I checked the safety at the front edge of the trigger guard. Louis placed a second magazine inside his jacket and tossed me a spare.

As we climbed into the back of the Dodge, two men drove our car out of sight and then jumped into the Nissan. Leon sat in the passenger seat of the Dodge beside the driver, a man in his fifties with long gray hair tied back in a ponytail, and indicated to him to move off. The other vehicles followed at a distance, so that we wouldn’t look like a convoy to any passing cops.

We drove along the border of East and West Feliciana, Thompson Creek to our right, until we came to a turnoff that led down to the riverbank. Two more cars, an ancient Plymouth and what looked like an even older Volkswagen Beetle, were pulled up at the bank, and two more pirogues lay beside them. Lionel Fontenot, dressed in blue jeans and a blue work shirt, stood by the Edsel. He cast an eye over the Calicos but didn’t say anything.

There were fourteen of us in all, most armed with H &Ks, two carrying M16 rifles, and we split three to a pirogue, with Lionel and the driver of the Dodge taking the lead in a smaller boat. Louis and I were separated and each handed a paddle, then we moved off upriver.

We rowed for twenty minutes, staying close to the western bank, before a darker shape appeared against the night sky. I could see lights flickering in windows and then, through a stand of trees, a small jetty against which a motorboat lay moored. The grounds of Joe Bones’s house were dark.

There was a low whistle from in front of us and hands were raised in the pirogues to indicate that we should stop rowing. Sheltered by the trees, which hung out over the water, we waited in silence. A light flashed on the jetty, and briefly, the face of a guard was illuminated as he lit a cigarette. I heard a low splash somewhere in front of me, and high on the bank, an owl hooted. I could see the guard moving against the moon-haunted water, could hear the sound of his boots scuffing against the wooden jetty. Then a dark shape rose up beside him and the pattern of the moonlight on the water was disturbed. A knife flashed and the red ember of the cigarette tumbled through the night air like a signal of distress as the guard crumpled to the ground. He made hardly a sound as he was lowered into the water.

The ponytailed man stood waiting at the jetty as we paddled by, moving as close as we could to the grass bank beyond before we climbed from the pirogues and dragged them onto dry land. The bank rose up to join an expanse of green lawn, undisturbed by flowers or trees. It rolled uphill to the back of the house, where steps led up to a patio overlooked by two French windows at ground level and a gallery on the second floor, which mirrored the one on the front of the house. I caught a movement on the gallery and heard voices from the patio. Three guards at least, probably more at the front.

Lionel raised two fingers and singled out two men to my left. They moved forward cautiously, keeping low against the ground as they moved toward the house. They were about twenty yards in front of us when the house and grounds were suddenly illuminated with bright white light. The two men were caught like rabbits in headlights as shouts came from the house and automatic fire burst from the gallery. One of them spun like an ice skater who has missed his jump, blood bursting forth from his shirt like red flowers opening. He fell to the ground, his legs twisting, as his partner dived for the cover of a metal table, part of a lawn set that stood, semiobscured, by the riverbank.

The French windows opened and dark figures spilled out onto the patio. On the gallery, the guard was joined by two or three others, who raked the grass in front of us with heavy fire. From the sides of the house, muzzles flashed as more of Joe Bones’s men inched their way around.

Close to where I lay, Lionel Fontenot swore. We were partly protected by the slope of the lawn as it curved down to meet the river, but the guards on the gallery were angling for clear shots at us. Some of Fontenot’s men returned fire, but each time they did so, they exposed themselves to the guards at the house. One, a sharp-faced man in his forties with a mouth like a paper cut, grunted as a bullet hit him in the shoulder. He kept firing, even as the blood turned his shirt red.

“It’s fifty yards from here to the house,” I said. “There are guards moving in from the sides to cut us off. We don’t move now, we’re dead.” A spray of earth kicked up by Fontenot’s left hand. One of Joe Bones’s men had progressed almost to the bank by approaching from the front of the house. Two bursts of M16 fire came from behind the metal lawn table and he tumbled sideways, rolling along the grass into the river.

“Tell your men to get ready,” I hissed. “We’ll cover you.” The message was passed down the line.

“Louis!” I shouted. “You ready to try these things out?” A figure two men down from me responded with a wave and then the Calicos burst into life. One of the guards on the gallery bucked and danced as the 9 millimeter bullets from Louis’s gun tore into him. I pushed the selector on the trigger guard fully forward and sent a burst of automatic fire across the patio. The French windows exploded in a shower of glass and a guard tumbled down the steps and lay unmoving on the lawn. Lionel Fontenot’s men sprang from their cover and raced across the lawn, firing as they did so. I switched to single shot firing and concentrated on the eastern end of the house, sending wood splinters shooting into the air as I forced the men there to take cover.

Fontenot’s men were almost at the patio when two fell, hit by fire from behind the ruined French windows. Louis sent a burst into the room beyond and Fontenot’s men moved to the patio and entered the house. Exchanges of fire were coming from within as Louis and I rose and ran across the lawn.

To my left, the guy behind the lawn table abandoned his cover to join us. As he did so, something huge and dark appeared out of the shadows and launched itself from the grass with a deep, ferocious growl. The boerbul struck him on the chest, knocking him to the ground with its enormous weight. He shouted once, his hands pounding at the creature’s head, and then the huge jaws closed on his neck and the boerbul’s head shook as he tore the man’s throat apart.

The animal lifted its head and its eyes gleamed in the darkness as it found Louis. He was turning the Calico in its direction when it bounded from the dead body and sprang into the air. Its speed was astonishing. As it moved toward us, its dark form blotted out the stars in the sky above. It was at the apex of its jump when Louis’s Calico sang and bullets ripped into it, causing it to spasm in midair and land with a crunch on the grass not two feet from us. Its paws scrambled for purchase and its mouth worked in biting motions, even as blood and froth spilled from between its teeth. Louis pumped more rounds into it until it lay still.

My eye caught movement at the western corner of the house as we neared the steps. A muzzle flashed and Louis yelled in pain. The Calico dropped to the ground as he leaped for the steps, cradling his injured hand. I fired three shots and the guard dropped. Behind me, one of Fontenot’s men fired single shots from his M16 as he advanced toward the house, then let the gun hang from its shoulder strap as he reached the corner. I saw moonlight catch the blade of his knife as he stood waiting. The short muzzle of a Steyr appeared, followed by the face of one of Joe Bones’s men. I recognized him as the one who had driven the golf cart to the plantation gates on our first visit here, but the flash of recognition became one with the flash of the knife as it struck across his neck. A crimson jet flew into the air from his severed artery, but even as he fell Fontenot’s man raised the M16 once again and fired past him as he moved toward the front of the house.

Louis was examining his right hand as I reached him. The bullet had torn across the back of the hand, leaving a bad gash and damaging the knuckle of his forefinger. I tore a strip from the shirt of a dead guard who lay sprawled across the patio and wrapped it around Louis’s hand. I handed him the Calico and he worked the strap over his head, then fitted his middle finger into the trigger guard. With his left hand he freed his SIG, then nodded to me as he rose. “We better find Joe Bones.”

Through the patio doors lay a formal dining room. The dining table, which could seat at least eighteen people comfortably, was splintered and pitted by shots. On the wall, a portrait of a Southern gentleman standing by his horse had sustained a large hole through the horse’s belly and a selection of antique china plates lay shattered in the remains of their glass-fronted display cabinet. There were two bodies in the room. One of them was the ponytailed man who had driven the Dodge.

The dining room led out into a large carpeted hallway and a white chandeliered reception area, from which a staircase wound up to the next floor. The other doors at ground level stood open, but there were no sounds coming from inside. There was sustained firing on the upper levels as we made our way to the stairs. At their base, one of Joe Bones’s men lay in a pair of striped pajama bottoms, blood pooling from an ugly head wound.

From the top of the stairs, a series of doors stretched left and right. Fontenot’s men seemed to have cleared most of the rooms, but they had been pinned down in the alcoves and doorways by gunfire from the rooms at the western end of the house, one on the river side to the right, its panels already pockmarked by bullets, and the other facing out to the front of the house. As we watched, a man in blue overalls carrying a short-handled axe in one hand and a captured Steyr in the other moved quickly from his hiding place to within one doorway of the front-facing room. Shots came through the door on the right and he fell to the ground, clutching his leg.

