James Burke - In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

After I hung up, I opened my desk drawer and took out the black-and-white photograph that Cholo Manelli had given me of Cherry LeBlanc and Julie Balboni at the beach in Biloxi. I looked again at the man who was reading a newspaper at another table. His face was beyond the field of focus in the picture, but the light had struck his glasses in such a way that it looked as if there were chips of crystal where his eyes should have been, and my guess was that he was wearing bifocals.

As with most police investigations, the problem had now become one of the time lag between the approaching conclusion of an investigation and the actual arrest of a suspect. It's a peculiar two-way street that both cops and criminals live on. As a cop grows in certainty about the guilt of a suspect and begins to put enough evidence together to make his case, the suspect usually becomes equally aware of the impending denouement and concludes that midsummer isn't a bad time to visit Phoenix after all.

The supervising P.O. in Lafayette now knew my suspicions about Doucet, so did Twinky Hebert Lemoyne, and it wouldn't be long before Doucet did, too.

The other problem was that so far all the evidence was circumstantial.

When Rosie came in I told her everything I had.

"Do you think Lemoyne will make a confession?" she said.

"He might eventually. It's obvious he's a tormented man."

"Because I don't think you'll ever get an indictment on the lynching unless he does."

"I want to get a search warrant and toss everything Doucet owns, starting with the security building out at Spanish Lake."

"Okay, Dave, but let me be honest with you. So far I think what we've got is pretty thin."

"I didn't tell you something else. I already checked Doucet's name through motor vehicle registration in Baton Rouge. He owns a blue 1989 Mercury. I'll bet that's the car that's been showing up through the whole investigation."

"We still don't have enough to start talking to a prosecutor, though, do we?"

"That's what a search warrant is for."

"What I'm trying to say is we don't have witnesses, Dave. We're going to need some hard forensic evidence, a murder weapon, clothing from one of the victims, something that will leave no doubt in a jury's mind that this guy is a creature out of their worst nightmares. I just hope Doucet hasn't already talked to Lemoyne and gotten rid of everything we could use against him, provided there is anything."

"We'll soon find out."

She measured me carefully with her eyes.

"You seem a little more confident than you should be," she said.

"It all fits, Rosie. A black pimp in the New Orleans bus depot told me about a white man selling dirty pictures. I thought he was talking about photographs or postcards. Don't you see it? Doucet's probably been delivering girls to Balboni's pornographic film operation."

"The only direct tie that we have is the fact that Doucet arrested Cherry LeBlanc."

"Right. And even though he knew I was investigating her murder, he never mentioned it, did he? He wasn't even curious about how the investigation was going. Does that seem reasonable to you?"

"Well, let's get the warrant and see what Mr. Doucet has to say to us this morning."

We had it in thirty minutes and were on our way out of the office when my extension rang. It was Bootsie. She said she was going to town to buy candles and tape for the windows in case the hurricane turned in to the coast and I would find lunch for me and Alafair in the oven.

Then she said, "Dave, did you leave the house last night?"

"Just a second," I said, and took the receiver away from my ear. "Rosie, I'll be along in just a minute."

Rosie went out the door and bent over the water cooler.

"I'm sorry, what did you say?"

"I thought I heard your truck start up in the middle of the night. Then I thought I just dreamed it. Did I just dream it?"

"I had to take care of something. I left a note on the lamp for you in case you woke up, but you were sound asleep when I came back."

"What are you doing, Dave?"

"Nothing. I'll tell you about it later."

"Is it those apparitions in the marsh again?"

"No, of course not."

"Dave?"

"It's nothing to worry about. Believe me."

"I am worried if you have to conceal something from me."

"Let's go out to eat tonight."

"I think we'd better have a talk first."

"A very bad guy is about to go off the board. That's what it amounts to. I'll explain it later."

"Does the sheriff know what you're doing?"

"He didn't ask. Come on, Boots. Let's don't be this way."

"Whatever you say. I'm sorry I asked. Everybody's husband goes in and out of the house in the middle of the night. I'll see you this afternoon."

She hung up before I could speak again; but in truth I didn't know how to explain to her the feelings I had that morning. If Murphy Doucet was our serial killer, and I believed he was, then with a little luck we were about to throw a steel net over one of those pathological and malformed individuals who ferret their way among us, occasionally for a lifetime, and leave behind a trail of suffering whose severity can only be appreciated by the survivors who futilely seek explanations for their loss the rest of their lives.

I lost my wife Annie to two such men. A therapist told me that I would never have any peace until I learned to forgive not only myself for her death but the human race as well for producing the men who killed her. I didn't know what he meant until several months later when I remembered an event that occurred on a winter afternoon when I was seven years old and I had returned home early, unexpectedly, from school.

My mother was not at work at the Tabasco bottling plant, where she should have been. Instead, I looked from the hallway through the bedroom door and saw a man's candy-striped shirt, suspenders, and sharkskin zoot slacks and panama hat hung on the bedpost, his socks sticking out of his two-tone shoes on the floor. My mother was naked, on all fours, on top of the bedspread, and the man, whose name was Mack, was about to mount her. A cypress plank creaked under my foot, and Mack twisted his head and looked at me, his pencil mustache like a bird's wings above his lip. Then he entered my mother.

For months I had dreams about a white wolf who lived in a skeletal black tree on an infinite white landscape. At the base of the tree was a nest of pups. In the dream the wolf would drop to the ground, her teats sagging with milk, and eat her young one by one.

I would deliberately miss the school bus in the afternoon and hang around the playground until the last kids took their footballs or kites and walked off through the dusk and dead leaves toward lighted houses and the sound of Jack Armstrong or Terry and the Pirates through a screen door. When my father returned home from trapping on Marsh Island, I never told him what I had seen take place in their bedroom. When they fought at night, I sat on the back steps and watched the sugarcane stubble burning in the fields. The fires looked like thousands of red handkerchiefs twisting in the smoke.

I knew the wolf waited for me in my dreams. Then one afternoon, when I started walking home late from school, I passed an open door in the back of the convent. It was the music room, and it had a piano in it, a record player, and a polished oak floor. But the two young nuns who were supposed to be waxing the floor had set aside their mops and rags, turned on a radio, and were jitterbugging with each other in their bare feet, their veils flying, their wooden rosary beads swirling on their waists.

They didn't see me, and I must have watched them for almost five minutes, fascinated with their flushed faces inside their wimples and the laughter that they tried to hide behind their hands when it got too loud.