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I started the engine. “Pull the anchor. There’s a guy inside the trees with a scoped bolt-action.”
“Isn’t it deer season?”
“Not with regular firearms.”
Clete pulled the anchor and clunked it into the bow. We headed around the island. The outboard was gone, but we could hear its drone across the water, perhaps from a channel that led into another bay. I cut our engine. Now the only sound was the chop against the hull.
“You see his face?” Clete said.
“No.”
“Is it still alligator season?”
“Yeah, it is.”
“So don’t worry about it,” Clete said. “Right?”
“This is a fishing area, not a target range.”
“So it was a jerkoff who has his gun mixed up with his dork.”
But we both knew better. Nobody hunts gators with scoped rifles, and no person of goodwill looks through the scope at another individual. I restarted the engine and we headed home, the wind in our faces, ten degrees colder now, like a slow burn on the skin.
• • •
I SHOWERED AND WENT to Bailey’s house, hoping we could have a late dinner. She had gone shopping in Lafayette and told me she expected to be home by eight.
It was almost nine. I called her cell phone twice and went directly to voicemail. I sat on the gallery and waited. Then I began to go places in my head I probably shouldn’t have. Or at least that’s what I felt at the time.
I could not explain away the presence of the man with the bolt-action rifle on the flooded island. Clete and I had enemies. Every cop does. But few of them seek revenge. I witnessed the electrocution of two murderers I helped convict, partly out of duty, partly at their request. Neither of them bore me enmity. None of my past experience as a detective in New Orleans or New Iberia had been any help in solving the series of murders connected with the tarot or the Maltese cross. What was the motivation? That was the big one. The old saw money wasn’t working.
How about someone who had declared war on something much larger than he was, a misanthrope with the vision of Captain Ahab in his pursuit of the white whale? The kind of man who wanted to destroy beauty and goodness whenever he found it? That brought to mind the image of a man firing out of a resort window in Las Vegas.
Or maybe he was the kind of man who hated others so much he would kill their friends or loved ones so the real target would suffer daily for the rest of his or her life. I thought again of the damage done to the body of Hilary Bienville.
I called Bailey a third time. No answer. I called Alafair at the house.
“Hi, Dave,” she said.
“You okay, Alfie?”
“Don’t call me that dumb name.”
“Are you okay?”
“Sure. What’s going on?”
“I’m just checking.”
“Where are you?”
“In front of Bailey’s house. I don’t know where she is. She said she would be back from Lafayette by eight.”
“You know how the traffic is.”
“What did you do today?”
“We quit the shoot early and I played tennis with Des at Red’s.”