I leaned into an alcove in which the remains of long-stemmed roses lay in a pool of water and shattered pottery and fired a sustained burst at the door on the front-facing side. Two of Fontenot’s men moved forward at the same time, keeping low on the ground as they did so. Across from me, Louis fired shots at the semiclosed river-side door. I stopped firing as Fontenot’s men reached the room and rushed the occupant. There were two more shots, then one of them emerged wiping his knife on his trousers. It was Lionel Fontenot. Behind him was Leon.

The two men took up positions at either side of the last room. Six more of his men moved forward to join him.

“Joe, it’s over now,” said Lionel. “We gon’ finish this thing.”

Two shots burst through the door. Leon raised his H &K and appeared to be about to fire, but Lionel raised his hand, looking past Leon to where I stood. I advanced forward and waited behind Leon’s back as Lionel pushed open the door with his foot, then pressed himself flat against the wall as two more shots rang out, followed by the click of a hammer on an empty chamber, a sound as final as the closing of a tomb.

Leon entered the room first, the H &K now replaced by his knives. I followed him, with Lionel behind me. The walls of Joe Bones’s bedroom were marked with holes and the night air entered through the shattered window and sent the white curtains swirling in the air like angry ghosts. The blonde who had lunched with Joe on his lawn earlier in the week lay dead against the far wall, a red stain on the left breast of her silk nightgown.

Joe Bones stood before the window in a red silk dressing gown. The Colt in his hand hung uselessly at his side but his eyes glowed with anger and the scar on his lip seemed painfully pinched and white against his skin. He dropped the gun.

“Do it, you fuck,” he hissed at Lionel. “Kill me, you got the fucking guts.”

Lionel closed the bedroom door behind us as Joe Bones turned to look at the woman.

“Ask him,” said Lionel.

Joe Bones didn’t seem to hear. His face seemed consumed with a look of terrible grief as his eyes traced the contours of the dead woman’s face. “Eight years,” he said softly. “Eight years she was with me.”

“Ask him,” repeated Lionel Fontenot.

I stepped forward and Joe Bones sneered as he turned, that look of sadness now gone. “The fucking grieving widower. You bring your trained nigger with you?”

I slapped him hard and he took a step back.

“I can’t save you, Joe, but if you help me maybe I can make it quicker for you. Tell me what Remarr saw the night the Aguillards died.”

He wiped blood from the corner of his mouth, smearing it across his cheek. “You have no idea what you’re dealing with, no fucking idea in the world. You’re so out of your fucking depth, the fucking pressure should be making your nose bleed.”

“He kills women and children, Joe. He’s going to kill again.”

Joe Bones twisted his mouth into the semblance of a grin, the scar distorting his full lips like a crack in a mirror. “You killed my woman and now you’re gonna kill me, no matter what I say. You got nothing to bargain with,” he said.

I glanced at Lionel Fontenot. He shook his head almost imperceptibly, but Joe Bones caught it. “See, nothing. All you can offer is a little less pain, and pain don’t hold no surprises for me.”

“He killed one of your own men. He killed Tony Remarr.”

“Tony left a print at the nigger’s house. He was careless and he paid the price. Your guy, he saved me the trouble of killing the old bitch and her brood myself. I meet him, I’ll shake his hand.”

Joe Bones smiled a broad smile like a flash of sunshine through dark, acrid smoke. Haunted by visions of tainted blood flowing through his veins, he had moved beyond ordinary notions of humanity and empathy, love and grief. In his shimmering red robe, he looked like a wound in the fabric of space and time.

“You’ll meet him in Hell,” I said.

“I see your bitch there, I’ll fuck her for you.” His eyes were bland and cold now. The smell of death hung around him like old cigar fumes. Behind me, Lionel Fontenot opened the door and the rest of his men walked quietly into the room. It was only now, seeing them all together in the ruined bedroom, that the resemblance between them became clear. Lionel held the door open for me.

“It’s a family thing,” he said as I left. Behind me, the door closed with a soft click like the knocking of bones.

After Joe Bones died, we gathered the bodies of the Fontenot dead on the lawn in front of the house. The five men lay side by side, crumpled and torn as only the dead can be. The gates to the plantation were opened and the Dodge, the VW and the pickup sped in. The bodies were loaded gently but quickly into the trunks of the cars, the injured helped into the rear seats. The pirogues were doused in gasoline, set on fire, and left to float down the river.

We drove from the plantation and kept driving until we reached the rendezvous point at Starhill. The three black Explorers I had seen at the Delacroix compound stood waiting, their motors idling, their lights dimmed. As Leon sprayed gasoline into the cars and the pickup, the bodies of the dead were removed, wrapped in tarps, and placed in the backs of two of the jeeps. Louis and I watched it all in silence.

As the jeeps roared into life and Leon threw lighted rags into the discarded vehicles, Lionel Fontenot walked over to us and stood with us as they burned. He took a small green notebook from his pocket, scribbled a number on a sheet, and tore it out.

“This guy will look after your friend’s hand. He’s discreet.”

“He knew who killed Lutice, Lionel,” I said.

He nodded. “Maybe. He wouldn’t tell, not even at the end.” He rubbed his index finger along a raw cut on the palm of his right hand, picking dirt from the wound. “I hear the feds are looking for someone around Baton Rouge, used to work in a hospital in New York.”

I stayed silent and he smiled. “We know his name. Man could hide out in the bayou for a long time, he knew his way around. Feds might not find him, but we will.” He gestured with his hand, like a king displaying his finest troops to his worried subjects. “We’re looking. We find him, it’ll end there.”

Then he turned and climbed into the driver’s seat of the lead jeep, Leon beside him, and they disappeared into the night, the red taillights like falling cigarettes in the darkness, like burning boats floating on black water.

I called Angel as we drove back to New Orleans. At an all-night drugstore I picked up antiseptic and a first-aid kit so we could work on Louis’s hand. There was a sheen of sweat on his face as I drove and the white rags binding his fingers were stained a deep red. When we arrived back at the Flaisance, Angel cleansed the wound with the antiseptic and tried to stitch it with some surgical thread. The knuckle looked bad and Louis’s mouth was stretched tight with pain. Despite his protests, I called the number we had been given. The bleary voice that answered the phone on the fourth ring shook the sleep from its tones when I mentioned Lionel’s name.

Angel drove Louis to the doctor’s office. When they had gone, I stood outside Rachel’s door and debated whether or not to knock. I knew she wasn’t asleep: Angel had spoken to her after I called, and I could sense her wakefulness. Still, I didn’t knock, but as I walked back toward my own room her door opened. She stood in the gap, a white T-shirt reaching almost to her knees, and waited for me. She stood carefully aside to let me enter.

“You’re still in one piece, I see,” she said. She didn’t sound particularly pleased.

I felt tired and sick from the sight of blood. I wanted to plunge my face into a sink of ice-cold water. I wanted a drink so badly my tongue felt swollen inside my mouth and only a bottle of Abita, ice frosting on its rim, and a shot of Redbreast whiskey could restore it to its normal size. My voice sounded like the croak of an old man on his deathbed when I spoke.

“I’m in one piece,” I said. “A lot of others aren’t. Louis took a bullet across the hand and too many people died out at the house. Joe Bones, most of his crew, his woman.”

Rachel turned her back and walked to the balcony window. Only the bedside lamp lit the room, casting shadows over the illustrations that she had kept from Woolrich and that were now restored to their places on the walls. Flayed arms and the face of a woman and a young man emerged from the semidarkness.

“What did you find out, for all that killing?”

It was a good question. As usual with good questions, the answer didn’t live up to it.

“Nothing, except that Joe Bones was happier to die painfully than to tell us what he knew.”

She turned then. “What are you going to do now?”

