“Why didn’t he get the injection table?”
“He did. He tried to kill himself. He got loose from a prison hospital. What should I do?”
“You saw a guy jump off a freight. You’ve reported it to me. I’ll take it from here. End of story.”
“Who’s the dead woman?” he asked.
“We have no idea.”
“This is eating my lunch, Dave.”
What could I say? He was the best cop I ever knew, but he’d ruined his career with dope and booze and Bourbon Street strippers and had hooked up with the Mob for a while and now made a living as a PI who ran down bail skips and looked in people’s windows.
“Come inside,” I said. “We’ll go out for supper.”
“You said you were meeting with the coroner.”
“I’ll talk to him on the phone.”
“You don’t have to babysit me. I’ll see you later.”
“Go easy on the hooch,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s the source of the problem, all right,” he replied. “Thanks for the reminder I’m a lush.”
• • •
CORMAC WATTS WAS our coroner. He had a genteel Virginia accent and wore size-fourteen shoes and seersucker pants high on his hips and long-sleeve dress shirts without a coat, and had a physique like a stick figure and a haircut that resembled an inverted shoe brush.
At Iberia General, in a room without windows, one that was too cold and smelled of chemicals, our Jane Doe lay on a stainless steel table, one with gutters and drains and tubes that could dispose of the fluids released during an autopsy. A sheet was pulled to her chin; her eyes were closed. One hand and part of the forearm were exposed; the fingers were a dark blue at the tips and had started to curl into a claw.
“Beautiful woman,” Cormac said.
“You got the cause of death?”
He lifted the sheet off her left foot. “There were three injections between her toes. She was loaded with enough heroin to shut down an elephant.”
“No tracks on the arms?”
“None.”
“Was there any sexual violation?”
“Not that I could determine.”
“Most intravenous users start on the arms,” I said. “Those who shoot between the toes usually have a history.”
“It gets weirder,” he said. He lifted her hand. “Her nails were clipped and scrupulously cleaned. Her hair had been recently shampooed and her skin scrubbed with an astringent cleanser. There were no particles of food in her teeth.”
“You can tell all that in a body that was in the water for half a day?” I asked.
“She was floating on top of the cross. The sun did more damage than the water.”
“Was she alive when the nails went in?”
“No,” he said.
“What do you think we’re looking at?” I asked.
“Fetishism. A sacrifice. How should I know?”
I could hear the hum of a refrigeration unit. The light in the room was metallic, sterile, warping on angular and sharp surfaces.
“You’d better get this motherfucker, Dave.”
I had never heard Cormac use profanity. “Why?”
“He’s going to do it again.”
• • •
THE IBERIA SHERIFF’S Department was located in city hall, a grand two-story brick building on the bayou, with white pillars and dormers and a reflecting pool and fountain in front. I went into Helen’s office early Monday morning.
“I was just about to buzz you,” she said. “An elderly black minister in Cade called and said his daughter went missing six days ago. Her name is Lucinda Arceneaux.”
“He’s just now reporting her missing?”
“He thought she took a flight out of Lafayette to Los Angeles. He just found out she never arrived.”
“How old is she?”
“Twenty-six.”
“Want me to talk to him?”
“Yeah. What were you going to tell me?”
“About two weeks ago Clete Purcel was fishing on the Mermentau River and saw a guy jump from the top of a boxcar into the water. Clete saw the story in the Iberian about our Jane Doe and thought he ought to tell me. The guy was wearing a white uniform with blue trim on it.”
“Like a Texas convict?”
“Possibly.”
There was a beat. “Clete didn’t want to call it in?” she said.
“Ice cream vendors wear white uniforms. So do janitors and cooks. After Clete saw the story in the paper, he found a story on the Internet about a condemned man who escaped from a prison hospital outside Austin. The name is Hugo Tillinger.”
Helen got up from her chair and wrote on a notepad that rested on her desk blotter, her jaw flexing. She had a compact and powerful physique and features that were androgynous and hard to read, particularly when she was angry. “What was Tillinger in for?”
“Double homicide. His wife and teenage daughter. He set fire to his house.”
“Tell Clete he just went to the top of my shit list.”
“He didn’t have the information we have, Helen.”
“Lucinda Arceneaux’s father says she worked for the Innocence Project. They get people off death row.”
I let my eyes slip off hers. “What’s the father’s address?”
“Try the Free Will Baptist Church. Tell Clete I’m not going to put up with his swinging-dick attitude.”
“Cut him some slack. He couldn’t be sure the guy was an escaped convict. He didn’t want to mess up a guy who was already down on his luck.”
“Don’t say another word.”
• • •
I CHECKED OUT A cruiser and drove to Cade, a tiny, mostly black settlement on the back road between New Iberia and Lafayette. The church house was a clapboard building with a faux bell tower set back in a grove of pecan trees. A house trailer rested on cinder blocks behind the church. In the side yard stood a bottle tree. During the Great Depression and the war years, many rural people hung blue milk of magnesia bottles on the branches of trees so they tinkled and rang whenever the wind blew. I don’t believe there was any reason for the custom other than a desire to bring color and music to the drabness of their lives. Then again, this was Louisiana, a place where the dead are not only with us but perhaps also mischievous spirits you don’t want to think about. I knocked on the door of the trailer.
The man who answered looked much older than the father of a twenty-six-year-old. He was bent and thin and walked with a cane, and wore suspenders with trousers that were too large. His cheeks were covered with white whiskers, his eyes the color of almonds, unlike those of our Jane Doe. I opened my badge holder and told him who I was.
“Come in,” he said. “You got news about Lucinda?”
“I’m not sure, Reverend,” I replied. I stepped inside. “I need more information, then maybe we can make some phone calls.”
“I’ve done that. Didn’t help.”
I sat down on a cloth-covered stuffed chair. I looked around for photographs on the walls or tables. My eyes had not adjusted to the poor lighting. A fan oscillated on the floor. There was no air-conditioning in the trailer. I hated the possible outcome of the conversation I was about to have.