She opened the icebox and removed a bottle of Bud and twisted off the cap. She put the cap on top of the breakfast table rather than in the trash basket. She lifted the bottle to her mouth and drank, her eyes on his, two curls of hair hanging down on her brow.
“Who killed the girls?” Clete said.
“I don’t know. That’s the truth. Carolyn was in business with the Abelards and looking out for her own interests. Stanga was in the way, and so was her husband. But I don’t know who killed the girls. I think they got a rotten deal.”
“A rotten deal?” he repeated.
“That’s what I said,” she replied, not comprehending his bemusement.
He looked into her face for a long time, to the point that she broke and glanced away. “Why are you staring at me like that?” she asked.
“Because I can never tell when you’re lying.”
“That’s a lousy thing to say. Dave Robicheaux said I wouldn’t ever have any peace unless I owned up to you. So I’ve done that.”
“Yeah, you have. You got anything else to say?”
“It’s kind of outrageous.”
“So tell me.”
She lowered her eyes, then looked up into his face again, her flop hat tilted on the back of her head, the leather cord swinging under her chin. “How about a mercy fuck for a girl on her way out of town?”
He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her around and led her to the door. “Get some coffee down the road. Don’t tell me where you’re going. Never contact me again, not for any reason. You find my name on anything in your possession, destroy it. I hope things work out for you, but I think you did the big flush on yourself a long time ago. Adios, babe.”
Her face seemed to recede in the darkness and rain, the disbelief and injury in her expression shaping and reshaping itself in the overhead light. He closed the door and bolted it behind her.
He heard thunder in the south and through his side window saw a sheet of rain sweep across the water and slap the trees against the roof of his cottage. He watched her drive out of the motor court, her car leaking oil smoke, one taillight burned out, and he wondered if he had developed a capacity for cruelty that, in the past, he had only feigned. Then he realized the phone on his nightstand was ringing.
I LOOKED AT my watch. It was 8:10 when Clete picked up. Rain was drumming on our tin roof, so hard I almost had to yell into the telephone to be understood. “Alafair left a message at six-twenty. She said she was in Broussard and was stopping to talk with someone she met. I haven’t heard from her since.”
“She doesn’t answer her cell?” Clete asked.
“She turned it off. I talked to the cops in Broussard. They haven’t seen a car that looks like hers. I called the state police. Same thing.”
“Why would she turn off her cell?”
“She didn’t want to be bothered while she was talking to somebody I probably don’t like.”
“Not necessarily. It could be a girlfriend or somebody who needs some help. Look, right before you called, Emma Poche was here, pretty soused, wanting to own up to planting my pen in Stanga’s swimming pool.”
“How’s that relate to Alafair?”
“She said she didn’t know who killed Bernadette Latiolais and Fern Michot. I believed her. So I let her go.”
“So?”
“I thought I should tell you. Maybe I should have sweated her. I let her get her hooks into me. I don’t think I have any judgment anymore.”
“Why are you telling me this now?” I asked.
“I just thought I should.”
“No, you think whoever killed the girls has Alafair.”
“Don’t put words in my mouth. Turn on the TV. This storm is tearing up Lafayette. Maybe she pulled off the road. Maybe she can’t get a signal.”
“I think Robert Weingart killed Timothy Abelard and the Nicaraguan. I think he tried to put it on you and, by extension, on me. I think he’s probably convinced Kermit Abelard we’re responsible for his grandfather’s death.”
“Who cares? Kermit Abelard is a fop. Stay where you are. I’m coming over.”
I couldn’t think straight. Before I could say anything else, he had broken the connection. I called the sheriff in St. Mary Parish and hit another dead end. He said he didn’t know where either Kermit Abelard or Robert Weingart was, then added, “Frankly, I don’t care.”
“Say again?”
“Because they’re not the problem,” he said.
“Who is, sir? My daughter?”
“Don’t you be laying off your anger on me, Dave.”
“Don’t call me by my first name again,” I said, and hung up.
But getting angry at a functionary in St. Mary Parish was of no help. I tried to clear my head, to think in a sequential fashion, to revisit mentally all the evidence we’d uncovered in the murder of the two girls. The video of the subterranean room we had found in Herman Stanga’s DVD player contained a detail that I couldn’t get out of my mind, one that indicated a story larger than itself. But what was it?
The stones in the walls. They had reminded me of bread loaves, smooth and heavy and rounded on the ends, not given to flaking. Emma Poche had looked at the still photos made from the video and had said they resembled pineapples. Why would she say pineapples? Because of the shape? Was her statement one of those linguistic leaps from an image to an idea based on an association in the subconscious? Did something about them call to mind breadfruit, the food that nineteenth-century plantation owners grew and fed to their slaves in the tropics?
Clete came through the back door without knocking. His slicker was dripping water, his face beaded with it. “Let’s go to Broussard,” he said. “We start talking to everybody we can along Highway Ninety and the old two-lane.”
