James Burke - The Glass Rainbow

Clete bent over and picked up a piece of crumpled paper from the floor. He smelled it. “They were here. I think we just missed them,” he said.

“What is that?”

“A hamburger wrapper.” He wiped his fingers across it. “Look, the mustard is still fresh.”

“They were eating down here?” I said.

“Let’s follow the car tracks down to the river. The state troopers ought to be here soon,” he said.

“Don’t count on it. It’s not their bailiwick.” I was trying to think and not having much success. The only words that went through my mind were Where to now? And I had no answer to my own question. “Maybe they went back into St. Mary Parish,” I said.

Then headlight beams flooded into the kitchen area above our heads. I climbed back up the steps and went outside, my.45 hanging from my right hand, the mist damp on my face. I stared into the high beams of an unmarked car driven by the plainclothes detective Huffinton. He got out of his vehicle, hitching up his pants, his shapeless fedora pulled low on his brow, his expression as blank as a dough pan. “Y’all got here, huh?” he said.

“Where’ve you been?” I asked.

“I was here. I didn’t see anything. Then we had an armed robbery and a shooting by the exit on I-Ten. I took the call.”

“You looked in the cottage?”

“I didn’t say that. I pulled up on the road and put my spot on it. There wasn’t anybody around. Then I got the shots fired on the radio.”

“Two sets of car tracks go right past the cottage and down to the river. You didn’t check them out?”

“I saw maybe one vehicle down there. But that’s not unusual. High school kids fuck down there. What’s the big deal? You didn’t find anything, either, did you?”

I could hear my breath rising in my throat again. “Go through that back door and look down into the room below the floor. That’s where I think my daughter was being held. It’s a torture chamber. I want you to go down below and put your hand on the stones. I want you to look in that toolbox on the table and tell me what’s on the tools.”

I felt myself moving toward him as though I had no willpower, as though a dark current were crawling from my brain down through my arm and hand into the grips of my.45. “Don’t just stare at me. You get your ass down those stairs.”

“Dave,” I heard Clete say softly behind me. “Maybe at least Huffinton stopped it.”

I didn’t move. My fingers were opening and closing on the grips of the.45.

“Time to dee-dee,” Clete said. “The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are keeping it simple tonight, big mon. We’re getting Alf back.”

“He’s not gonna talk to me like that,” Huffinton said.

“You shut up,” Clete said.

I felt my right hand relax, and I saw Huffinton’s face go in and out of focus then suck away from me in the wind, that quick, like an electronic blip disappearing on a screen. Then I was walking with Clete toward the truck, his arm as heavy as an elephant’s trunk across my shoulders.

WE HEADED EAST, back toward New Iberia, with no plan or specific destination, the speedometer needle nearing ninety. At Crowley we picked up an Acadia Parish sheriff’s escort in the form of two cruisers with their flashers rippling. I called Molly and told her what we had found. “They took Alafair there?” she said.

“I can’t be sure, but I think so. Has anybody called?”

“Helen Soileau, that’s it. Where are you going now?”

“Maybe back to the Abelards’ place. Is the cruiser parked outside?”

“It was ten minutes ago.”

“Go look.”

“It’s there.”

“Go look, Molly.”

She set down the receiver, then returned to the kitchen and scraped it up from the counter. “He’s parked by the curb, smoking a cigarette. Everything is fine here.”

“Call me if you hear from anybody. I’ll update you as soon as anything develops.”

“What did they do to her in that room, Dave?”

“There’s no way to know. Maybe nothing. Maybe they didn’t have time,” I said, forcing myself not to think about the toolbox.

The Acadia escort turned off at the Lafayette Parish line, and a Lafayette Parish deputy picked us up and stayed with us almost all the way to New Iberia.

“What do you want to do, Dave?” Clete asked.

“We go back to St. Mary. I want to find Abelard’s daughter. I don’t think she told me everything she knew.”

“Waste of time, in my view.”

“Why?”

“She’ll go down with the ship. You already know that.”

“Somebody knows where Weingart is. His literary agent, his business connections in Canada, his publisher. He’s got a plan, and somebody knows what it is. We need to get ahold of the sheriff in St. Mary and get in the Abelard house.”

“What for?”

“Correspondence, Rolodexes, records, how do I know?”

“I don’t think we have time for that, Dave.”

I looked at him, my heart seizing up, my breath coming short. Maybe Clete was right and I was creating my own illusions about getting back my daughter. This whole case had been characterized by illusion. The St. Jude Project, Robert Weingart as reformed recidivist, Kermit Abelard as egalitarian poet, Timothy Abelard as the tragic oligarch stricken by a divine hand for defying the natural order, Layton Blanchet as the working-class entrepreneur who amassed millions of dollars through his intelligence and his desire to help small investors, a historic Acadian cottage that hid a barracoon. The Abelards had paneled their sunporch with stained-glass images of unicorns and satyrs and monks at prayer and knights in armor that shone like quicksilver, turning the interior of their home into a kaleidoscopic medieval tapestry. Or perhaps, better said, they had created a glass rainbow that awakened memories of goodness and childhood innocence, all of it to hide the ruination they had brought to the Caribbean-like fairyland they had inherited.

If she was not already dead, my daughter was in the hands of men who were among the most cowardly and cruel members of the male species, namely those who would take out their rage and self-loathing on the body of a child or a woman. I wanted to kill them. I felt a level of bloodthirst I had never experienced.

Clete seemed to read my thoughts. “Dave, just do what your judgment tells you. I don’t have any answers. But whatever we do, it’s under a black flag.”

I didn’t reply.

“No quarter, Streak. Say it. We kill every one of these bastards.”

“Whatever it takes,” I said.

He put an unlit Lucky Strike in his mouth, his porkpie hat slanted down, the scar tissue through his eyebrow as pink as a rose. My cell phone vibrated on the dashboard. I opened it and placed it to my ear. “Dave Robicheaux,” I said.

“Molly gave me your number,” a woman’s voice said. “Where are you?”

“Carolyn?” I said.

“I have to talk to you. We have to put a stop to this.”

“To what?”

“To Alafair’s abduction.”

“You have some information for me?”

“Maybe. I’m not sure. I don’t know how helpful it is.”

“What are you trying to tell me?”

“I’ve found out some things about Weingart. I know some of the places he goes. I have to talk to you on a landline or in person. They can pull transmissions out of the air.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“The people who tried to kill you. Where are you?”

“Just outside New Iberia.”

“I’ll meet you at your house.”

I thought about it. Carolyn Blanchet was not about to go down to the department. “All right,” I said. “But in the meantime, get on a landline and call Helen Soileau.”

“Are you serious? I wouldn’t allow that bitch to wash my panties.” She clicked off.