LATER, I CALLED Betsy Mossbacher at the FBI office in Baton Rouge. I had left her a message after I had found out Bertrand Melancon was in the Ninth Ward. I had also called her after Bobby Mack Rydel had tried to kill my family. But she had not returned my calls. This time she picked up.
“Where have you been?” I asked.
“All over the state. What’s this about?”
“I left you a message about Bertrand Melancon. Otis Baylor found him. Melancon is at his aunt’s house in the Ninth Ward. I also left you a message about Bobby Mack Rydel.”
“Yeah, I was sorry to hear about that. I’m glad you’re okay.”
I waited for her to go on, but she didn’t.
“Y’all been pretty busy?” I said.
“Give me Melancon’s address. I’ll see what we can do.”
I could feel my energies draining. We had been called into a jurisdiction not our own and asked to do scut work that was the responsibility of other agencies. Now I was getting the inference, I had become an annoyance. I gave her the address of Melancon’s aunt in the Ninth Ward.
“Melanie Baylor confessed this morning to shooting the looters. Her husband was covering for her.”
“Sheriff Soileau faxed us that info an hour ago.”
“Melancon wrote a letter of amends to the Baylor family. He gave them directions to the blood diamonds. Except the letter got water-soaked and so far hasn’t been of much value to us. In the meantime, two of Sidney Kovick’s guys got whacked in the Atchafalaya Basin.”
“Yeah, we got that.”
“Betsy, I’m supposed to share information with you. If you don’t want me to do that, tell me to get lost.”
“We’re buried alive in work. Maybe all this will get sorted out one day, but it’s going to be a long time. Do you have any idea how many open homicide cases we have in New Orleans? The city is a giant repository for the dead. I’m not talking about gangbangers, I’m talking about patients who were allowed to drown in nursing homes. Do you realize how many complaints about unjustified police shootings we have to investigate? I can’t even get information about our own people. I think some navy SEALs took out some snipers we don’t know about.”
But I wasn’t concerned with the FBI’s problems. “I’ve got to get a net over Ronald Bledsoe. He’s ruining our lives,” I said.
I heard her breathe air out her nose. But I didn’t allow her to speak and continued to bore in. “Sidney Kovick inasmuch as told me he took the diamonds off some guys from the Mideast. You told me yourself he fancied himself a patriot. Maybe these guys are al Qaeda. You have unlimited electronic access when it comes to Homeland Security matters. Bledsoe is the loose thread on the sweater. We just have to pull on it.”
“Good try, no cigar.”
“So long, Betsy. I think you’re working for the right bunch,” I said, and hung up, coming down hard with the receiver.
WEDNESDAY EVENING was exceptionally beautiful, as though the earth and the heavens had decided to join together and re-create South Louisiana the way it was before Katrina and Rita tore it apart. The sky was a hard blue, the evening star twinkling in the west, a big brown moon rising above the cane fields. The rains had turned the oaks a deeper green and had sent Bayou Teche over its banks, swirling along the edges of our yards. You could smell barbecue fires in the park and the tannic odor of chrysanthemums and a clean, bright odor that perhaps signaled the coming of winter, but not in a bad way. For no demonstrable reason, I felt a sense of peace, as though I had been invited to a war but at the last moment had decided not to attend.
Alafair was returning to the university library to finish the research for her novel and Molly was going to drive her. “You’re sure you won’t come?” Molly said from the doorway.
“I’ll probably just read a bit and take a walk,” I said.
“I think I almost have the words worked out on the bottom of the letter the black guy left at the Baylors’,” Alafair said. “It’s just a matter of finding the right combination, not the letters, but the words themselves, so they form a sensible statement.”
I tried not to show my lack of enthusiasm. “That’s good,” I said.
“Would the word ‘bricks’ mean anything?” she said.
I thought about it. “Yeah, it could.”
“I’ll let you know what I come up with. Actually this is great material. I’d like to use it in my novel.”
They said good-bye and started out the door. Alafair snapped her fingers in the air. “I forgot my purse. I don’t have any money,” she said. “I was going to pick up a dessert.”
“Here,” I said. I took twenty dollars from my wallet and handed it to her. “I’ll put it on your tab.”
