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“You didn’t have to provide a bill of sale or an item number of some kind?”
“They stole my Armani suit and all my silverware and my flat-screen. Stealing a DVD player isn’t like hauling off Fort Knox. I’m starting to get a li’l lost here.”
“Where’d you buy the player?” Helen asked.
“I didn’t exactly buy it.”
“Then how did you acquire it, Mr. Stanga?” she asked.
“My cousin Herman told me he wanted me to have it. And his flat-screen. So after he died, see, I brought them over to my house. ’Cause of what Herman told me.”
“You ever use the player?” I said.
He seemed to search his memory. “I don’t think I plugged it in. But I’m not sure. What’s on y’all’s mind? I want to he’p, but I don’t know what we’re ruminating about here.”
“I want you to come down to the department and watch about forty seconds of video, Mr. Stanga,” Helen said. “Then we’ll have a chat.”
Outside, the Sunset Limited clattered down the railway tracks, the pictures and framed degrees rattling on the office walls.
“Herman have some porn on there or something?” Monroe said.
Helen exhaled, then looked at me. Monroe may have been a venal man, but he could not be called an evil one. Our knowledge about his cousin’s activities was probably greater than his own. After he watched the video, he was visibly shocked and frightened and sat with his arms folded tightly across his chest, his round mahogany-colored waxed head bright with pinpoints of perspiration. He wiped his forehead with a folded handkerchief, then rubbed at his nose with the back of his wrist.
“How come there’s no sound?” he asked.
“We don’t know,” I said.
He huffed air out of his nostrils, blinking like a man who couldn’t deal with the brightness of the day. “Think y’all gonna find Herman’s flat-screen?”
/> “I doubt it,” I said.
“If you do, give it to the Goodwill. I don’t want to ever see it again,” he said.
THAT EVENING I asked Molly to take a walk with me. The sky was piled with clouds that looked like golden and purple fruit turning red around the edges. From the bridge at Burke Street, we could see the flooded bamboo behind The Shadows and the flowers growing along the bayou and the deep shade on the water under the overhang of the trees.
“I’d like for you and Alafair to leave town for a week or so. Maybe go to Key West,” I said.
“When did we start running away from things?” she replied.
“This one is different. I’m not even sure who the players are.”
“What others do or don’t do isn’t a factor. We don’t stop being who we are,” she said.
The air was cool puffing up from under the bridge, the surface of the water crinkling in the sunset with the incoming tide. “We’re dealing with people who have no lines,” I said. “Their motivations are only partially known to us. Part of their agenda is financial. The other part of it is fiendish. It’s the last part I’m worried about.”
Then I told her about the video we had watched in Helen’s office. While I spoke, Molly continued to lean on the bridge rail, staring at the sunlight’s reflection on the bayou’s surface, like hundreds of glinting razors, her face never changing expression.
“Who would do this?” she said.
“That’s it. We don’t know. Monsters like Gacy and Bundy and Gary Ridgway and this guy Rader in Kansas torture and murder people for years and live undetected in our midst while they do it.”
“We’re not going anywhere, Dave.”
I watched a garfish roll among the water hyacinths along the bank, its dark green armored back sliding as supplely as a snake’s beneath the flowers, down into the depths, while tiny bream skittered out of its way.
I ATE LUNCH the next day at Victor’s cafeteria on Main. It was hot and bright when I came back out on the street, the air dense, a smell like salt and warm seaweed on the wind, more like hurricane season than the end of spring.
A Lexus pulled to the curb. The driver rolled down the charcoal-tinted window on the passenger side. Carolyn Blanchet leaned forward so I could see her face. “How about a ride?” she said.
