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“I don’t like to be the bearer of bad news, but your homicide partner is not what she seems. She set fire to a school as a child, and she fried some fellows at a fairgrounds up in Montana.”
“How do you know this?”
“I knew her in New Orleans. I was sticking it to her long before you did. Sorry to tell you, she’s not Clementine Carter, as Des is always saying. What a fucking joke. I’ll be back with you later. Or maybe not.”
He broke the connection. I folded the phone in my hand and tried to keep my face empty.
“That was Wexler?” Bailey said.
“Yes,” I replied.
“What did he say?”
“That except for shooting Wimple, he’s an innocent man.”
“Do you believe him?”
“Did you know him in New Orleans?”
“No.”
“Never saw him before you came to the Iberia Sheriff’s Department.”
“No. Is that what he told you?”
“We need to get a net over Desmond Cormier,” I said.
“Cormier has Alafair?”
“I’m not sure about anything.”
She looked at me in dismay. I walked toward my truck. I have long had problems with vertigo, the kind caused by a tightening of blood vessels in the brain. I could feel the ground caving under my feet. Then I felt Clete fitting his hand inside my upper arm. He opened the driver’s door and steadied me so I could step inside.
“I’m all right,” I said.
“What did that cocksucker say?”
“He knows things about Bailey that would be impossible for him to know, unless he’d had a relationship with her. He says the stuff from the attic are movie props. He knows nothing about a tarot deck.”
“What else?”
“Alafair may already be dead. Or maybe Cormier has her. I just don’t know.”
“Don’t say that about her being dead. You hear me, Streak? Don’t even think it. I’m going to get these guys. I promise you.”
He looked like he was drowning.
• • •
BAILEY AND OUR departmental pilot and I took the pontoon plane over the wetlands south of New Iberia. It might have seemed a waste of time to others, but we had nothing else to go on. I had no idea where Desmond Cormier might be. Wexler knew Bailey’s history, which gave plausibility to the other things he’d said. Possibly he had worked as a companion killer with Desmond. That I’ve spoken of Desmond’s physiognomy several times probably says more about me than Desmond. The prenatal alcoholic influence stamped on his features was undeniable, the inner reality one I had never wanted to accept.
As the plane dipped and turned and glided over the swamps and marshlands that were shrinking daily, I wondered what to look for. Maybe a white cabin cruiser couched in a green harbor. A cherry-red Lamborghini. A houseboat or a duck camp where Alafair had set a fire as a mayday signal. These thoughts were the product of desperation, and they led me to worse thoughts, namely, that I might see Alafair costumed and floating out to sea, closing the circle for the killer, as Bailey had predicted.
I had thought my days in the Garden of Gethsemane were over and my ticket had been punched, and that I belonged to the club of those who were inured to the worst the world could offer. But as I looked at the miles and miles of salt grass and flooded gum trees and milky-green curtains of algae that floated atop the bays, I knew that I was powerless over my situation, and the last remnant of my family had perhaps been subsumed by the evil forces I have fought against all my life, most of it in vain.
• • •
WHAT DOES THE expression “hell on earth” mean? In my experience, it usually has to do with our own handiwork. Freight cars clicking down the tracks on their way to Buchenwald. A nineteen-year-old peasant girl set alight while tied to a stake in Rouen, France. The slaughter of fifty million buffalo to starve the American Indian into submission.