“We won’t be late,” she said.
“I’ll still be up,” I replied, and gave her the thumbs-up sign, the one I had always given her when she was little.
A HALF HOUR LATER, I saw Clete’s Caddy pull into the driveway. I went outside and waited for him on the gallery. He tore the tab on a can of beer and sat down on the steps, his porkpie hat slanted forward on his forehead. He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and lit it and blew smoke out into the yard. He still had not spoken except to comment negatively on the price of gasoline. I took the cigarette from his mouth, walked out to the curb, and dropped it into the storm drain.
“Dave, being around you is like being married. Will you lay off it?”
“What’s on your mind, Cletus?”
“What’s on my mind is I’ve either been living in my own thoughts too long or I’ve developed shit-for-brains syndrome.”
I sat down next to him. The streetlights had gone on and the canopy of oaks that arched over the street ruffled when the wind blew.
“Remember when we were searching the Baylor property and the neighbor came out and asked us what we were doing?” he said.
“Yeah, his name is Tom Claggart.”
“Remember I told you I thought I’d seen him somewhere?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Last year I took a gal for a boat ride out in the Basin. It was cold as hell and I ran out of gas. There were some hunters in a camp up on an island, about three hundred yards from the Atchafalaya. I walked up on them while they were dressing a deer. The deer was hanging by its feet from a tree. There were guts and strips of hide all over the ground. These guys looked pretty uncomfortable. Then I remembered deer season had closed two or three days earlier.
“One guy goes, ‘We got this six-pointer last week, but it froze up on us.’
“I pretended I didn’t know or care what he was talking about. They gave me two gallons of gas and wouldn’t let me pay them for it. Just as I was leaving, a guy with a bullet head and thick mustache came to the door and looked at me. I think it was that Claggart guy.”
“So maybe Claggart hunts deer or has a camp in the Basin,” I said.
“There was a laptop opened on the table behind him. I could see it through the doorway. The image on the screen was a bunch of playing cards floating into a black hat, you know, the kind magicians use. I think it’s one of those video games for gamblers. Bledsoe is always playing them.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them. “No, he doesn’t just play them. He plays that one,” I said.
“Say again?”
“I saw that program running on Bledsoe’s laptop when I was in his cottage.”
“Oh man, we walked right over it, didn’t we? Where you going?”
“To apologize to the FBI.”
I went into the kitchen and called Betsy Mossbacher’s cell phone.
“Hello, Dave,” she said.
“Can we deep-six that conversation we had this afternoon? I need your help,” I said.
“You push me into corners, then you blow hot and cold. I never know who’s coming out of the jack-in-the-box. It can be a drag, Dave.”
Don’t argue, don’t contend, I heard a voice say.
“We’ve been looking in the wrong places for information on Ronald Bledsoe. We’ve been looking for a criminal record that doesn’t exist and faulting ourselves for not finding it. The real story on a guy like Bledsoe is in the façade of normalcy.”
“I don’t follow.”
“The reason guys like BTK and John Wayne Gacy and the Green River guy, what’s-his-name, Gary Ridgway, can kill people for decades is they’re protected. Their family members live in denial because they can’t accept the fact they’re related to a monster, or that they’ve slept with him or had children with him. How would you like to find out your father is Norman Bates?”
“I got the point. What do you need?”
“Everything I can get on a guy by the name of Tom Claggart. He has a house next door to Otis Baylor’s place in New Orleans.”
“What’s his tie-in?”
“He’s an export-import man. Baylor said Claggart attended either Virginia Military Institute or the Citadel. The Citadel is in South Carolina. That’s where Bledsoe seems to be from.”
“How soon do you need this?”
“Right now.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Betsy, Bledsoe sent Bobby Mack Rydel after my daughter. She came within inches of being killed. We’ve been square with you guys. You owe me.”
There was a beat. “I think we do,” she replied.
THE SKY HAD SOFTENED to a dark blue when Molly and Alafair parked their automobile next to Burke Hall, the old drama and arts building hard by a lake that was thick with flooded cypress. Molly had a guest-faculty sticker on her car and almost always used the same parking area when she visited the university because there were no evening classes in Burke Hall and the spot between the building and the lake was secluded and usually empty. She put her purse under the seat and locked the car, then she and Alafair walked across the campus to the library.
