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I HAD THREE OPEN homicide files on my desk: Lucinda Arceneaux floated out to sea on a cross; Joe Molinari hanged in a shrimp net from a tree; and Travis Lebeau tortured and dragged to death. In terms of forensic evidence, we had nothing that would necessarily connect one case to the other. But the histrionic nature of each homicide couldn’t be denied. There were also threads that seemed to overlap. The man Lucinda Arceneaux tried to get off death row had broken out of a prison hospital and come here rather than a large urban area where he could hide more conveniently. He’d also gone out of his way to tell a bartender he knew people connected to the film industry. The man who had befriended him, Travis Lebeau, had ended up dead. But where did Joe Molinari fit in? His life had been lived almost invisibly. Had he been selected randomly by a lunatic and posed to represent the Hanged Man in the tarot, or had Bailey Ribbons and I let our imaginations go unchecked?
Normally, the motivation in any premeditated homicide involves sex or money or power or any combination of the three. The similarity in the Arceneaux and Molinari homicides was the lack of motivation and the possibility of religious fanaticism bordering on madness. The horrible death of Travis Lebeau may have been simply a revenge killing by the AB. But the fact remained that his friend was the escaped convict Hugo Tillinger, and Tillinger was a friend of Lucinda Arceneaux’s. Tillinger had known both people, and now both were dead.
Tillinger was the only lead we had. Skip, my bartender friend, had said Tillinger was a nice guy. A jury in Texas had thought otherwise. But what did we actually know about him?
He may or may not have killed his family. He was argumentative and had inflexible moral attitudes. He had probably broken into three fishing camps but had taken little of value and seemed to have no record of dishonesty. Skip had said he didn’t belong in a bar that was one cut above a hot-pillow joint. A Texas gunbull had called him a lying son of a bitch you shouldn’t turn your back on.
All of which added up to take your choice.
• • •
THAT EVENING I went home late and stood at the back of my property and threw moldy pecans into the current and watched them sink out of sight. Snuggs sat by my foot, sniffing the breeze, his tail draped over my loafer. I heard Alafair walk up behind me. “What’s goin’ on, big guy?”
“Eighty-six the big-guy stuff, please.”
“I signed on with Desmond’s group,” she said. “I might be going out to Arizona.”
“Sorry—what?”
“I’m going to do the rewrite on the script. I’m also going to have a small acting role.”
“That’s good,” I said.
“I’ll be flying out to the location with Lou next week.”
“Lou Wexler?”
“Yeah,” she said. “What about it?”
“He’s old.”
“He’s older than I am. That doesn’t mean he’s old.”
“It’s your life, Alf.”
“Why do you have to say that, Dave?”
“I don’t trust these guys. When they get what they want, they’re gone. Every time, without exception.”
“So I should stay away from the movie business? How about publishing? Should I stay away from publishing houses?”
I arced a pecan into the middle of the bayou. “I’m at a dead end on three homicides. One thing I’m sure of, however: Antoine Butterworth is mixed up in them.”
“I think you’re wrong,” she said. “Besides, Lou hates his guts.”
“Why do you call this guy by his first name?”
“It’s what people do when they know each other. I don’t mean in the biblical sense, either. You think Desmond is corrupt?”
“No,” I said.
“Then maybe you won’t mind that he wants to cast Bailey Ribbons.”
“That’s her business.” I threw a pecan into the bayou.
&nbs
p; “You have feelings for her?”
