J. Bertrand - Pattern of Wounds

“So the samples are in storage at an independent lab?”

“No, Brad, they’re not. That’s what’s so strange. Two separate sets had to disappear, and there’s no one who has the power to make that happen, not officially.”

“A police cover-up-”

“You’re not listening. The whole point of an independent lab is to produce independent confirmation. The chief of police himself can get on the phone and tell these guys to make some evidence disappear, and it won’t make a bit of difference to them. Their reputation is based on that firewall between the police departments and their work.”

For the first time, his confidence seems shaken. “So what are you suggesting?”

“It’s simple. Fauk’s been campaigning for a while. You admitted as much. Maybe he decided that with his wife and daughter cutting him off, he couldn’t do the time anymore. Your mistake was in thinking you were the only person he’s been lobbying. Those envelopes I told you about? You’re not the only one receiving them. Donald Fauk has a lot of money. I think he’s used some of it to make that evidence go away.”

“Did he pay off the psychiatrist to backdate a diagnosis? Did he pay Eugene Fontenot to rough him up in the holding cell?”

“Fontenot’s under investigation now,” I say. “It wouldn’t surprise me if some of the allegations against him had come to light thanks to Fauk’s deep pockets. He’s not a spotless lamb by any stretch, but when Fontenot fell, I believe Fauk’s legal team was poised to take advantage.”

“So he paid to suppress the evidence, he paid to make Fontenot look guilty, and I suppose you think he paid me, too?”

“That’s the irony, Brad. He didn’t have to. He just put the worm in your ear and let it go to work, same as you did with Lauterbach.”

He takes a sip of his cappuccino and looks surprised that it’s gone cold. Whether my words have struck deeply or not, I have no way of guessing. The most I can read in his guarded expression is a note of concern.

“I made myself some notes,” he says, consulting his pad for the first time. “Since you insist on treating this as some kind of conspiracy, I figured there were a couple of facts you needed to know. Maybe I’m wasting my time, but here goes.”

He takes another sip. Clears his throat.

“This whole thing started after that conference your cousin organized. There were questions afterward, and somebody asked whether there were any serial killers currently operating. I had just received some information, one of those letters from Donald you’re so worked up about. He cited two murders with similar circumstances to his wife’s death: that housewife in the Woodlands, Tegan McGill, and another woman named Mary Sallier. So this guy in the audience asks about current killers, and I throw the names out there as an example of a possible connection that’s never been followed up.

“When I do that, Lauterbach gets a funny look. The Mary Sallier case was his, he says, and he thinks there’s a link to a more recent homicide, too, a physical trainer who was discovered in a gymnasium pool. Everybody in the room is kind of stunned. Out of nowhere, it’s like this serial killer just took shape, and none of us could quite believe it. We got through the rest of the Q amp; A and afterward spent more than an hour comparing notes. Lauterbach got so excited. . and meanwhile I felt sick to my stomach.

“Your cousin Tammy, she was just glowing. Dean Corll is her thing, obviously, but that little club of hers is equal opportunity. The idea of a new serial killer emerging from her Q amp; A session. . she was ecstatic. And sharp, too. She knows the subject, and knows the kind of questions to ask. She drilled us both until we pretty much had to admit there was something to this thing.

“Up to that moment, I never took Donald’s rambling seriously. All the sudden, I realized that what he was saying made sense. Now, you can sit there and say that Fauk hired himself a serial killer to commit crimes that would match the one he was convicted on, but even you have to admit that strains credibility to the breaking point.”

I nod slowly. “There might be connections, I don’t know. But that doesn’t mean Fauk didn’t kill his wife.” Now I sound like Bascombe, conceding when I’d said I wouldn’t. “I went through Lauterbach’s case files and I can tell you this with absolute certainty: Nicole Fauk’s murder is different, and so are the two I’m working.”

“You can tell yourself that.” He rises. “But who are you really trying to convince?”

He throws a few dollars on the table and heads to the nearest door.

“I want to see those letters,” I say.

But he’s out on the sidewalk. The door swings shut.

If Cavallo were here, she’d defend him. With an experience like the one he just described, how could Templeton have come to any other conclusion? Lauterbach, enthused by what he thought was a major breakthrough, would have pushed him over the edge. Whatever doubts he might harbor about Fauk, here was a cop with special training in serial murder independently validating the connections Fauk had handed him.

I can imagine Fauk, sitting in his cell a couple of hours north, stunned beyond belief at how successful his gambit had been. There’s no way he could have predicted the two men meeting at the crime conference, or the catalyzing question from the audience. This was a perfect storm, and even Donald Fauk can’t control the weather.

Now he lies in a hospital bed. Fated, perhaps, to be his deathbed. For all the strings he managed to pull on the outside, life behind bars outmaneuvered him. And now everything is out of his control, just as it’s out of mine.

The fan revolves in lazy circuits overhead, and I toss back and forth on the empty mattress, warm despite the air on my skin. On the nightstand, glowing red from the digital clock, my SIG Sauer lies on its side, a round in the chamber, in case of a repeat visit from Dave Bayard. I don’t know for a fact it was him who broke into the house. I don’t know for a fact he kicked the bathroom door into splinters and would have sunk Knife #29 into my wife’s soft flesh. But in my sleep-addled mind, I’ve attached his name to the menacing silhouette.

I wish he would come back. I wish he would make my job that simple.

He could at least open up Simone Walker’s laptop and send me a message. I’m getting lonely here, and nothing would please me more than a candid photo of my unsuspecting suspect. If he’s back in the States-I’m sure he is-and holed up in the family home, then our early morning search warrant execution must have spooked him. He sent an email and we showed up on his doorstep or thereabouts. Too close for comfort. He couldn’t resist sending the second one, but he took the precaution of doing so from a public Wi-Fi network. Now even that must strike him as too risky.

My laptop rests at the foot of the bed. After sitting up for an hour, checking email every few minutes on the off chance he’d overcome his shyness, I gave up and decided to get some sleep.

But now I can’t sleep. The fan turns, my skin grows uncomfortably warm, sticky to the point of feverishness, and I turn the case over in my mind. And when I do sleep, when I slip into a restless, slit-eyed state that could pass for sleep, something Jack Hill said comes back to me, how Bayard’s son claimed he’d killed before. I see a machete-wielding shadow cutting its way through African jungles, and racing ahead, just out of the blade’s reach, the alternating faces of Wayne Bourgeois, the man I chased through the cemetery, and of my cousin Moody. The knifing shadow is sometimes Bayard and sometimes myself.

Wake up. No more of this. Give me sleep, dreamless sleep.