The grass in the quadrangle had just been mowed, and the air smelled like flowers blooming and wet hay, and leaves and pecan husks someone was burning in a damp pile. The roofed walkways that enclosed the quadrangle were full of students, the moss in the live oaks limned by the glow of the lighted windows in classroom buildings and student dorms. A sorority was conducting a bake sale in front of the library entrance, the girls wearing sweaters because of the chill, an aura of innocence about them that one would associate with a 1940s movie. The scene I describe is not one of nostalgia. It’s one that existed. It’s one in which we either believe or disbelieve. It represents I think to all of us the kind of moment that should be inviolate.
Unfortunately it is not.
After Molly and Alafair entered the building, a man in a raincoat paused at the bake-sale table and bought a pastry. He wore a rain hat that seemed too large for his head and cupped his ears, like an oversize bowler sitting on a manikin. He also wore a mustache with streaks of white in it. He seemed to be a nervous man, and he gave off a smell that was like a mixture of deodorant and moldy fabric or socks left in a gym locker.
He paid for the pastry with a five-dollar bill and wanted no change. When he pushed the pastry into his mouth, his eyes were fastened on the interior of the library. The coed who had sold him the pastry offered him a napkin. He took it from her and entered the building, wiping his mouth. In his right hand he still held the napkin the coed had given him and the cellophane the pastry had come wrapped in. A trash receptacle was less than three feet from him. But he balled the cellophane and napkin in his palm and shoved them in his coat pocket. Then he walked up the stairs to the second floor of the library, his face lifted, like a hunter glancing upward into the canopy of a forest.
I DIDN’T WAIT for Betsy Mossbacher to call me back with information about Tom Claggart. I used my cell phone, in case Betsy called on the landline, and talked to the state police in both Virginia and South Carolina, but the people on duty were all after-hours personnel and had the same problem I did, namely that all the state offices that could give answers about Tom Claggart were closed.
Then I used the most valuable and unlauded investigative resource in the United States, the lowly reference librarian. Their salaries are wretched and they receive credit for nothing. Their desks are usually tucked away in the stacks or in a remote corner where they have to shush noisy high school students or put up with street people blowing wine in their faces or snoring in the stuffed chairs. But their ability to find obscure information is remarkable and they persevere like Spartans.
The tidewater accent of the one I spoke with at the Citadel library in Charleston was a genuine pleasure to listen to. Her name was iris Rosecrans and I had the feeling she could read aloud from the telephone directory and make it sound like a recitation of Shakespearean sonnets. I told her who I was and asked if she could find any record of a past student by the name of Tom Claggart.
“As you probably have already gathered, Mr. Robicheaux, the registrar’s office is closed until tomorrow morning,” she said. “However, that said, I think I can go back through some of the yearbooks and be of some service to you.”
“Ms. Rosecrans, I need every bit of information I can get regarding this man. It’s extremely urgent. I don’t want to burden you with my situation or to seem melodramatic, but someone tried to kill my daughter and I think the man responsible is named Ronald Bledsoe. I think Ronald Bledsoe may have some relationship to Tom Claggart.”
She paused a moment. “Spell ‘Bledsoe’ for me, please.”
Twenty minutes later she called back. “Thomas S. Claggart was a freshman and sophomore student here in 1977 and ’78. His hometown is listed as Camden. He’s not included in the yearbooks after ’78. Ronald Bledsoe appears never to have been a student here.”
“Well, I appreciate your-”
I heard a piece of paper crinkle, like a sheet on a tablet being folded back. “I do have other information, Mr. Robicheaux,” she said.
“Please, go ahead.”
“I talked to the reference librarian in Camden. She checked the old telephone directories and found a T. S. Claggart listed during the years ’76 to ’79. I called the police station there, but no one had heard of a Claggart family. The officer I spoke with was kind enough to give me the number of the man who was police chief at the time. So I called him at his house. Would you like his name?”
“No, no, what did he tell you?”
“He remembered the senior Claggart quite well. He said he was a United States Army sergeant stationed at Fort Jackson. His wife had died several years earlier, but he had a son named Tom Junior, and perhaps a stepson. The stepson was named Ronald.”