I had already thought about it. The two-lane was a possibility. It was within the town of Broussard itself, with few places where Alafair could pull off to talk to someone. But the city cops had not seen her car, nor had anyone along the two-lane reported a scuffle or an abduction or anything unusual occurring that evening. The four-lane, also known as Highway 90, was far more problematic. It went for miles and was congested with service stations, fast-food restaurants, bars, convenience stores, and motels, plus any number of business properties where she could simply pull in to a parking lot.
Regardless, one way or another, we had to get off the dime. “We’ll each take a vehicle and divide it up,” I said.
The phone rang. Molly picked it up in the bedroom before I could reach the kitchen counter. “Dave, it’s the state police,” she said.
My heart was beating hard when I picked up. I didn’t know the trooper who had called. He said he was on a farm road not far off the interstate west of Lafayette. “We’ve got a Honda registered in the name of Alafair Suzanne Robicheaux. It’s been involved in an accident,” he said. “I saw the ATL on it earlier. Am I talking to the right party?”
“Yeah, this is Dave Robicheaux, with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department. I’m Alafair’s father. Who’s in the vehicle?”
“We’re not sure. It’s upside down in a coulee. We’re waiting on the Jaws of Life. We had to get them from Opelousas. The vehicle is wedged, so we can’t flip it over.”
I had to close my eyes to control my frustration. “How many people are in there? Are we talking about a man or woman? Can you be specific?”
“I can see one man. I don’t know if anybody is in there with him or not. I hope he’s the only one. I sure as hell do.”
“Explain that.”
He paused. “The guy I can see has space to breathe. Most every other area of the vehicle is crushed tight as tinfoil.”
“Give me your twenty again,” I said.
After he gave me directions, I pressed down the button on the phone cradle and looked at Molly, the receiver still in my hand. “It’s Alafair’s car. There’s an injured man inside. The trooper can’t be sure if anybody else is in the car.”
“Oh, Dave,” she sai
d.
“Clete and I are headed there now.” Before she could speak, I raised my hand. “You have to stay here in case somebody calls. Maybe it was a carjacking, maybe an abduction. Alafair would have fought. She wouldn’t have just submitted to some guy who drove off with her.”
There were other scenarios that were much less optimistic. But there was no point in reviewing them. “Weingart is behind this, isn’t he?” Molly said.
“That’s my guess. But I don’t know.”
I saw Clete look at me and tap on the dial of his watch. I called the department and asked that a cruiser be stationed in front of our house. Then Clete and I headed for Interstate 10, the emergency flasher clamped on the roof of my new Toyota truck, the rain dividing in the headlights, the highway unwinding behind us like a long black snake.
CHAPTER
25
THE STORM WAS still in full progress when we arrived at the accident scene, the sky roiling with blue-black clouds, the lights of farmhouses barely visible inside the rain. The state troopers had ignited emergency flares along the edge of the coulee where, according to a witness, Alafair’s Honda had been hit at high speed by a tractor-trailer that had never slowed down. The Honda had rolled over at least three times before it landed on its roof at the bottom of the coulee, the driver’s window pinched into a slit. A trooper with a flashlight in one hand and a radio in the other approached us as soon as Clete and I got out of the truck.
“You’re Detective Robicheaux?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“It’s probably going to be another fifteen or twenty minutes before the Jaws are here. I don’t know the status of the guy inside. He’s generally incoherent and uncooperative,” the trooper said. He had a square jaw and tight mouth and eyes that kept looking at everything around him rather than at me.
“Did you get a name?”
“No. I’m trying to get a crane in here. Did you see one on the road?”
“No,” I said.
“The attempt to locate didn’t give us very much information. What’s the deal on your daughter?”
“I think she may have been abducted.”
His eyes met mine before he gazed down the road again, his expression neutral. “We don’t quite understand what happened here. The witness says two other cars seemed to be traveling with your daughter’s car. But they didn’t stop. From what we can gather, the guy driving the semi may be DUI, but the two companion vehicles fleeing the scene don’t add up.”
“What kind of description do you have on them?”
“The witness says one was white, the other dark-colored. If you want to talk to the guy inside your daughter’s car, you’d better do it now.”
“He’s not going to make it?” I said.
“We’re trying to open an irrigation lock and divert the water out of the coulee. I give it about ten more minutes before it’ll be over his nose. If we have to chain-pull the car out—” He didn’t finish his thought. “Take a look for yourself.”
Clete and I worked our way down the side of the coulee, each of us holding a flashlight the troopers had given us. The rain was warm and pattering on the exposed undercarriage of the Honda. Through the opening between the roof and the window jamb, I could see a man’s head and shoulders wedged against the steering wheel, the safety strap still in place across his chest. His face was contorted, the water in the coulee flowing thick with mud and dead vegetation through the broken windows, touching the top of his head.
“Dave, that’s Andy Swan, the guy who was on the execution team at Raiford,” Clete said.
“You’re sure?” I said.
“I ought to know. I kicked his ass.”
I got on my knees in the water and leaned down to the window. “I’m Detective Dave Robicheaux. My daughter is the owner of this car. Where is she?” I said.
Swan’s gaze would not focus. I realized that one of his eyes had been knocked askew inside the socket. “Did you hear me?” I said.