I was getting tired of questions, especially questions as difficult as these. I knew she was right and I felt disgusted at myself. It felt as if Rachel had become tainted through her contact with me. Maybe I should have told her all of those things then, but I was too tired and too sick and I could smell blood in my nostrils; and, anyway, I think she already knew most of it.

“I’m going to bed,” I said. “After that, I’m winging it.” Then I left her.

47

THE NEXT MORNING I awoke with an ache in my arms from toting the Calico, exacerbated by the lingering pain of the gunshot wound inflicted in Haven. I could smell powder on my fingers, in my hair, and on my discarded clothes. The room stank like the scene of a gunfight, so I opened the window and let the hot New Orleans air slip heavily into the room like a clumsy burglar.

I checked on Louis and Angel. Louis’s hand had been expertly bound after the doctor picked the shards of bone from the wound and padded the knuckle. Louis barely opened his eyes as I exchanged a few quiet words with Angel at the door. I felt guilty for what had happened, although I knew that neither of them blamed me.

I sensed, too, that Angel was anxious now to return to New York. Joe Bones was dead, and the police and the feds were probably closing in on Edward Byron, despite Lionel Fontenot’s doubts. Besides, I didn’t believe that it would take long for Woolrich to connect us to what had happened to Joe Bones, especially if Louis was walking around with a bullet crease on his hand. I told Angel all of this and he agreed that they would leave as soon as I returned, so that Rachel would not be left alone. The whole case seemed to have ground to a kind of halt for me. Elsewhere, the feds and the Fontenots were hunting Edward Byron, a man who still seemed as distant from me as the last emperor of China.

I left a message for Morphy. I wanted to see what his people had on Byron; I wanted to add flesh to the figure. As things stood, he was as shorn of identity as the faceless figures of the slain that the feds believed he had left behind. The feds might well have been right. With the local police, they could conduct a better search than a bunch of visitors from New York with delusions of adequacy. I had hoped to work my way toward him from a different direction, but with the death of Joe Bones that path seemed to have come to an end in a tangle of dark undergrowth.

I took my phone and my book of Ralegh’s writings and headed for Mother’s on Poydras Street, where I drank too many cups of coffee and picked at some bacon and brown toast. When you reach one of life’s dead ends, Ralegh is good company. “Go soul…since I needs must die / And give the world the lie.” Ralegh knew enough to take a stoical attitude to adversity, although he didn’t know enough to avoid getting his head cut off.

Beside me, a man ate ham and eggs with the concentrated effort of a bad lover, yellow egg yolk tingeing his chin like sunlight reflected from a buttercup. Someone whistled a snatch of “What’s New?” then lost his thread in the complicated chord changes of the song. The air was filled with the buzz of late morning conversation, a radio station easing into neutral with a bland rock song and the low, aggravated hum of distant, slow-moving traffic. Outside, it was another humid New Orleans day, the kind of day that leads lovers to fight and makes children sullen and grim.

An hour passed. I rang the detective squad in St. Martin and was told that Morphy had taken a day’s leave to work on his house. I had nothing better to do now, so I paid my bill, put some gas in the car, and started out once again toward Baton Rouge. I found a Lafayette station playing some scratchy Cheese Read, followed by Buckwheat Zydeco and Clifton Chenier, an hour of classic Cajun and zydeco, as the DJ put it. I let it play until the city fell away and the sound and the landscape became one.

A sheet of plastic slapped dryly in the early afternoon wind as I pulled up outside Morphy’s place. He was replacing part of the exterior wall on the west side of the house, and the lines holding the plastic in place over the exposed joints sang as the wind tried to yank them from their moorings. It tugged at one of the windows, which had not been fastened properly, and made the screen door knock at its frame like a tired visitor.

I called his name but there was no reply. I walked to the rear of the house, where the back door stood open, held in place by a piece of brick. I called again but my voice seemed to echo emptily through the central hallway. The rooms on the ground level were all unoccupied and no sounds came from upstairs. I drew my gun and climbed the stairs, newly planed in preparation for treating. The bedrooms were empty and the bathroom door stood wide open, toiletries neatly arranged by the sink. I checked the gallery and then went back downstairs. As I turned back toward the rear door, cold metal touched the base of my neck.

“Drop it,” said a voice.

I let the gun slip from my fingers.

“Turn around. Slowly.”

The pressure was removed from my neck and I turned to find Morphy standing before me, a nail gun held inches from my face. He let out a deep breath of relief and lowered the gun.

“Shit, you scared the hell out of me,” he said.

I could feel my heart thumping wildly in my chest. “Thanks,” I said. “I really needed that kind of adrenaline rush on top of five cups of coffee.” I sat down heavily on the bottom step.

“You look terrible, mon. You up late last night?”

I looked up to see if there was an edge to what he had said, but he had turned his back.

“Kind of.”

“You hear the news? Joe Bones and his crew were taken out last night. Someone cut Joe up pretty bad before he died, too. Police weren’t even sure it was him until they checked the prints.” He walked down to the kitchen and came back with a beer for himself and a soda for me. I noticed it was caffeine-free cola. Under his arm he held a copy of the Times-Picayune.

“You see this today?”

I took the paper from him. It was folded into quarter size, the bottom of the front page facing up. The headline read:

POLICE HUNT SERIAL KILLER IN RITUAL MURDERS. The story below contained details of the deaths of Tante Marie Aguillard and Tee Jean that could only have come from the investigation team itself: the display of the bodies, the manner of their discovery, the nature of some of the wounds. It went on to speculate on a possible link between the discovery of Lutice Fontenot’s body and the death of a man in Bucktown, known to have links with a leading crime figure. Worst of all, it said that police were also investigating a connection to a similar pair of murders in New York earlier this year. Susan and Jennifer were not named, but it was clear that the writer-anonymous beneath a “Times-Picayune Journalists” byline-knew enough about the murders to be able to put a name on the victims.

I put the paper down wearily. “Did the leak come from your guys?” I asked.

“Could have done, but I don’t think so. The feds are blaming us: they’re all over us, accusing us of sabotaging the investigation.” He sipped his beer before saying what was on his mind.

“One or two people maybe felt that it could have been you who leaked the stuff.” He was obviously uncomfortable saying it, but he didn’t look away.

“I didn’t do it. If they’ve got as far as Jennifer and Susan, it won’t be too long before they connect me to what’s happening. The last thing I need is the press crawling all over me.”

He considered what I said, then nodded. “I guess you’re right.”

“You speak to the editor?”

“He was contacted at home when the first edition came out. We got freedom of the press and the protection of sources coming out our ass. We can’t force him to tell but”- he rubbed at the tendons on the back of his neck-“it’s unusual for something like this to happen. The papers are real careful about jeopardizing investigations. I think it had to come from someone close to all this.”

I thought about it. “If they felt okay about using this stuff, then it must be cast iron and the source impeccable,” I said. “It could be that the feds are playing their own game on this.” It seemed to reaffirm our belief that Woolrich and his team were holding back, not only from me but probably from the police investigating team as well.

“It wouldn’t be anything new,” said Morphy. “Feds wouldn’t tell us what day it is, they thought they could get away with it. You think they might have planted the story?”

“Somebody did.”

Morphy finished his beer and crushed the can beneath his foot. A small stain of beer spread itself on the bare wood. He picked up a tool belt from where it hung on a hat stand near the door and strapped it on.

“You need any help?”

He looked at me. “Can you carry planks without falling over?”

“No.”

“Then you’re perfect for the job. There’s a spare pair of work gloves in the kitchen.”

For the rest of the afternoon I worked with my hands, hoisting and carrying, hammering and sawing. We replaced most of the wood on the west side, a gentle breeze spraying sawdust and shavings around us as we worked. Later, Angie returned from a shopping trip to Baton Rouge, carrying groceries and boutique bags. While Morphy and I cleaned up, she grilled steaks with sweet potatoes, carrots, and Creole rice, and we ate them in the kitchen as the evening drew in and the wind wrapped the house in its arms.

Morphy walked me out to my car. As I put the key in the ignition, he leaned in the window and said softly: “Someone tried to get to Stacey Byron yesterday. Know anything about it?”

“Maybe.”

“You were there, weren’t you? You were there when they took Joe Bones?”