“Bledsoe?”
“The retired police chief wasn’t sure of the last name. But it was not Claggart. He said the boy was peculiar-looking and strange in his behavior. He had the feeling the boy had been in foster homes or a place for disturbed children.
“That’s all I was able to gather. We’re about to close. Would you like for me to search a little bit more tomorrow? I don’t mind.”
“What I would like, Ms. Rosecrans, is to buy you an island in the Caribbean. Or perhaps to ask the Vatican to grant you early canonization.”
“That’s very nice of you,” she said.
I told Clete what I had just learned from Ms. Rosecrans. He was eating a sandwich in the living room, watching the History Channel.
“You think Claggart has been covering Bledsoe’s ass all these years?” he said.
“Probably. Or maybe they work as a team. You remember the Hillside Strangler case in California? The perps were cousins. Explain how one family can have two guys like that in it.”
He started to reply, but I opened my cell phone and began punching in numbers.
“Who you calling?” he asked.
“Molly.”
“Relax, they’re at the university. I mean it, noble mon, you’re giving me the shingles just watching you.”
I got Molly’s voice mail and realized she had probably left her cell phone in the automobile or turned it off when she entered the library. I tried Alafair’s number and got the same result, then I remembered Alafair had left her purse at the house.
The phone rang in the kitchen.
ALAFAIR HAD SPREAD her note cards on a table that was not far from shelves of books that dealt with the flora and fauna of the American Northwest. She was writing down the names of trees and types of rock that characterized the escarpment along the Columbia River Gorge just south of Mount Hood. Then her eyes began to burn from the fatigue of the day and the sleepless nights she had experienced since Bobby Mack Rydel, a man she had never seen before, had tried to kill her.
In her earliest attempts at fiction, she had learned that there are many things a person can do well when he or she is tired, but imagining plots and creating dialogue and envisioning fictional characters and writing well are not among them.
She gathered up her note cards and placed them in her book bag, then took out the yellow legal pad on which I had written down the remnants of the words at the bottom of Bertrand Melancon’s letter to the Baylor family.
In the stacks, a man with a raincoat over his arm and an oversize hat on his head was gazing curiously at the titles of the books arrayed along the shelf. He lifted a heavy volume off the shelf and seated himself on the opposite side of Alafair’s table, three chairs down from her. He did not glance in her direction and seemed intent upon the content of his book, a collection of photographic plates of scenes in Colorado. Then, as an afterthought, he seemed to remember that he was still wearing his hat. He removed it and set it crown-down on the table. His scalp was bone-white under the freshly shaved roots of his hair.
“How do you do?” he said, and nodded.
“Fine, how are you?” Alafair replied.
He opened his book and began reading, his forehead knitted. Alafair went back to work on Bertrand Melancon’s water-diluted directions to Sidney Kovick’s diamonds. Molly returned from the restroom and looked over her shoulder. The original letters had been Th dym s un the ri s on e ot ide of h an. Alafair had spaced them out ten times on ten lines, trying different combinations with them on each line. By the tenth line, she had created a statement that seemed to make syntactical and visual sense.
“You should have been a cryptographer,” Molly said.
“Spelling is the challenge,” Alafair said. “He probably spells most polysyllabic words phonetically. So if the first word is ‘The’ and we create ‘dymines’ out of ‘dym,’ we’ve got a running start on the whole sentence. If the third word doesn’t agree in number with ‘dymines’ and we substitute ‘is’ for ‘are,’ it begins to come together pretty quickly.”
The man with the mustache and shaved head paused in his reading, stifling a yawn, his head turning in the opposite direction from Molly and Alafair. His eyes scanned the high windows for a flicker of lightning in the sky. He watched a tall black kid in a basketball letter sweater walk by, then resumed reading.
“We turn ‘un’ into ‘under’ and let ‘the’ stand. Put a ‘b’ in front of ‘ri’ and add a ‘k’ and you get ‘bricks.’ ‘On’ stands by itself and ‘ot’ becomes ‘other.’ ‘Of’ stands alone and we turn ‘h’ into ‘the.’ So we’ve got ‘The dymines is under the bricks on the other side of the…’ It’s the ‘an’ I haven’t worked out.”
