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At four o'clock the uniformed deputies left. The sun came out and I watched Thurston Meaux sit down on a crate in the lee of the barn and eat a sandwich, let the wax paper blow away in the wind, then pull the tab on a soda can and drop it in the dirt.
"You're contaminating the crime scene," I said.
"Wrong," he replied.
"Oh?"
"Because we're not wasting any more time on this bullshit. You've got some kind of obsession, Robicheaux." He brushed the crumbs off his clothes and walked to his automobile.
Helen didn't say anything for a long time. Then she lifted a strand of hair out of her eye and said, "Dave, we've walked every inch of the field and raked all the ground inside and around the barn. You want to start over again, that's okay with me, but—"
"Guidry said, 'It was under your feet, you arrogant shithead.' Whatever he was talking about, it's physical, maybe something we walked over, something he could pick up and stick in my face."
"We can bring in a Cat and move some serious dirt."
"No, we might destroy whatever is here."
She let out her breath, then began scraping a long divot with a mattock around the edges of the hardpan.
"You're a loyal friend, Helen," I said.
"Bwana has the keys to the cruiser," she said.
I stood in front of the barn wall and stared at the weathered wood, the strips of red paint that were flaking like fingernail polish, the dust-sealed nail holes where Jack Flynn's wrists had been impaled. Whatever evidence was here had been left by Harpo Scruggs, not Alex Guidry, I thought. It was something Scruggs knew about, had deliberately le
ft in place, had even told Guidry about. But why?
To implicate someone else. Just as he had crucified Swede Boxleiter in this spot to tie Boxleiter's death to Flynn's.
"Helen, if there's anything here, it's right by where Jack Flynn died," I said.
She rested the mattock by her foot and wiped a smear of mud off her face with her sleeve.
"If you say so," she said.
"Long day, huh?"
"I had a dream last night. Like I was being pulled back into history, into stuff I don't want to have anything to do with."
"You told me yourself, we're the good guys."
"When I kept shooting at Guidry? He was already done. I just couldn't stop. I convinced myself I saw another flash from his weapon. But I knew better."
"He got what he deserved."
"Yeah? Well, why do I feel the way I do?"
"Because you still have your humanity. It's because you're the best."
"I want to make this case and lock the file on it. I mean it, Dave."
She put down her mattock and the two of us began piercing the hardpan with garden forks, working backward from the barn wall, turning up the dirt from six inches below the surface. The subsoil was black and shiny, oozing with water and white worms. Then I saw a coppery glint and a smooth glass surface wedge out of the mud while Helen was prizing her fork against a tangle of roots.
"Hold it," I said.
"What is it?"
"A jar. Don't move the fork."