“You don’t want to know the answer to that,” I replied. “Just like I don’t want to know about Luther Bordelon.”

As I drove away, I could see him standing before his uncompleted house. Then he turned away and returned to his wife.

When I arrived back at the Flaisance, Angel and Louis were packed and ready to go. They wished me luck and told me that Rachel had gone to bed early. She had booked a flight for the next day. I decided not to disturb her and went to my own room. I don’t even remember falling asleep.

The luminous dial on my watch read 8:30 A.M. when the pounding came at my door. I had been in deep sleep and I pulled myself slowly into wakefulness like a diver struggling for the surface. I had got as far as the edge of the bed when the door exploded inward and there were lights shining in my face and strong arms hauled me to my feet and pushed me hard against the wall. A gun was held to my head as the main light came on in the room. I could see NOPD uniforms, a couple of plainclothesmen, and directly to my right, Morphy’s partner Toussaint. Around me, men were tearing the room apart.

And I knew then that something had gone terribly, terribly wrong.

They allowed me to pull on a tracksuit and a pair of sneakers before cuffing me. I was marched through the hotel, past guests peering anxiously from their rooms, to a waiting police car. In a second car, her face pale and her hair matted from sleep, sat Rachel. I shrugged helplessly at her before we were driven in convoy from the Quarter.

I was questioned for three hours, then given a cup of coffee and grilled again for another hour. The room was small and brightly lit. It smelled of cigarette smoke and stale sweat. In one corner, where the plaster was broken and worn, I could see what looked like a bloodstain. Two detectives, Dale and Klein, did most of the questioning, Dale assuming the role of aggressive interrogator, threatening to dump me in the swamp with a bullet in the head for killing a Louisiana cop, Klein taking the part of the reasonable, sensitive man trying to protect me while ensuring that the truth was told. Even with other cops as the object of their attentions, the good cop-bad cop thing never went out of fashion.

I told them all I could, again and again and again. I told them of my visit to Morphy, the work on the house, the dinner, the departure, all of the reasons why my prints were all over the house. No, Morphy hadn’t given me the police files found in my room. No, I couldn’t say who did. No, only the night porter saw me re-enter the hotel, I didn’t speak to anyone else. No, I didn’t leave my room again that night. No, there was no one to confirm that fact. No. No. No. No. No.

Then Woolrich arrived and the merry-go-round started all over again. More questions, this time with the feds in attendance. And still, no one told me why I was there or what had happened to Morphy and his wife. In the end, Klein returned and told me I could go. Behind a slatted-rail divider, which separated the detective squadroom from the main corridor, Rachel sat with a mug of tea while the detectives around her studiously ignored her. In a cage ten feet behind her, a skinny white man with tattooed arms whispered obscenely to her.

Toussaint appeared. He was an overweight, balding man in his early fifties, with straggly white curls around his pate like the top of a hill erupting from out of a mist. He looked red eyed and nauseous and was as out of place here as I was.

A patrolman motioned to Rachel. “We’ll take you back to your hotel now, ma’am.” She stood. Behind her, the guy in the cage made sucking noises and grabbed his crotch in his hand.

“You okay?” I asked as she passed by.

She nodded dumbly, then: “Are you coming with me?”

Toussaint was at my left hand. “He’ll follow later,” he said. Rachel looked over her shoulder at me as the patrolman led her away. I gave her a smile and tried to make it look reassuring, but my heart wasn’t in it.

“Come on, I’ll drive you back and buy you a coffee on the way,” said Toussaint, and I followed him from the building.

We ended up in Mother’s, where less than twenty-four hours before I had sat waiting for Morphy’s call and where Toussaint would tell me how John Charles Morphy and his wife, Angela, had died.

Morphy had been due to work a special early duty that morning and Toussaint had dropped by to pick him up. They alternated pickup duties as it suited. That day, it happened to be Toussaint’s turn.

The screen door was closed, but the front door behind stood open. Toussaint called Morphy’s name, just as I had the afternoon before. He followed in my footsteps through the central hallway, checking the kitchen and the rooms to the right and left. He thought Morphy might have slept in, although he had never been late before, so he called up the stairs to the bedroom. There was no reply. He recalled that his stomach was already tightening as he worked his way up the stairs, calling Morphy’s name, then Angie’s, as he advanced. The door of their bedroom was partially open, but the angle obscured their bed.

He knocked once, then slowly opened the door. For a moment, the merest flashing splinter of a second, he thought he had disturbed their lovemaking, until the blood registered and he knew that this was a parody of all that love stood for, of all that it meant, and he wept then for his friend and his wife.

Even now, I seem to recall only snatches of what he said, but I can picture the bodies in my head. They were naked, facing each other on what had once been white sheets, their bodies locked together at the hips, their legs intertwined. From the waist, they leaned backward at arm’s length from each other. Both had been cut from neck to stomach. Their rib cages had been split and pulled back, and each had a hand buried in the breast of the other. As he neared, Toussaint saw that each was holding the other’s heart in the palm of a hand. Their heads hung back so that their hair almost touched their backs. Their eyes were gone, their faces removed, their mouths open in their final agony, their moment of death like an ecstasy. In them, love was reduced to an example to other lovers of the futility of love itself.

As Toussaint spoke, a wave of guilt swept over me and broke across my heart. I had brought this thing to their house. By helping me, Morphy and his wife had been marked for a terrible death, just as the Aguillards too seemed to have been tainted by their contact with me. I stank of mortality.

And in the midst of it all, some lines of verse seemed to float into my head and I could not recall how I had resurrected them, or who had given them to me in the first place. And it seemed to me that their source was important, although I could not tell why, except that in the lines there seemed to be echoes of what Toussaint had seen. But as I tried to remember a voice speaking them to me, it slipped away, and try as I might, I could not bring it back. Only the lines remained. Some metaphysical poet, I thought. Donne, perhaps. Yes, almost certainly Donne.

If th’unborne

Must learne, by my being cut up, and torne:

Kill, and dissect me, Love; for this

Torture against thine owne end is,

Rack’t carcasses make ill Anatomies.

Remedium amoris, wasn’t that the term? The torture and death of lovers as a remedy for love.

“He helped me,” I said. “I involved him in this.”

“He involved himself,” Toussaint said. “He wanted to do it. He wanted to bring this guy to an end.”

I held his gaze.

“For Luther Bordelon?”

Toussaint looked away. “What does it matter now?”

But I couldn’t explain that in Morphy I saw something of myself, that I had felt for his pain, that I wanted to believe he was better than me. I wanted to know.

“Garza called the Bordelon thing,” said Toussaint at last. “Garza killed him and then Morphy supplied the throwdown. That’s what he said. Morphy was young. Garza shouldn’t have put him in that situation, but he did, and Morphy’s been paying for it ever since.” And then he caught himself using the present tense and went silent.

Outside, people were living another day: working, touring, eating, flirting still continued despite all that had taken place, all that was happening. It seemed, somehow, that it should all have come to a halt, that the clocks should have been stopped and the mirrors covered, the doorbells silenced and the voices reduced to a respectful, hushed volume. Maybe if they had seen the pictures of Susan and Jennifer, of Tante Marie and Tee Jean, of Morphy and Angie, then they would have stopped and considered. And that was what the Traveling Man wanted: to provide, in the deaths of others, a reminder of the deaths of us all and the worthlessness of love and loyalty, of parenthood and friendship, of sex and need and joy, in the face of the emptiness to come.

As I stood to leave, something else came to me, something awful that I had almost forgotten, and I felt a deep, violent ache in my gut, which spread through my body until I was forced to lean against the wall, my hand scrabbling for purchase.

“Ah, God, she was pregnant.”

I looked at Toussaint and his eyes briefly fluttered closed.

“He knew, didn’t he?”

Toussaint said nothing, but there was despair in his eyes. I didn’t ask what the Traveling Man had done to the unborn child, but in that instant, I saw a terrible progression over the last months of my life. It seemed that I had moved from the death of my own child, my Jennifer, to the deaths of many children, the victims of Adelaide Modine and her partner, Hyams, and now, finally, to the deaths of all children. Everything this Traveling Man did signified something beyond itself: in the death of Morphy’s unborn child, I saw all hope for the future reduced to tattered flesh.