Molly thought about it. “Put a ‘c’ in front and an ‘e’ behind.”
“‘Cane,’ that’s it. ‘The dymines is under the bricks on the other side of the cane.’ How about that?” Alafair said.
The man staring at alpine scenes in the large picture book he gripped by both covers, the spine resting on the table, looked at his watch and yawned again. He got up from the table and replaced his book on the shelf. Then he walked over to a periodicals rack and began thumbing through a magazine, occasionally glancing out the window at the darkness in the sky.
At 9:53 Molly and Alafair left the library and walked toward their automobile.
It was 9:12 p.m. when the phone rang in the kitchen. I hoped it was Molly. I looked at the caller ID and saw that the call was blocked. I picked up the receiver. “Hello?” I said.
“I had to cajole a couple of people, but this is what I found out,” Betsy said. “Tom Claggart attended the Citadel in the late seventies. His father was stationed at Fort Jackson. The father was a widower and had only one child with the name Claggart. But at various times on his tax form he claimed two dependents besides himself, his son. Tom Junior, and a foster child by the name of Ronald Bledsoe.”
“Yeah, I’ve already got that.”
“You’ve got that? From where?” she said.
“A reference librarian at the Citadel.”
“A reference librarian. Thanks for telling me that.”
“Come on, Betsy, give me the rest of it.”
“Dave, try to understand this. An agent in Columbia, South Carolina, drove to Camden, thirty miles away, and found people who remembered the Claggart family. He did this as a favor because we were in training together at Quantico. Be a little patient, all right?”
“I understand,” I said, my scalp tightening.
“Claggart Senior was originally from Myrtle Beach. Evidently he had a child out of wedlock with a woman named Yvonne Bledsoe. She came from an old family that had fallen on bad times, and ran a day care center. Evidently she thought of herself as southern aristocracy who had been forced into a life beneath her social level. According to what my friend found out, a couple of parents accused her of molesting the children in her care. Tom Claggart, Junior, seemed to have lived with his father at several army bases around the country, but Ronald Bledsoe stayed with the mother until he was fifteen or sixteen.”
“Where is she now?” I asked.
“She burned to death in a house fire, source of ignition unknown.”
When I hung up, the side of my head felt numb. I called Molly’s cell phone again but got no answer. Clete was looking at me, a strange expression on his face. “What is it?” he said.
“Let’s take a ride,” I said.
MOLLY AND ALAFAIR walked across a stretch of green lawn between two brick buildings covered with shadow, crossed the boulevard, and entered an unlit area by the side of Burke Hall. The wind was colder now, threading lines through the film of congealed algae in the lake. The vehicles that had been parked by Molly’s car were gone, the windows in Burke Hall dark. Molly unlocked the driver’s door, then got behind the wheel and leaned across the seat to unlock the passenger side. In a flicker of lightning, she thought she saw a man standing at the rear of the building, leaning against the bricks, his arms folded on his chest. When she refocused her eyes, he wasn’t there.
Alafair got in on the passenger side and closed the door behind her. “I’m tired. How about we pass on picking up a dessert?” she said.
“Fine with me,” Molly said.
Molly removed her purse from under the seat and set it beside her. She slipped the key into the ignition and turned it. But the starter made no sound, not even the dry click that would indicate a dead battery. Nor did the dash indicators come on, as though the battery were totally disconnected from the system.
“I bought a new battery at AutoZone only three weeks ago,” she said.
“Let me have your cell phone. I’ll call Dave,” Alafair said.
A gust of wind and rain blew across the cypress trees in the lake and patterned the windshield. Suddenly the man who had been sitting across from Molly and Alafair in the library was standing outside Molly’s window, wearing his raincoat, his oversize hat cupping his ears. He was smiling and making a circular motion for Molly to roll down her window. That’s when she noticed there was a one-inch airspace at the top of the glass, one that she didn’t remember leaving when she had exited the car.
She hand-cranked the window down another six inches. “Yes?” she said.
“I saw you upstairs at the library,” the man said.
“I know. What is it you want?”
“It looks like you got car trouble. I can call Triple A for you or give you a ride.”
“Why do you think we’re having car trouble?” Molly said.
