John Connolly - Every Dead Thing

Only two cars were at the scene when we arrived. The body had been out of the water for less than three hours. Two uniformed cops stood by with the dredging crew. Around the body stood three men in plain clothes, one of them wearing a slightly more expensive suit than the rest, his silver hair cut short and neat. I recognized him from the aftermath of Morphy’s death: Sheriff James Dupree of St. Martin Parish, Toussaint’s superior.

Dupree motioned us forward as we stepped from the car. Rachel hung back slightly but still moved toward the body in the drum. It was the quietest crime scene at which I had ever been present. Even when the coroner appeared later, it remained restrained.

Dupree pulled a pair of plastic gloves from his hands, making sure that he didn’t touch their exterior with his exposed fingers. His nails were very short and very clean, I noticed, although not manicured.

“You want to take a closer look?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I’ve pretty much seen all I want to see.”

There was a rotten, pungent odor coming from the mud and silt dredged up by the crew, stronger even than the smell from the girl’s body. Birds hovered over the detritus, trying to target dead or dying fish. One of the crew lodged his cigarette in his mouth, bent to pick up a stone, and hurled it at a huge gray rat that scuttled in the dirt. The stone hit the mud with a wet, thudding sound like a piece of meat dropped on a butcher’s slab. The rat scurried away. Around it, other gray objects burst into activity. The whole area was alive with rodents, disturbed from their nests by the actions of the dredging crew. They bumped and snapped at one another, their tails leaving snaking lines in the mud. The rest of the crew now joined in, casting stones in a skimming motion close to the ground. Most of them had better aims than their friend.

Dupree lit a cigarette with a gold Ronson lighter. He smoked Gitanes, the only cop I had ever seen do so. The smoke was acrid and strong and the breeze blew it directly into my face. Dupree apologized and turned so that his body partially shielded me from the smoke. It was a peculiarly sensitive gesture and it made me wonder, once again, why I was not sitting at Moisant Field.

“They tell me you tracked down that child killer in New York, the Modine woman,” said Dupree eventually. “After thirty years, that’s no mean feat.”

“She made a mistake,” I said. “In the end, they all do. It’s just a matter of being in the right place at the right time to take advantage of the situation.”

He tilted his head slightly to one side, as if he didn’t entirely agree with what I had said but was prepared to give it a little thought in case he’d missed something. He took another long drag on his cigarette. It was an upmarket brand, but he smoked it the way I had seen longshoremen on the New York docks smoke, the butt held between the thumb and the first two fingers of the hand, the ember shielded by the palm. It was the sort of hold you learned as a kid, when smoking was still a furtive pleasure and being caught with a cigarette was enough to earn you a smack across the back of the head from your old man.

“I guess we all get lucky sometimes,” said Dupree. He looked at me closely. “I’m wondering if maybe we’ve got lucky here.”

I waited for him to continue. There seemed to be something fortuitous in the discovery of the girl’s body, or perhaps I was still remembering a dream in which shapes came out of my bedroom wall and told me that a thread in the tapestry being woven by the Traveling Man had suddenly come loose.

“When Morphy and his wife died, my first instinct was to take you outside and beat you to within an inch of your life,” he said. “He was a good man, a good detective, despite everything. He was also my friend.

“But he trusted you, and Toussaint here seems to trust you too. He thinks maybe you provide a linking factor in all this. If that’s true, then putting you on a plane back to New York isn’t going to achieve anything. Your FBI friend Woolrich seemed to feel the same way, but there were louder voices than his shouting for you to be sent home.”

He took another drag on his cigarette. “I reckon you’re like gum caught in someone’s hair,” he continued. “The more they try to pry you out, the more you get stuck in, and maybe we can use that. I’m risking a storm of shit by keeping you here, but Morphy told me what you felt about this guy, how you believed he was observing us, manipulating us. You want to tell me what you make of this, or do you want to spend the night at Moisant sleeping on a chair?”

I looked at the bare feet and exposed legs of the girl in the drum, the strange yellow accretion like a chrysalis, lying in a pool of filth and water on a rat-infested stretch of a river in western Louisiana. The coroner and his men had arrived with a body bag and a stretcher. They positioned a length of plastic on the ground and carefully maneuvered the drum onto it, one of them supporting the girl’s legs with a gloved hand. Then slowly, gently, the coroner’s hands working inside the drum, they began to free her.

“Everything we’ve done so far has been dogged and predicted by this man,” I began. “The Aguillards learned something, and they died. Remarr saw something, and he was killed. Morphy tried to help me, and now he’s dead as well. He’s closing off the options, forcing us to follow a pattern that he’s already set. Now someone’s been leaking details of the investigation to the press. Maybe that person has been leaking things to this man as well, possibly unintentionally, possibly not.”

Dupree and Toussaint exchanged a look. “We’ve been considering that possibility as well,” said Dupree. “There are too many damn people crawling over this for anything to stay quiet for long.”

“On top of all that,” I continued, “the feds are keeping something back. You think Woolrich has told you everything he knows?”

Dupree almost laughed. “I know as much about this guy Byron as I know about the poet, and that’s sweet FA.”

From inside the drum came a scraping sound, the sound of bone rubbing on metal. Gloved hands supported the girl’s naked, discolored body as it was freed from the confines of the drum.

“How long can we keep the details quiet?” I asked Dupree.

“Not long. The feds will have to be informed, the press will find out.” He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “If you’re suggesting that I don’t tell the feds…” But I could see in his face that he was already moving in that direction, that the reason why the coroner was examining the body so soon after its discovery, the reason why there were so few police at the scene, was to keep the details limited to the minimum number of people.

I decided to push him. “I’m suggesting you don’t tell anyone about this. If you do, the man who did this will be alerted and he’ll cut us off again. If you’re put in a position where you have to say something, then fudge it. Don’t mention the barrel, obscure the location, say you don’t believe the discovery is connected to any other investigation. Say nothing until the girl is identified.”

“Assuming that we can identify her,” said Toussaint mournfully.

“Hey, you want to rain someplace else?” snapped Dupree.

“Sorry,” said Toussaint.

“He’s right,” I said. “We may not be able to identify her. That’s a chance we’ll have to take.”

“Once we exhaust our own records, we’ll have to use the feds,” said Dupree.

“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it,” I responded. “Can we do this?”

Dupree shuffled his feet and finished his cigarette. He leaned through the open window of his car and put the butt into the ashtray.