“I’m supposed to bring you back to your hotel,” said Toussaint at last. “The New Orleans PD will make sure you get on the evening flight back to New York.”

But I hardly heard him. All I could think was that the Traveling Man had been watching us all along and that his game was still going on around us. We were all participants, whether we wanted to be or not.

And I recalled something that a con man named Saul Mann had once told me back in Portland, something that seemed important to me yet I couldn’t recall why.

You can’t bluff someone who isn’t paying attention.

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.

49

THE VOICE on the telephone was heavy with tiredness and tension.

“Woolrich, it’s Bird.” I spoke as I drove; a St. Martin ’s deputy had retrieved the rented car from the Flaisance.

“Hey.” There was no life to the word. “What have you heard?”

“That Byron’s dead, some of your men too. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, it was a mess. They call you in New York?”

“No.” I debated whether or not to tell him the truth and decided not to. “I missed the flight. I’m heading toward Lafayette.”

“ Lafayette? Shit, what you doin’ in Lafayette?”

“Hanging around.” With Toussaint and Dupree, it had been decided that I should talk to Woolrich. Someone had to tell him that his daughter had been found. “Can you meet me?”

“Shit, Bird, I’m on my last legs here.” Then, resignedly: “Sure, I’ll meet you. We can talk about what happened today. Give me an hour. I’ll meet you in the Jazzy Cajun, off the highway. Anyone will tell you where it is.” I could hear him coughing at the other end of the phone.

“Your lady friend go home?”

“No, she’s still here.”

“That’s good,” he said. “It’s good to have someone with you at times like this.” Then he hung up.

The Jazzy Cajun was a small dark bar annexed to a motel, with pool tables and a country music jukebox. Behind the bar, a woman restocked the beer while Willie Nelson played over the speakers.

Woolrich arrived shortly after I began drinking my second coffee. He was carrying a canary yellow jacket and the armpits of his shirt were stained with sweat. The shirt itself was marked with dirt on the back and sleeves, and one elbow was torn. His tan trousers were dark with mud at the cuffs and hung over mud-encrusted, ankle-high boots. He ordered a bourbon and a coffee, then took a seat beside me near the door. We didn’t say anything for a time, until Woolrich drained half of his bourbon and began sipping at his coffee.

“Listen, Bird,” he began. “I’m sorry for what went down between us this last week or so. We were both trying to bring this to an end our own way. Now that it’s done, well…” He shrugged and tipped his glass at me before draining it and signaling for another. There were black stains beneath his eyes and I could see the beginnings of a painful boil at the base of his neck. His lips were dry and cracked and he winced as the bourbon hit the inside of his mouth. He noticed my look. “Mouth ulcers,” he explained. “They’re a bitch.” He took another sip of coffee. “I guess you want to hear what happened.”

I shook my head. I wanted to put off the moment, but not like that.

“What are you going to do now?” I asked.

“Sleep,” he said. “Then maybe take some time off, go down to Mexico and see if I can’t rescue Lisa from these goddamn religious freaks.”

I felt a pain in my heart and stood suddenly. I wanted a drink as badly as I had ever wanted anything before in my life. Woolrich didn’t seem to notice my lack of composure, or even register that I was walking toward the men’s room. I could feel sweat on my forehead and my skin felt hypersensitive, as if I was about to come down with a fever.

“She’s been asking after you, Birdman,” I heard him say, and I stopped dead.

“What did you say?” I didn’t turn around.

“She asks after you,” he repeated.

I turned then. “When did you hear from her last?”

He waved the glass. “Couple of months back, I suppose. Two or three.”

“You sure?”

He stopped and stared at me. I hung by a thread over a dark place and watched as something small and bright separated from the whole and disappeared into the blackness, never to be found again. The surroundings of the bar fell away and there was only Woolrich and me, alone, with nothing to distract either of us from the other’s words. There was no ground beneath my feet, no air above me. I heard a howling in my head as images and memories coursed through my mind.

Woolrich standing on the porch, his finger on the cheek of Florence Aguillard.

“I call this my metaphysical tie, my George Herbert tie.”

A couplet from Ralegh, from “The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage,” the poem from which Woolrich so loved to quote: “Blood must be my bodies balmer/No other balme will there be given.”

The second phone call I had received in the Flaisance, the one during which the Traveling Man had allowed no questions, the one during which Woolrich was in attendance.

“They have no vision. They have no larger view of what they’re doing. There’s no purpose to it.”

Woolrich and his men seizing Rachel’s notes.

“I’m torn between keeping you in touch and telling you nothing.”

Cops throwing a bag of donuts he had touched into a trash can.

“Are you fucking her, Bird?”

You can’t bluff someone who isn’t paying attention.

Adelaide Modine. “They can sniff each other out.”

And a figure in a New York bar, fingering a Penguin volume of metaphysical verse and quoting verses from Donne.

“Rack’t carcasses make ill Anatomies.”

A metaphysical sensibility: that was what the Traveling Man had, what Rachel had tried to pinpoint only days before, what united the poets whose works had lined the shelves of Woolrich’s East Village apartment on the night he took me back there to sleep, on the night after he killed my wife and child.

“Bird, you okay?” His pupils were tiny, like little black holes sucking the light from the room.

I turned away. “Yeah, just a moment of weakness, that’s all. I’ll be back.”

“Where are you going, Birdman?” There was doubt in his voice, and something else: a note of warning, of violence, and I wondered if my wife had heard it as she tried to escape, as he came after her, as he broke her nose against the wall.

“I have to go to the john,” I said.

I am still not certain why I turned away. Bile was rising in my throat, threatening to make me gag and vomit on the floor. A fierce, burning pain dug at my stomach and clawed at my heart. It was as if a veil had been pulled aside at the moment of my death, revealing only a cold, black emptiness beyond. I wanted to turn away. I wanted to turn away from it all, and when I returned, everything would be normal again. I would have a wife and a child who looked like her mother. I would have a small, peaceful home and a patch of lawn to tend and someone who would stand by me, even to the end.

The toilet was dark and smelled of stale urine from the unflushed bowl, but the tap worked. I splashed cold water on my face, then reached into my jacket pocket for my phone.

It wasn’t there. I had left it on the table with Woolrich. I wrenched the door open and moved around the bar, my right hand drawing my pistol, but Woolrich was already gone.

I called Toussaint but he had left the office. Dupree had gone home. I convinced the switchboard operator to ring Dupree’s home number and to ask him to call me back. Five minutes later he did. His voice was bleary.

“This had better be good,” he said.

“Byron isn’t the killer,” I said.

“What?” He was wide awake instantly.

“He didn’t kill them,” I repeated. I was outside the bar, gun in hand, but there was no sign of Woolrich. I stopped two black women passing with a child between them, but they backed off as soon as they saw the gun. “Byron wasn’t the Traveling Man. Woolrich was. He’s running. I caught him out with a lie about his daughter. He said he had spoken to her two or three months back. You and I both know that’s not possible.”

“You could have made a mistake.”

“Dupree, listen to me. Woolrich set Byron up. He killed my wife and daughter. He killed Morphy and his wife, Tante Marie, Tee Jean, Lutice Fontenot, Tony Remarr, and he killed his own daughter too. He’s running, do you hear me? He’s running.”

“I hear you,” said Dupree. His voice was dry with the realization of how wrong we had been.

One hour later, they hit Woolrich’s apartment in Algiers, on the south bank of the Mississippi. It lay on the upper floor of a restored house on Opelousas Avenue, above an old grocery store, approached by a flight of cast iron stairs, girded with gardenias, that led up to a gallery. Woolrich’s apartment was the only one in the building, with two arched windows and a solid oak door. The New Orleans police were backed up by six FBI men. The cops led, the feds taking up positions at either side of the door. There was no movement visible in the apartment through the windows. They had not expected any.