“Because your car won’t start,” the man replied, a half-smile on his face.
“But how would you know that? The engine made no sound,” Molly said.
“I saw you twisting the key a couple of times, that’s all.”
“We’re fine, here. Thanks for the offer,” she said.
The man looked out into the darkness, toward the side of the building, holding his raincoat closed at the throat, his face filmed with the mist blowing out of the cypress trees. “It’s nasty weather to be out. I think a storm is coming,” he said.
Alafair gave Molly a look, then pulled Molly’s purse toward her, easing it down by her foot.
The man who wore a hat that cupped his ears and whose mustache was streaked with white leaned closer to the window. “I got to tell you ladies something. I didn’t choose this. I feel sorry for you. I’m not that kind of man.”
“Take the mashed potatoes out of your mouth and say it, whatever it is,” Molly said.
But before the man in the raincoat could answer, Alafair’s window exploded in shards all over the interior of the car. Alafair’s face jerked in shock, her hair and shirt flecked with glass. A hand holding a brick raked the glass down even with the window frame, grinding it into powder against the metal.
Alafair and Molly stared at the grinning face of Ronald Bledsoe. In his right hand he clutched the brick, in his left, a.25-caliber blue-black automatic. He fitted the muzzle under Alafair’s chin and increased the pressure until she lifted her chin and shut her eyes.
“Pop the hood so Tom can reconnect your battery, Miz Robicheaux,” he said. “Then lean over the backseat and open the door for me. We’re going to take a drive. Y’all are going to be good the whole way, too.” He leaned forward and smelled Alafair’s hair. “Lordy, I like you, Miss Alafair. You’re a darlin’ young girl, and I know what I’m talking about, because I’ve had the best.”
Molly hesitated.
“You want to see her brains on the dashboard, Miz Robicheaux?” Bledsoe said.
Molly pulled on the hood release, then leaned over the backseat and opened the rear door. Bledsoe slipped inside, closing the door as quickly as possible to turn off the interior light. Molly was still extended over the seat, and his face and eyes were only inches from hers. His silk shirt rippled like blue ice water. She could smell the dampness on his skin, the dried soap he had used in shaving his head, an odor like soiled kitty litter that rose from his armpits.
The man in the raincoat slammed down the hood.
“Start the car,” Bledsoe said, clicking the switch on the interior light to the “off” position.
“I don’t think I should do that,” Molly said.
The man in the raincoat pulled open the back door and got inside. He struggled a minute with his raincoat before getting the door shut. He would not look directly at either Molly or Alafair.
“Want to be the cause of this little girl’s death?” Bledsoe said. “Want to be the cause of your own, just because you decide to be stubborn? That doesn’t sound like a nun to me. That sounds like pride talking.”
Molly’s hand started to shake as she turned the ignition. “My husband is going to hang you out to dry, buddy boy,” she said.
“He’d like to. But so far, he hasn’t done such a good job of it, has he?” Bledsoe said. He teased the muzzle of the.25 under Alafair’s ear. “Pull onto the street, Miz Robicheaux.”
Molly turned on the headlights and began backing up, craning her neck to see out the back window. The sidewalk and lawn area in front of Burke Hall were empty, the giant oak by the entrance obscuring the light from the intersection to the south.
“Miss Alafair, reach there into your book bag and give me that yellow tablet you were writing on,” Bledsoe said. “That’s right, reach in and hand it to me. You a good girl. You play your cards right, you cain’t tell what might happen. You might come out of this just fine.”
Bledsoe took the yellow legal pad from Alafair’s hand and examined the top page, all the while holding the.25 against Alafair’s head. “Miss Alafair, you just made a bunch of people very happy. Isn’t that something, Tom? It was sitting in your backyard all the time, under that big generator, I bet. It took an educated young woman to figure this out for us. She’s special is what she is. Hear that, darlin’? You special and that’s how I’m gonna treat you. You’ll like it when we get there.”
He picked a piece of glass out of her hair and flicked it out the window. He did not say where “there” was.
They pulled out on the boulevard and drove past a women’s dormitory to a stop sign on the edge of the campus. Then they turned onto University Avenue and headed toward the edge of town.