He didn’t answer. I shone the light inside the car, the beam spearing into the crevasses between the crushed metal and the seats, and over the buckled doors and the folded glass that looked like green ice blown from a fountain. I could smell gasoline and oil and brake fluid and the dirty burnt odor of rubber that had been scoured off the tires.
“What are you doing inside Alafair’s car?” I asked.
Andy Swan made no reply. Clete knelt next to me, one hand propped against the car body. “Remember me?” he said through the window.
Swan’s good eye watered in the glare of the flashlight.
“I’m going to line it out for you,” Clete said. “I’ve got no reason to deceive you. One way or another, we’re going to get Alafair back. But right now you’ve got about eight minutes before you do the big gargle. If you do the right thing now, Dave and I promise you we’ll pick up this car with our bare hands and get you out of this ditch and into federal custody and on the way to a federal hospital. Your pals screwed you with a RotoRooter, Andy. Are you going to take their weight on a kidnap and maybe a murder beef? This is Louisiana. You thought Raiford was a bitch? You know what it’ll be like on death row at Angola for a guy who was on an execution team? Every trusty in the kitchen will spit in your food before it’s brought to your cell. In the shower you’ll be anybody’s bar of soap. Think the hacks will be looking out for you? Most of them wouldn’t blow their nose on your shirt.”
Swan opened his mouth to speak, and I realized that something was wrong with his throat or that something was broken inside his chest. His words were clotted, wrapped with phlegm, blood leaking over his lip from a dark gap in his teeth. “Under the hay,” he said, almost in a whisper.
“What hay?” I asked.
“Baled hay. Go through the door. It’s under the hay.”
“What’s under the hay?” I said.
“The place they were taking her. By the river.”
“What place? Which river?” I said.
“I’m not from here. There’s a tractor—” he began.
“Say it.”
The coulee was running higher, the current sweeping along the crown of his skull, startling him, his eyes opening wide. “I don’t know the name of the place.”
“Who took her?” I said.
He twisted his head and looked straight into my face, his ruined eye protruding obliquely from the socket, his good eye almost luminous, as though it were seeing through me, watching a scene or images that no one else saw.
“Talk to me,” I said. “Don’t let go. Don’t let a collection of shits write your epitaph.”
Then he did something I had seen in a dying man only two or three times in my life. His face became filled with dread, the jaw going slack, the tissue transforming to a puttylike gray, even though his blood had already drained into his head. The exhalation of his final breath was as rank as sewer gas.
I hit the side of the car with my fist.
“What was he talking about?” Clete said. “A tractor? Baled hay?”
“By a river,” I added.
Clete’s face was round and hard in the reflection of the flashlight. “What are you thinking?” he asked me.
“The video from Herman Stanga’s DVD player,” I said. “The stones in the wall. They’re not indigenous to Louisiana. They’re the kind that were carried as ballast in nineteenth-century sailing ships. The place in the video was a barracoon.”
“I didn’t get that last part,” he said.
“A jail for slaves. A lot of blackbirders were bringing in slaves from the West Indies after the prohibition of 1809. Jim Bowie and Jean Lafitte brought them up the Mermentau River and sold them into the cane fields.”
“That shack or whatever full of hay bales where we got into the shoot-out?” Clete said. “There was a rusted-out tractor next to it. You think that’s the place where the girls were?”
“Maybe,” I said.
Above us on the road, someone was setting up a generator-powered bank of flood lamps. Sud
denly, the coulee was lit by an eye-watering white brilliance. The state trooper in charge of the accident scene was silhouetted against the glare, the rain blowing like bits of crystal in the wind. “We got the Jaws,” he called down. “You guys find out anything?”
“The guy’s name was Andy Swan,” Clete hollered up the slope. “He worked with the execution team that fried Bundy. He’s probably checking in with him about now.”
But Clete’s cynical remark served as a poor disguise for our mood and the hopelessness of our situation. Our investigation into the accident by the coulee had eaten up time that Alafair may not have had. While we dithered, she suffered. We got back on Interstate 10 and headed west toward Jeff Davis Parish while I tried to get through to someone in the sheriff’s department there. Finally the 911 operator patched me through to a plainclothes detective who was working an extra duty shift that night. His name was Huffinton. At first the name didn’t register. Then I remembered him. “What is it this time?” he said.
This time? “You responded to the ‘shots fired’ at the river?” I said.
“I’m the guy,” he replied, sucking on a tooth or a mint. “What do you need?”
He was the same detective who had gotten into it with Clete and who had made a remark about my history with alcohol. “Down by the river, at the same location where I had to pop those guys, there’s an old Acadian cottage. It’s stacked with bales of hay. There’s a tractor not far from it.”
“What about it?”
“My daughter has been abducted. I’m not sure where she’s being held, but one of the perps in the abduction described a house or cabin just like the one by the river. I’m on I-Ten west of Crowley, but I need you guys to jump on the place right now. You copy on that?”
“No, I don’t copy anything. A kidnap victim is being held in a shack full of hay?”
“I think it was a barracoon.”
“A what?”
“A place where slaves were kept. We have video that came from—”
“Is this a put-on?”
“I’m talking about an underground jail. It may be underneath that old Acadian house. It’s the place where Bernadette Latiolais may have been murdered.”