Two cops swung an iron battering ram with Hi, Y’all painted in white on its flat head. It took one swing to knock the door open. The FBI men poured into the house, the police securing the street and the surrounding yards. They checked the tiny kitchen, the unmade bed, the lounge with the new television, the empty pizza cartons and beer cans, the Penguin poetry editions which sat in a milk crate, the picture of Woolrich and his daughter smiling from on top of a nest of tables.

In the bedroom was a closet, open and containing an array of wrinkled clothes and two pairs of tan shoes, and a metal cabinet sealed with a large steel lock.

“Break it,” instructed the agent in charge of the operation, Assistant SAC Cameron Tate. O’Neill Brouchard, the young FBI man who had driven me to Tante Marie’s house centuries before, struck at the lock with the butt of his machine pistol. It broke on the third attempt and he pulled the doors open.

The explosion blew O’Neill Brouchard backward through the window, almost tearing his head off in the process, and sent a hailstorm of glass shards into the narrow confines of the bedroom. Tate was blinded instantly, glass embedding itself in his face, neck, and his Kevlar vest. Two other FBI men sustained serious injuries to the face and hands as part of Woolrich’s store of empty glass jars, his laptop computer, a modified H3000 voice synthesizer, a smaller, portable voice changer with the capacity to alter pitch and tone, and a flesh-colored mask, used to obscure his mouth and nose, were blown to pieces. And amid the flames and the smoke and the shards of glass, burning pages fluttered to the ground like black moths, a mass of biblical apocrypha disintegrating into ash.

As O’Neill Brouchard was dying, I sat in the detective squad room in St. Martinville as men were pulled in from holidays and days off to assist in the search. Woolrich had switched off his cell phone but the phone company had been alerted. If he used it, they would try to pinpoint a location.

Someone handed me a cup of coffee in an alligator cup, and while I drank it, I tried Rachel’s room at the motel again. On the tenth ring the desk clerk interrupted.

“Are you…Do they call you the Birdman?” he said. He sounded young and uncertain.

“Yes, some people do.”

“I’m sorry, sir. Did you call before?”

I told him that this was my third call. I was aware of an edge in my voice.

“I was grabbing lunch. I have a message for you, from the FBI.”

He said the three letters with a sort of wonder in his voice. Nausea bubbled in my throat.

“It’s from Agent Woolrich, Mr. Birdman. He said to tell you that he and Ms. Wolfe were taking a trip, and that you’d know where to find them. He said he wanted you to keep it to just the three of you. He doesn’t want anyone else to spoil the occasion. He told me to tell you that especially, sir.”

I closed my eyes and his voice grew further away.

“That’s the message, sir. Did I do okay?”

Toussaint, Dupree and I lay the map across Dupree’s desk. Dupree took out a red felt-tip and drew a circle around the Crowley-Ramah area, with the two towns acting as the diameters of the circle and Lafayette as its center.

“I figure he’s got a place in there somewhere,” said Dupree. “If you’re right and he needed to be close to Byron, if not to the Aguillards as well, then we’re looking at an area as far as Krotz Springs to the north and, damn, maybe as far as Bayou Sorrel to the south. If he took your friend, that probably delayed him a little: he needed time to check motel reservations-not much, but enough if he was unlucky with the places he called-and he needed time to get her out. He won’t want to stay on the roads, so he’ll hole up, maybe in a motel or, if it’s close enough, his own place.”

He tapped the pen in the center of the circle. “We’ve alerted the locals, the feds, and the state troopers. That leaves us-and you.”

I had been thinking of what Woolrich had said, that I would know where to find them, but so far nothing had come to me. “I can’t pin anything down. The obvious ones, like the Aguillard house and his own place in Algiers, are already being checked, but I don’t think he’s going to be at either of those places.”

I put my head in my hands. My fears for Rachel were obscuring my reasoning. I needed to pull back. I took my jacket and walked to the door.

“I need space to think. I’ll stay in touch.”

Dupree seemed about to object, but he said nothing. Outside, my car was parked in a police space. I sat in it, rolled down the windows, and took my Louisiana map from the glove compartment. I ran my fingers over the names: Arnaudville, Grand Coteau, Carencro, Broussard, Milton, Catahoula, Coteau Holmes, St. Martinville itself.

The last name seemed familiar from somewhere, but by that point all the towns seemed to resonate with some form of meaning, which left them all meaningless. It was like repeating your name over and over and over again in your head, until the name itself lost its familiarity and you began to doubt your own identity. I started to drive out of town toward Lafayette.

Still, St. Martinville came back to me again. Something about New Iberia and a hospital. A nurse. Nurse Judy Neubolt. Judy the Nut. As I drove, I recalled the conversation that I had had with Woolrich when I’d arrived in New Orleans for the first time after the deaths of Susan and Jennifer. Judy the Nut. “She said I murdered her in a past life.” Was the story true, or did it mean something else? Had Woolrich been toying with me, even then?

The more I thought about it, the more certain I became. He had told me that Judy Neubolt had moved to La Jolla on a one-year contract after their relationship broke up. I doubted that Judy had ever got as far as La Jolla.

Judy Neubolt wasn’t in the current directory, or the previous year’s directory either. I found her in an old directory in a gas station-her phone had since been disconnected- and figured I could get more directions in St. Martinville. Then I called Huckstetter at home, gave him Judy Neubolt’s address, and asked him to contact Dupree in an hour if he hadn’t heard from me. He agreed, reluctantly.

As I drove, I thought of David Fontenot and the call from Woolrich that had almost certainly brought him to Honey Island, a promise of an end to the search for his sister. He couldn’t have known how close he was to her resting place when he died.

I thought of the deaths I had brought on Morphy and Angie; the echo of Tante Marie’s voice in my head as he came for her; and Remarr, gilded in fading sunlight. I think I realized, too, why the details had appeared in the newspaper: it was Woolrich’s way of bringing his work to a larger audience, a modern-day equivalent of the public anatomization.

And I thought of Lisa: a small, heavy, dark-eyed girl, who had reacted badly to her parents’ separation, who had sought refuge in a strange Christianity in Mexico, and who had returned at last to her father. What had she seen to force him to kill her? Her father washing blood from his hands in a sink? The remains of Lutice Fontenot or some other unfortunate floating in a jar?

Or had he simply killed her because the pleasure he took in disposing of her, in mutilating his own flesh and blood, was as close as he could come to turning the knife on his own body, to enduring his own anatomization and finding at last the deep red darkness within himself?

50

NEAT LAWNS mixed with thick growths of cypress as I drove back along the blacktop of 96 to St. Martinville, past a God Is Pro-Life sign and the warehouselike structure of Podnuh’s nightclub. At Thibodeaux’s Café, on the neat town square, I asked for directions to Judy Neubolt’s address. They knew the house, even knew that the nurse had moved to La Jolla for a year, maybe longer, and that her boyfriend was maintaining the house.

Perkins Street started almost opposite the entrance to Evangeline State Park. At the end of the street was a T-junction, which disappeared on the right into a rural setting, with houses scattered at distant intervals. Judy Neubolt’s house was on this street, a small, two-story dwelling, strangely low despite the two floors, with two windows on either side of a screen door and three much smaller windows on the upper level. At the eastern side, the roof sloped down, reducing it to a single story. The wood of the house had been newly painted a pristine white, and damaged slates on the roof had been replaced, but the yard was overgrown with weeds and the woods beyond had begun to make inroads on the boundaries of the property.

I parked some way from the house and approached it through the woods, stopping at their verge. The sun was already falling from its apex and it cast a red glow across the roof and walls. The rear door was bolted and locked. There seemed to be no option but to enter from the front.

As I moved forward, my senses jangled with a tension I had not felt before. Sounds, smells, and colors were too sharp, too overpowering. I felt as if I could pick out the component parts of every noise that came to me from the surrounding trees. My gun moved jerkily, my hand responding too rapidly to the signals from my brain. I was conscious of the firmness of the trigger against the ball of my finger and every crevice and rise of the grip against the palm of my hand. The sound of the blood pumping in my ears was like an immense hand banging on a heavy oak door, my feet on the leaves and twigs like the crackling of some huge fire.