MOMENTS LATER, a few blocks up the avenue, between a Jewish cemetery that was covered with the deep shadows of cedar and oak trees, and an old icehouse that had been converted into a topless club, a jogger had to dodge a car that had plunged out of the traffic, across the median, and possibly had been hit by another car. The jogger could not see clearly inside the car because of the mist, but when he called 911, he told the dispatcher he had heard a sound like muffled firecrackers and he thought he had seen a series of flashes inside the windows.
I CLAMPED THE portable emergency flasher on the roof of my truck and let Clete drive. By the time Clete had driven us through the little town of Broussard, the highway was slick, the sky black, and traffic was backing up because of construction outside Lafayette. We went through a long section of urban sprawl that in my college days had been sugarcane fields and pecan orchards, threaded by a two-lane highway that had been lined on each side with live oaks. But that was all gone.
It was almost 10:00 p.m. I had called Molly’s cell phone three times en route, getting her voice mail each time.
“You’re worrying too much. They’re probably headed home by now,” Clete said.
“She always checks her voice mail. It’s an obsession with her,” I said.
“Think about it a minute, Dave. Nothing has changed since this afternoon, except for the fact we found out Claggart is Asswipe’s half brother. That doesn’t mean Molly and Alafair are in greater danger. You know what I think is bothering you?”
“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”
“You smoked Rydel and now you want to drink.”
When I didn’t speak, he said, “Remember when we did that bunch of Colombians? I’ve never been so scared in my life. I drank a dozen double Scotches that night and it didn’t make a dent.”
“Clete?”
“Yeah?”
“Will you shut up?”
He looked at me in the glow of the dash, then mashed on the accelerator, swerving across a double stripe to pass a tractor-trailer rig, rocking both of us against the doors.
I punched in 911 and got a Lafayette Parish dispatcher. “What’s the nature of your emergency?” a black woman’s voice said.
“This is Detective Dave Robicheaux, Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department,” I said. “I’m on my way to the UL campus to find my wife and daughter. They usually park by Cypress Lake, next to Burke Hall. They’re not responding to my calls. I think they may be in jeopardy. Will you send a cruiser to the campus and check out their vehicle, please?”
I gave her the make and model of Molly’s car.
“We have a five-car accident on University, but we’ll get someone over to the campus as soon as possible,” she said. “Do you want me to call Campus Security?”
“Yes, please.”
“You didn’t tell me the nature of the emergency.”
“Some guys tried to kill my family on Sunday. They’re still out there.”
“Give me your number and I’ll call you every ten minutes until we know they’re safe.”
“Thank you,” I said.
As I said, it’s the most humble members of the human family who remind us of the Orwellian admonition that people are always better than we think they are.
Clete hit a clear stretch of four-lane road and floored my truck. We went through a brightly lit shopping district, then entered the old part of Lafayette, where live oak trees hung with moss still form canopies over the streets. We turned left on University Avenue and passed the five-car pileup the 911 dispatcher had mentioned. The mist was gray, floating across the trees and shrubbery and hedges in the university district. A church bus passed us in the opposite direction, then a tanker truck and a stretch limo and a small car barely visible on the other side of the limo.
The roof of the car had the same rusty tint as Molly’s. I turned around in the seat and looked through the back window, but I had lost sight of the car.
“Was that Molly and Alafair?” Clete said.
“I’m not sure.”
“Want me to turn around?”
I thought about it. “No, check Burke Hall first,” I said.
“You got it, noble mon,” Clete said.
AS THEY DROVE DOWN University Avenue past a five-car pileup, Ronald Bledsoe propped both his arms on the back of Alafair’s seat to conceal the.25 automatic he had wedged against her spine. He smelled her hair again and ticked the back of her neck with his fingernail. When she tried to lean forward, he hooked his finger in her collar.
“Why’d you kick me in the park?” he asked.
“Where are we going?” Molly said.
“Straight ahead. I’ll tell you what to do. You don’t talk anymore until I tell you to,” he replied. He nudged Alafair with the automatic. “You didn’t answer my question, darlin’.”
“I kicked you in the mouth because you asked for it,” she said.
“I did no such thing. You shouldn’t lie.”
