J. Bertrand - Pattern of Wounds

“Well. .”

“You did check around, right?”

“March,” he says with an exasperated sigh. “Not everybody works the same hours as you. This might come as a surprise, but I can’t just call somebody at NOPD on a Saturday night and get them to send over everything they’ve got.”

“Did you do anything at all?”

A pause. “I really don’t think you should get in touch with him.”

“You said you were going to help out.”

“And I will,” he says. “But not on your timetable. Give me a chance to get the wheels in motion, then I’ll call you.”

“When will that be?”

“Whenever it happens, okay? That’s the best I can do.”

I’m not sure if he hangs up on me or I hang up on him. We both hit the button so fast it could have been a draw.

I pound the steering wheel a couple of times before pulling onto the shoulder. I should have known better than to trust Wilcox to hold up his end. How many times does a man have to let you down before you learn not to trust him? Of course it cuts both ways. I’ve given him plenty of reason to ask the same question of me.

I’ve driven back and forth between Houston and Huntsville so many times I can do the trip with my eyes closed. But for the idea I’m hatching, I need a map. I take the next exit and circle under the highway, heading back toward town. Passing under Sam Houston’s gaze, I give the old man a wave.

At the next service station I buy an atlas and flip through the pages, working out the quickest route. From Huntsville I can take 190 east to Woodville, heading south on 69 until I connect with Interstate 10 at Beaumont. After that I’ll travel east into Louisiana, hitting Lake Charles, Lafayette, and Baton Rouge in succession, reaching New Orleans sometime between seven and eight in the evening. Seven hours to work out how to find Wayne Bourgeois, and how to break him once I do. Seven hours to decide if what I’m doing is crazy. With luck I can conclude my business by midday tomorrow and get back to Houston early in the evening.

There’s no point in cloak-and-dagger, but seeing the pay phone at the service station, I dig some change out anyway. I take my Filofax, open up to the page where I’ve written Gene Fontenot’s address and phone numbers, dialing him at home.

“Hello?” he says.

“It’s me.”

A pause. “I wondered when I’d hear from you.”

“You still have that spare bedroom?”

“What I have is a spare couch,” he says. “And you’re welcome to it.”

“I’m on my way. And in the meantime, there’s someone I need you to locate.”

Charlotte sounds icy over the phone, indifferent.

“You didn’t pack a bag,” she says.

“I didn’t anticipate making the trip. I’d come back through Houston, but that would add another hour to the drive.”

“I’ve hardly seen you the past week.”

“It’s this case,” I say. “Everything is unraveling on me and I’m not sure what to do.”

“Bridger called the house looking for you.”

“He has my cell number.”

“I guess he thought you’d be home on a Sunday afternoon. He wants you to call him.”

“I’ll do that.” The phone is warm against my ear. “Charlotte, I don’t want you to be mad. I would have said something before, if I knew this would come up.”

“I’m not mad,” she says.

A pause.

“Look,” I say. “It’s this pregnancy thing, isn’t it?” Silence. “It’s been eating at you ever since you found out. I know it’s. .” My voice trails off. Still nothing. “Is it the thought of a baby in the house, or the fact that they’ll probably move out-?”

This time there’s no question who hangs up first.

I decide to give her time, calling Bridger instead. He picks up and I get a blast of wind noise over the line, immediately picturing him on a golf course green. He’s just the sort to play in this weather. But no, he’s in the car, smoking with the window down.

“You should give up,” I say.

“Thanks for the advice. Now, what’s this I hear about Donald Fauk appealing his conviction? There’s no chance of the court entertaining this, is there?”

I start to explain the situation. He makes a series of affirming grunts, prodding the story along. Occasionally I hear him exhale loudly, and I imagine a cloud of smoke swirling around the pathologist’s windblown head.

“I heard about the DNA samples going missing,” he says. “What do you think about that?”

“Is it any wonder? Evidence gets lost even under the best conditions, and these days nobody’s calling HPD’s DNA section the best.”

“You don’t think it’s convenient, though?”

“In what way?”

“This particular set of samples going missing.”

“Fauk must be happy,” I say, puzzled.

“But you think it’s just a coincidence.”

Now I’m really confused. “What are you getting at exactly?”

“Maybe it’s nothing,” he says. “But when the original tests were done, the results were verified by an independent lab. We send a lot of work to this particular lab, and I happened to be talking to one of their doctors earlier this week when the subject came up. He brought it up, by the way, and he had a strange story to tell.

“When the evidence couldn’t be retrieved from HPD, Fauk’s attorney queried the independent lab about whether they had samples in storage. My friend answered that they did-these guys keep everything-but the lawyer insisted on him physically checking to see whether they were there. And when he did, guess what?”

“No samples.”

“Exactly. And it’s not like somebody misplaced them. He checked every test they’d run the same month as the Fauk evidence, and all of it was there. The only thing missing were the Fauk DNA samples.”

“Did he have a theory?”

“He told me they were still looking into it. But off the record he said the only explanation was that someone on staff removed them. He doesn’t know when, but at some point, a lab employee went into storage and took the evidence.”

“So Fauk’s counsel insisted on them checking because he knew already the evidence was no longer there.”

“That’s how it looks to me.”

“If this is true,” I say, “then what are the odds the same thing happened in the HPD crime lab?”

“Pretty good, if you ask me. A lot of heads rolled during that inquiry. Maybe somebody decided to make an extra buck. It might not have seemed too serious to them, knowing there was a confession and those backup samples at the other lab.”

“You’ve given me something to think about. Thanks for passing it along.”

“How are you doing, March? The whole Fauk thing coming back like this has to be taking its toll. .”

“There’s a lot going on,” I say, brushing his concern aside. “If I can keep Fauk in jail, that’ll be one thing I don’t have to worry about at night.”

After I hang up, I remember Carter Robb saying something similar to me last night.

If I could just get clarity. On just one thing.

And what had I told him? Something stupid about the human condition. Speeding through East Texas with New Orleans in my crosshairs, I keep repeating Carter’s words to myself. If I could just get clarity on just one thing. A mantra doubles and redoubles in my head, syncopated by the roar of the road, by the rush of forced air, and the beat of raindrops on the windshield. I hear the tap, tap, tap of the knifepoint, first on the stainless surface of the autopsy slab and then chipping away at the sheriff’s conference table. It all becomes white noise and then fades to silence, and in the silence a new sound, wet and whispering, fills my ears. It’s the porous sucking hiss of a blade through flesh.