The drapes were pulled on the windows, top and bottom, and across the inner door. Through a gap in the drapes on the door I could see black material, hung to prevent anyone from peering through the cracks. The screen door opened with a squeak of rusty hinges as I eased it ajar with my right foot, my body shielded by the wall of the house. I could see a thick spider’s web at the upper part of the door frame, the brown, drained husks of trapped insects shivering in the vibrations from the opening door.

I reached in and turned the handle on the main door. It opened easily. I let it swing to its fullest expanse, revealing the dimly lit interior of the house. I could see the edge of a sofa, one half of a window at the other side of the house, and to my right, the beginning of a hallway. I took a deep breath, which echoed in my head like the low, pained gasp of a sick animal, then moved quickly to my right, the screen door closing behind me.

I now had a full, uninterrupted view of the main room of the house. The exterior had been deceptive. Judy Neubolt, or whoever had decided on the design of the house’s interior, had removed one floor entirely so that the room reached right to the roof, where two skylights, now encrusted with filth and partly obscured by black drapes stretched beneath them, allowed thin shafts of sunlight to penetrate to the bare boards below. The only illumination came from a pair of dim floor lamps, one at each end of the room.

The room was furnished with a long sofa, decorated with a red-and-orange zigzag pattern, which stood facing the front of the house. At either side of it were matching chairs, with a low coffee table in the center and a TV cabinet beneath one of the windows facing the seating area. Behind the sofa was a dining table and six chairs, with a fireplace to their rear. The walls were decorated with samples of Indian art and one or two vaguely mystical paintings of women with flowing white dresses standing on a mountain or beside the sea. It was hard to make out details in the dimness.

At the eastern end was a raised wooden gallery, reached by a flight of steps to my left, which led up to a sleeping area with a pine bed and a matching closet.

Rachel hung upside down from the gallery, a rope attached from her ankles to the rail above. She was naked and her hair stretched to within two feet of the floor. Her arms were free and her hands hung beyond the ends of her hair. Her eyes and mouth were wide open, but she gave no indication that she saw me. A needle, attached to the plastic pipe of a drip, was taped to her left arm. The drip bag hung from a metal frame, allowing the ketamine to seep slowly and continuously into her system. On the floor beneath her was stretched an expanse of clear plastic sheeting.

Beneath the gallery was a dark kitchen area, with pine cupboards, a tall refrigerator, and a microwave oven beside the sink. Three stools stood empty by a breakfast nook. To my right, on the wall facing the gallery, hung an embroidered tapestry with a pattern similar to the sofa and chairs. A thin patina of dust lay over everything.

I checked the hallway behind me. It led into a second bedroom, this one empty but for a bare mattress on which lay a military green sleeping bag. A green knapsack lay open beside the bed and I could see some jeans, a pair of cream trousers, and some men’s shirts inside. The room, with its low, sloping roof, took up about half the width of the house, which meant that there was a room of similar size on the other side of the wall.

I moved back toward the main room, all the time keeping Rachel in sight. There was no sign of Woolrich, although he could have been standing hidden in the hallway at the other side of the house. Rachel could give me no indication of where he might be. I began moving slowly along the tapestried wall to the far wall of the house.

I was about halfway across when a movement behind Rachel caught my attention and I spun, my gun raised to shoulder level as I instinctively assumed a marksman’s stance.

“Put it down, Birdman, or she dies now.” He had been waiting in the darkness behind her, shielded by her body. He stood close to her now, most of his body still hidden by her own. I could see the edge of his tan pants, the sleeve of his white shirt, and a sliver of his head, nothing more. If I tried to shoot, I would almost certainly hit Rachel.

“I have a gun pointing at the small of her back, Bird. I don’t want to ruin such a beautiful body with a bullet hole, so put the gun down.”

I bent down and placed the gun gently on the ground.

“Now kick it away from you.”

I kicked it with the side of my foot and watched it slide across the floor and spin to rest by the foot of the nearest chair.

He emerged from the shadows then, but he was no longer the man that I had known. It was as if, with the revelation of his true nature, a metamorphosis had occurred. His face was more gaunt than ever and the dark shadows beneath his eyes gave him a skeletal look. But those eyes: they shone in the semidarkness like black jewels. As my eyes grew more accustomed to the light, I saw that his irises had almost disappeared. His pupils were large and dark and fed greedily on the light in the room.

“Why did it have to be you?” I said, as much to myself as to him. “You were my friend.”

He smiled then, a bleak, empty smile that drifted across his face like snow.

“How did you find her, Bird?” he asked, his voice low. “How did you find Lisa? I gave you Lutice Fontenot, but how did you find Lisa?”

“Maybe she found me,” I replied.

He shook his head in slow disappointment. “It doesn’t matter,” he said softly. “I don’t have time for those things now. I got a whole new song to sing.”

He was fully in view now. In one hand he held what looked like a modified, wide-barreled air pistol, in the other a scalpel. A SIG was tucked into the waistband of his pants. I noticed that they still had mud on the cuffs.

“Why did you kill her?”

Woolrich twisted the scalpel in his hand. “Because I could.”

Around us, the light in the room changed, darkening as a cloud obscured the slivers of sunlight filtering through the skylights above us. I moved slightly, shifting my weight, my eye on my gun where it lay on the floor. My movement seemed exaggerated, as if, faced with the potential of the ketamine, everything shifted too quickly by comparison. Woolrich’s gun came up in a single fluid moment.

“Don’t, Bird. You won’t have long to wait. Don’t rush the end.”

The room brightened again, but only marginally. The sun was setting fast. Soon there would only be darkness.

“It was always going to end this way, Bird, you and me in a room like this. I planned it, right from the start. You were always going to die this way. Maybe here, or maybe later, in some other place.” He smiled again. “After all, they were going to promote me. It would have been time to move on again. But, in the end, it was always going to come down to this.”

He moved forward, one step, the gun never wavering.

“You’re a little man, Bird. Do you have any idea how many little people I’ve killed? Trailer park trash in penny-ass towns from here to Detroit. Cracker bitches who spent their lives watching Oprah and fucking like dogs. Addicts. Drunks. Haven’t you ever hated those people, Bird, the ones you know are worthless, the ones who will never amount to anything, will never do anything, will never contribute anything? Have you ever thought that you might be one of them? I showed them how worthless they were, Bird. I showed them how little they mattered. I showed your wife and your daughter how little they mattered.”

“And Byron?” I asked. “Was he one of the little people, or did you turn him into one of them?” I wanted to keep him talking, maybe work my way toward my gun. As soon as he stopped, he would try to kill both Rachel and me. But more than that, I wanted to know why, as if there could ever be a why that would explain all of this.

“Byron,” said Woolrich. He smiled slightly. “I needed to buy myself some time. When I cut up the girl at Park Rise, everyone believed the worst of him and he ran, all the way back to Baton Rouge. I visited him, Bird. I tested the ketamine on him and then I just kept giving it to him. He tried to run once, but I found him. In the end, I find them all.”

“You warned him that the feds were coming, didn’t you? You sacrificed your own men to ensure that he would lash out at them, to ensure that he died before he could start raving to them. Did you warn Adelaide Modine too, after you sniffed her out? Did you tell her I was coming after her? Did you make her run?”

Woolrich didn’t answer. Instead, he ran the blunt edge of the scalpel down Rachel’s arm. “Have you ever wondered how skin so thin…can hold so much blood in?” He turned the scalpel and ran the blade across her scapula, from the right shoulder to the space between her breasts. Rachel did not move. Her eyes remained open, but something glittered and a tear trickled from the corner of her left eye and lost itself in the roots of her hair. Blood flowed from the wound, running along the nape of her neck and pooling at her chin before it fell on her face, drawing red lines along her features.

“Look, Bird,” he said. “I think the blood is going to her head.”

His head tilted. “And then I drew you in. There’s a circularity to this which you should appreciate, Bird. After you die, everybody is going to know about me. Then I’ll be gone-they won’t find me, Bird, I know every trick in the book-and I’ll start again.”

He smiled slightly.