Alafair’s face was growing more intense, her features sharpening. He put his lips on the nape of her neck, then mussed her hair with his free hand.
“Do you believe we let this sick fuck take over our car?” she said to Molly.
“Miss, don’t talk like that to Ronald,” Tom Claggart said. “You don’t want to do that.”
“What else can you do to us? You’re going to kill us. Look at you, you’re pathetic. You both have heads that look like foreskin. Who was your mother? She must have been inseminated by a yeast infection.”
The effect of her words on the two men was different from what she had expected. Bledsoe cupped his hand under her chin and drew her head close to his mouth. Then he bit her hair. But it was Claggart who seemed to be losing control, as though he were witnessing a prelude to events he had seen before and did not want to see again. He became agitated, his eyes twitching. He rubbed his hands up and down on his thighs. Then he realized his raincoat was caught in the door. He began jerking at it, as though he were happy to have something to distract him.
“Pull over. My coat is caught,” he said.
“There’s a semi going fifty miles an hour on my bumper,” Molly said.
“I don’t care. Pull over right now. Make her pull over, Ronald,” Claggart said.
Then Claggart opened the door while the car was still moving. Molly swerved the wheel and he lurched sideways. Bledsoe wasn’t sure what was happening. In seconds, the environment he had imposed total control on was coming apart. He spit Alafair’s hair out of his mouth and grabbed Claggart’s arm, just as the open door was hit by a car traveling in the opposite direction.
Alafair reached down on the floor. All in one motion, she pulled Molly’s.22 Ruger from her purse, worked the slide, and brought up the barrel into Ronald Bledsoe’s face. His eyes were filled with disbelief. But his bigger problem was the fact he was twisted in the seat, his own brother fighting with him over a raincoat, his shoulder jammed against the seat so he couldn’t get off a shot at Alafair. The next second was probably the longest in Ronald Bledsoe’s life.
“Suck on this, you freak,” Alafair said.
She pulled the trigger four times. The first round went into his mouth and punched through his cheek. The second embedded in his forearm when he lifted it in front of him, the third clipped off the end of a finger, and the fourth shattered his chin, slinging blood and saliva across the seat and the back window.
Molly’s ears were deaf in the blowback of the Ruger. In the rearview mirror she saw Bledsoe staring back at her, his ruined mouth twisted like soft rubber, his concave face like a cartoon that was incapable of understanding the damage it had just incurred.
Molly’s car struck the curb and came to a stop, cars swerving around her in the mist, their horns blowing. Alafair jumped from the car and pulled Bledsoe out the back door onto the concrete. She reached down and picked up his gun from the floor and threw it into the shrubbery on the edge of the cemetery. Tom Claggart sat frozen in the seat, his raincoat and shirt whipsawed with blood.
Bledsoe stared up at her from the gutter, waiting, his eyes genuinely puzzled, as a child might look up from its crib at the looming presence of its mother. Alafair extended the Ruger with both hands, aiming it into the center of his forehead.
“Alafair-” Molly said, almost in a whisper.
Alafair’s knuckles whitened on the Ruger’s grips.
“Hey, kiddo,” Molly said.
“What?” Alafair said angrily.
“We never give them power.”
“He’ll be back.”
“I doubt it. But if he does, we still don’t give them power.”
Alafair widened her eyes, releasing her breath, and stepped backward, clicking on the Ruger’s safety with her thumb. She swallowed and looked at Molly, her eyes filming.
By the time Clete and I arrived at the scene, Alafair and Molly were sitting in the back of a cruiser, talking to a detective in the front seat. Tom Claggart was in handcuffs behind the wire-mesh grille of a second cruiser, and two paramedics were loading Ronald Bledsoe into an Acadiana ambulance.
Alafair got out of the cruiser when she saw me walking toward her from the truck. The detective had given her a roll of paper towels and she was scrubbing her hair with them, lifting her chin, flipping a strand out of her eyes. She looked absolutely beautiful, like a young girl emerging from a sun shower. “What’s the haps, Streak?” she said.
“No haps, Alf,” I said.
“Don’t call me that stupid name,” she said.
Molly leaned forward in the backseat of the cruiser, beaming. She gave me the thumbs-up sign with both hands. “What kept you?” she said.