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He raised his hand, signaling everyone around him to stop. I walked to a spot between the wheelchair and an enormous SUV that he and the others had been preparing to enter. His bronze-tinted hair was blowing on his pate, dry and loose, like a baby’s. When he turned his face up at me, I thought of a tiny bird.
“You’re a ubiquitous presence, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said. “You pop up like a jack-in-the-box. I didn’t realize you were an admirer of my friend the general.”
“I’m not.”
“So our meeting here is more than coincidental? Well, I shouldn’t be surprised. As I recall, your father was a persistent man. He could lay them flat out, couldn’t he? What is it about my grandson or my friends that has you so concerned?”
I looked at the man whose hand was wrapped in a wad of gauze and tape as big as a boxing glove. His face was as taut as latex, his eyes liquid with resentment, a scar like a piece of white string cupped on the rim of one nostril. The man with the oiled black hair had turned at an angle toward me, his coat open and pushed back loosely, his nose thinner than it should have been, as though it had been destroyed by disease of some kind and reconstructed by an inept plastic surgeon.
“Your man with his arm in the sling, is he missing some fingers?” I asked Abelard.
“Not to my knowledge. He slammed a door on his hand.”
“No, I think I shot him. I think I blew his fingers all over a tree. I suspect he’s still in considerable pain,” I said. Then I laughed. “I also killed one of his friends.”
“You must tell us about this sometime. But right now we need to be going. Good night to you,” Abelard said.
“No, I’d like for you to glance at a few photos,” I said, pulling the manila folder from my coat pocket and opening it in front of him so it caught the light. “That first shot was taken at an exhumation by the Iberia–St. Martin Parish line. Her name was Fern Michot. She was from British Columbia and eighteen years old at the time of her death. Here, this other shot shows her in her Girl Scout uniform when she was sixteen. It gives you a better idea what she looked like. There was a lot of water and decaying garbage in the grave where her killer dumped her.
“This other girl is Bernadette Latiolais. The knife cut across her throat almost decapitated her, which caused her to bleed out and the muscles in her face to collapse, so it’s probably pretty hard to recognize her. Does she look familiar to you? Kermit says he knew her, so I’ll bet he remembers how beautiful and happy she was before a degenerate and sadist kidnapped and murdered her.”
“What Mr. Robicheaux is trying to say is the girl received a scholarship we created at UL, Pa’pere,” Kermit said. “I might have met her at an honors ceremony, but I didn’t know her. Mr. Robicheaux is still resentful because of my breakup with Alafair.”
“Is that true, Mr. Robicheaux? You resent my grandson?” Abelard said.
“No, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about Kermit,” I said. “Here, look at these close-up photos of the ligature marks on Fern Michot’s wrists and ankles. She may have died from asphyxiation, or she may have been frightened to death. In your opinion, what kind of man or men would do this to a young girl, Mr. Timothy? You have any speculations?”
“Yes, I do. I think you should seek counseling,” he replied.
“Did you know these girls, Mr. Abelard? Have you ever seen them?”
“No, I haven’t. And I hope that settles the matter for you.”
“You think you can act like this to an elderly gentleman? Who are you?” the man with the mustache said to me.
“Stay out of it, buddy,” Clete said.
“Where is your identification? Where is your authority to do this?”
“Here’s mine,” Clete said, opening his badge holder. “Dave Robicheaux is a detective with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department. If you want to find yourself in handcuffs and sitting on the curb over there, open your mouth one more time.”
“It’s all right, Emiliano,” Abelard said.
“No, it is not all right,” Emiliano said. “Who are these crazy people? This is the United States.”
I don’t know if it was the booze, or Clete’s hypertension, or the angst over the lifetime of damage he had done to his career and himself, but it was obvious that once again we were about to give up the high ground and load the cannon for our enemies. “You just don’t listen, do you, greaseball?” Clete said.
“I have a son at West Point. I have another son who graduated from the School of the Americas at Fort Benning. You will not address me that way.”
Then I heard the voice of someone I had completely forgotten about. It was soft, almost a whisper, humble and deferential, the voice of someone who had been taught for a lifetime that her interests were secondary to those of other people. “Mr. Timothy?”
“What it is, Jewel?” Abelard answered, looking up at the woman who was both his nurse and his daughter.
“Mr. Timothy?”
“Yes?”
“Mr. Timothy?”
