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“He had some kind of working relationship with her. But something set him off. She was in pajamas?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe he wanted to get it on and she told him to fuck off. Violence like this is almost always sexual. There was no sign of rape or biting or any of that crap?”
“Not according to the coroner.”
Clete stared at the sun and the Greek revival home in the trees across the bayou. “Why does this place make me think of a killing ground on the Cambodian border?”
“Because this was a slave cemetery,” I said. “They’re under your feet.”
“Christ,” he said, his face twitching.
• • •
LATER THAT EVENING I sat down in the living room with Alafair. The windows were open, the streetlights on. I could see leaves smoldering like red coals in a rain gutter, and smell impending rain and the heavy odor of the bayou. I did not want to think any more about Hilary Bienville or the evil that humans do. I once had a friend who worked with the criminally insane in Norwalk, California. He was a Quaker and a humanist and seemed to be unscathed by his experience with patients who had committed crimes that were unthinkable. I asked him what his secret was.
“I conceded,” he answered.
“Conceded what?” I said.
“There are people who are at peace with malevolence. It’s in their eyes. It keeps them warm. That’s the way they come out of the womb.”
There was a reading lamp above Alafair’s head. She kept looking at me in a peculiar way. “Are you all right?”
“I’m a little tired. I brought a dessert home.”
I went into the kitchen and cut a wet slice of chocolate cake for each of us, then put them on plates and brought them back into the living room. She had been on location in Morgan City all day and had not heard about Hilary Bienville. So I told her, then I told her about Smiley. The room was quiet.
“You don’t believe me about Smiley?” I said.
“I’m not sure, you see things other people don’t. You haven’t said anything about the Bienville crime scene.”
“It’s better not to talk about it.”
“Who’s doing this, Dave?”
“I have no idea. There’s no single thread that runs through all the cases. We don’t know if we’re dealing with one killer or more than one.”
But her mind seemed somewhere else. “There’s something wrong with Desmond.”
“Like what?”
“Today somebody said something about the Lucinda Arceneaux homicide, like working the floating cross with the body on it into the movie. Desmond snapped the guy’s head off.”
“Maybe he was just out of sorts,” I said.
“There’s something else bothering me. Des got wet today and was changing his socks. There’s a Maltese cross tattooed on his ankle. Didn’t you say Bienville tied a charm shaped like a Maltese cross on her daughter’s ankle?”
“I did.”
“Just coincidence?” she said.
“That’s a word liars use often,” I said.
Chapter Twenty
EARLY THE NEXT morning I drove to the location outside Morgan City that Desmond had turned into a replica of an early 1950s prison farm. Mounted gunbulls in gray uniforms and shades, their skin as dark as saddle leather, were silhouetted against the sunrise atop the levee, while down below, men in prison stripes and straw hats that had been painted red were pulling stumps with mules and chains.
