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Sam "Hogman" Patin was wrong. Cherry LeBlanc's killer would not merely find another victim in the future. He already had.
Chapter 7
I got the call at eleven o'clock that night. A fisherman running a trotline by the levee, way down in the bottom of Vermilion Parish, almost to the salt water, had seen a lidless oil drum half submerged on its side in the cattails. He would have paid little attention to it, except for the fact that he saw the backs of alligator gars arching out of the water in the moonlight as they tore at something inside the barrel.
I drove down the narrow dirt track on top of the levee through the miles of flooded sawgrass that eventually bled into the Gulf. Strips of black cloud floated across the moon, and up ahead I could see an ambulance and a collection of sheriff's cars parked on the levee in a white and red glow of floodlamps, burning flares, and revolving emergency lights.
The girl was already in a body bag inside the ambulance. The coroner was a tired, overweight Jewish man with emphysema and a terrible cigarette odor whom I had known for years. There were deep circles under his eyes, and he kept rubbing mosquito repellent onto his face and fat arms.
Down the bank a Vermilion Parish plainclothes was interviewing the fisherman, whose unshaven face looked bloodless and gray in the glare of the floodlamps.
"You want to see her, Dave?" the coroner asked.
"Should I?"
"Probably."
We climbed into the back of the ambulance. Even with the air conditioner running, it was hot and stale-smelling inside.
"I figure she was in the water only a couple of days, but she's probably been dead several weeks," he said. "The barrel was probably on the side of the levee, then it rolled into the water. Otherwise, the crabs and the gars would have torn her up a lot worse."
He pulled the zipper from the girl's head all the way down to her ankles.
I took a breath and swallowed.
"I'd say she was in her early twenties, but I'm guessing," he said. "As you can see, we won't get much in the way of prints. I don't think an artist will be able to recreate what her face looked like, either. Cause of death doesn't appear to be a mystery—asphyxiation with a plastic bag taped around her neck. The same electrician's tape he used to bind her hands and ankles. Rape, sodomy, sexual degradation, that kind of stuff? When their clothes are gone, you can put it in the bank."
"No rings, bracelets, tattoos?"
He shook his head.
"Have they found anything out there?"
"Nothing."
"Tire tracks?"
"Not after all the rain we've had."
"Do y'all have any missing-persons reports that come with—"
"Nope."
A long strand of her blond hair hung outside the bag
. For some reason it bothered me. I picked it up and placed it on her forehead. The coroner looked at me strangely.
"Why would he stuff her in a barrel?" I said.
"Dave, the day you can put yourself inside the head of a cocksucker like that, that's the day you eat your gun."
I stepped back outside into the humid brilliance of the floodlamps, then walked along the slope of the levee and down by the water's edge. The darkness throbbed with the croaking of frogs, and fireflies were lighting in the tops of the sawgrass. The weeds along the levee had been trampled by cops' feet; fresh cigarette butts floated in the water; a sheriff's deputy was telling two others a racial joke.
The Vermilion Parish plainclothes finished interviewing the fisherman, put his notebook in his shirt pocket, and walked up the slope to his car. The fisherman continued to stand by his pirogue, scratching at the mosquito bites on his arms, evidently unsure of what he was supposed to do next. Sweat leaked out of the band of his cloth cap and glistened on his jawbones. When I introduced myself, his handshake, like most Cajun men's, was effeminate.
"I ain't never seen nothing like that, me," he said. "I don't want to never see nothing like that again, neither."
The bottom of his pirogue was piled with mudcat. They quivered on top of each other, their whiskers pasted back against their yellow sides and bloated white bellies. On the seat of his pirogue was a headlamp with an elastic strap on it.