“You don’t look very appreciative,” he said. “After all, Bird, I gave you a gift when I killed your family. If they had lived, they’d have left you and you would have become just another drunk. In a sense, I kept the family together. I chose them because of you, Bird. You befriended me in New York, you paraded them in front of me, and I took them.”

“Marsyas,” I said quietly.

Woolrich glanced at Rachel. “She’s a smart lady, Bird. Just your type. Just like Susan. And soon she’ll be just another of your dead lovers, except this time you won’t have long to grieve over her.”

His hand flicked the scalpel back and forth, tearing fine lines across Rachel’s arm. I don’t think he even realized what he was doing, or the manner in which he was anticipating the acts to come.

“I don’t believe in the next world, Bird. It’s just a void. This is Hell, Bird, and we are in it. All the pain, all the hurt, all the misery you could ever imagine, you can find it here. It’s a culture of death, the only religion worth following. The world is my altar, Bird.

“But I don’t think you’ll ever understand. In the end, the only time a man really understands the reality of death, of the final pain, is at the moment of his own. It’s the flaw in my work, but somehow, it makes it more human. Look upon it as my conceit.” He turned the scalpel in his hand, dying sunlight and blood mingling on the blade. “She was right all along, Bird. Now it’s time for you to learn. You’re about to receive, and become, a lesson in mortality.

“I’m going to recreate the Pietà again, Bird, but this time with you and your lady friend. Can’t you see it? The most famous representation of grief and death in the history of the world, a potent symbol of self-sacrifice for the greater good of humanity, of hope, of resurrection, and you’re going to be a part of it. Except this is the anti-resurrection we’re creating, darkness made flesh.”

He moved forward again, his eyes terrifyingly bright.

“You’re not going to come back from the dead, Bird, and the only sins you’re dying for are your own.”

I was already moving to the right when the gun fired. I felt a sharp, stinging pain in my left side as the aluminum-bodied syringe struck and I heard the sound of Woolrich’s footsteps approaching across the wooden floor. I lashed out at it with my left hand, dislodging the needle painfully from my flesh. It was a huge dose. I could already feel it taking effect as I reached for my gun. I gripped the butt hard and tried to draw a bead on Woolrich.

He killed the lights. Caught in the center of the floor, away from Rachel’s body, he moved to the right. I found a shape moving past the window and I loosed off two shots. There was a grunt of pain and the sound of glass breaking. A finger of sunlight lanced into the room.

I worked my way backward until I reached the second hallway. I tried to catch a glimpse of Woolrich but he seemed to have disappeared into the shadows. A second syringe whacked into the wall beside me and I was forced to dive to my left. My limbs were heavy now, my arms and legs propelling me with difficulty. I felt as if there was a pressure on my chest and I knew I would not be able to support my own weight if I tried to rise.

I kept moving backward, every movement a huge effort, but I felt certain that if I stopped, I would never be able to move again. The creaking of boards came from the main room and I heard Woolrich breathing harshly. He barked out a short laugh and I could hear the pain in it.

“Fuck you, Bird,” he said. “Shit, that hurts.” He laughed again. “I’m going to make you pay for that, Bird, you and the woman. I’m going to tear your fucking souls apart.”

His voice came to me as if through a heavy fog that distorted the sound and made it difficult to tell distances or direction. The walls of the hallway rippled and fragmented, and black gore oozed from the cracks. A hand reached out to me, a slim, female hand with a narrow gold loop on its wedding finger. I saw myself reach out to touch it, although I could still feel my hands on the floor beneath me. A second female hand appeared, flailing blindly.

bird

I backed away, shaking my head to try to clear the vision. Then two smaller hands emerged from the darkness, delicate and childlike, and I closed my eyes tightly and gritted my teeth.

daddy

“No,” I hissed. I dug my nails into the floor until I heard one crack, and pain coursed through the index finger of my left hand. I needed the pain. I needed it to fight off the effects of the ketamine. I pressed down hard on the injured finger and the pain made me gasp. There were still shadows moving along the wall, but the figures of my wife and child had gone.

I was conscious now of a reddish glow bathing the hallway. My back struck something cold and heavy, which moved slowly as I pressed against it. I was leaning against a half-open reinforced steel door, with three bolts on its left side. The central bolt was a monster, easily an inch in diameter with a huge open brass lock hanging from it. Red light seeped out from the crack in the door.

“Birdman, it’s almost over now,” said Woolrich. His voice sounded very close now, although I still could not see him. I guessed he was standing at the very edge of the corner, waiting for me to finally stop moving. “The drug is going to stop you soon. Throw the gun away, Bird, and we can get started. The sooner we start, the sooner we finish.”

I leaned back harder on the door and felt it give fully. I pushed back with my heels once, twice, a third time, until I came to rest against a set of shelving that reached from ceiling to floor. The room was lit by a single red bulb, which hung unshaded from the center of the ceiling. The windows had been bricked up, the brickwork left uncovered. There was no natural light to illuminate the contents of the room.

Opposite me, to the left of the door, was a row of metal shelving, perforated bars holding the shelves in place with screws. On each shelf sat a number of glass jars, and in each jar, glowing in the dim red light, lay the remains of a human face. Most were beyond recognition. Lying in the formaldehyde, some had sunken in on themselves. Eyelashes were still visible on some, lips bleached almost white on others, the skin at their edges tattered and torn. On the lowest shelf, two dark faces lay almost upright against the glass, and even though they had been violated in this way, I recognized the faces of Tante Marie Aguillard and her son. I counted maybe fifteen bottles in front of me. Behind me, the shelving moved slightly and I heard the sound of glass knocking against glass and the slick movement of liquid.

I raised my head. Row upon row of bottles reached up to the ceiling, each bearing its faint, white, human remains. Beside my left eye, a face leaned against the front of a jar, its empty eyes gaping, as if trying to peer into eternity.

And I knew that somewhere among these faces, Susan lay preserved.

“What do you think of my collection, Bird?” The dark bulk of Woolrich moved slowly down the hallway. In one hand, I could see the outline of the pistol. In the other, he rubbed his thumb along the clean line of the scalpel.

“Wondering where your wife is? She’s on the middle shelf, third from the left. Shit, Bird, you’re probably sitting beside her right now.”

I didn’t move. I didn’t blink. My body lay slumped against the shelves, surrounded by the faces of the dead. My face would be there soon, I thought, my face and Rachel’s and Susan’s, side by side forever.

Woolrich came forward until he stood in the doorway. He raised the air pistol.

“Nobody ever lasted this long before, Bird. Even Tee Jean, and he was a strong kid.” His eyes glowed redly. “I gotta tell you, Bird: in the end, this is going to hurt.”

He tightened his finger on the pistol and I heard the sharp crack as the hypo shot from the barrel. I was already raising my gun as the sharp pain struck my chest, my arm achingly heavy, my vision blurred by the shadows moving across my eyes. I tightened my finger on the trigger, willing it to increase the pressure. Woolrich sprang forward, alive to the danger, the scalpel raised to slash at my arm.

The trigger moved back slowly, infinitesimally slowly, and the world slowed down with it. Woolrich seemed to hang in space, the blade curving down in his hand as if through water, his mouth wide and a sound like a wind howling in a tunnel coming from his throat. The trigger moved back another tiny measure and my finger froze as the gun boomed loudly in the enclosed space. Woolrich, barely three feet from me now, bucked as the first shot took him in the chest. The next eight shots seemed to come together, the sound of their firing joining together as the bullets tore into him, the 10 millimeter rounds ripping through cloth and flesh before the gun locked empty. Glass shattered as the bullets exited and the floor became awash with formaldehyde. Woolrich fell backward and lay on the floor, his body shaking and spasming. He rose once, his shoulders and head lifting from the ground, the light already dying in his eyes. Then he lay back and moved no more.

My arm gave in under the weight of the gun and it fell to the floor. I could hear liquid dripping, could feel the presence of the dead as they crowded around me. From a distance, there came the sound of approaching sirens and I knew that, whatever happened to me, Rachel at least would be safe. Something brushed my cheek with a touch light as gossamer, like the last caress of a lover before the time to sleep, and a kind of peace came over me. With a final act of will, I closed my eyes and waited for the stillness to come.