James Burke - In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

"What'd you say?" Rosie asked.

"Nothing. I didn't say anything."

"You're worried about what Doucet said, aren't you?"

"I'm not following you."

"You think the Bureau might cut a deal with him."

"It crossed my mind."

"This guy's going down, Dave. I promise you."

"I've made a career of discovering that my priorities aren't the same as those of the people I work for, Rosie. Sometimes the worst ones walk and cops help them do it."

She looked out the side window, and now it was she whose face seemed lost in an abiding memory or dark concern that perhaps she could never adequately share with anyone.

Murphy Doucet lived in a small freshly-painted white house with a gallery and a raked, tree-shaded lawn across from the golf course on the north side of Lafayette. A bored Iberia Parish deputy and a Lafayette city cop sat on the steps waiting for us, flipping a pocket knife into the lawn. The blue Mercury was parked in the driveway under a chinaberry tree. I unlocked it from the key ring we had taken from Doucet when he was booked; then we pulled out the floor mats, laid them carefully on the grass, searched under the seats, and cleaned out the glove box. None of it was of any apparent value. We picked up the floor mats by the corners, replaced them on the rugs, and unlocked the trunk.

Rosie stepped back from the odor and coughed into her hand.

"Oh, Dave, it's-" she began.

"Feces," I said.

The trunk was bare except for a spare tire, a jack, and a small cardboard carton in one corner. The dark blue rug looked clean, vacuumed or brushed, but twelve inches back from the latch was a dried, tea-colored stain with tiny particles of paper towel embedded in the stiffened fabric.

I took out the cardboard carton, opened the top, and removed a portable spotlight with an extension cord that could be plugged into a cigarette lighter.

"This is what he wrapped the red cellophane around when he picked up the girl hitchhiking down in Vermilion Parish," I said.

"Dave, look at this."

She pointed toward the side wall of the trunk. There were a half-dozen black curlicues scotched against the pale blue paint. She felt one of them with two fingers, then rubbed her thumb against the ends of the fingers.

"I think they're rubber heel marks," she said. "What kind of shoes was Cherry LeBlanc wearing?"

"Flats with leather soles. And the dead girl in Vermilion didn't have on anything."

"All right, let's get it towed in and start on the house. We really need-"

"What?"

"Whatever he got careless about and left lying around."

"Did you call the Bureau yet?"

"No. Why?"

"I was just wondering."

"What are you trying to say, Dave?"

"If you want a handprint set in blood to make our case, I don't think it's going to happen. Not unless there's some residue on that utility knife we can use for a DNA match. The photograph is a bluff, at least as far as indicting Doucet is concerned. Like you said earlier, everything else we've got so far isn't real strong."

"So?"

"I think you already know what your boss is going to tell you."

"Maybe I don't care what he says."

"I don't want you impairing your career with Fart, Barf, and Itch because you think you have to be hard-nosed on my account, Rosie. Let's be clear on that."

"Cover your own butt and don't worry about mine," she said, took the key ring out of my hand, and walked ahead of me up the front steps of the house and unlocked the door.

The interior was as neat and squared away as a military barracks. The wood floors were waxed, the stuffed chairs decorated with doilies, the window plants trimmed and watered, the kitchen sink and drainboards immaculate, the pots and pans hung on hooks, the wastebaskets fitted with clean plastic liners, his model planes dusted and suspended on wires from the bedroom ceiling, his bedspread tucked and stretched so tightly that you could bounce a quarter off it.

None of the pictures on the walls dealt with human subjects, except one color photograph of himself sitting on the steps of a cabin with a dead eight-point deer at his feet. Doucet was smiling; a bolt-action rifle with iron sights and a sling lay across his lap.

We searched the house for an hour, searched the garage, then came back and tossed the house again. The Iberia Parish deputy walked through the front door with an icecream cone in his hand. He was a dark-haired, narrow-shouldered, wide-hipped man who had spent most of his five years with the department as a crosswalk guard at elementary schools or escorting misdemeanor prisoners to morning arraignment. He stopped eating and wiped the cream out of his mustache with the back of his wrist before he spoke.

"Jesus Christ, Dave, y'all tore the place apart," he said.

"You want to stay behind and clean it up?" I said.

"Y'all the ones done it, not me."

"That's right, so you don't have to worry about it," I said.

"Boy, somebody didn't get enough sleep last night," he said. When I didn't answer he walked into the center of the room. "What y'all found in that trunk?"

When I still didn't answer, he peered over my shoulder.

"Oh man, that's a bunch of little girl's underwear, ain't it?" he said.

"Yes, it is," I said.

The deputy cleared his throat.

"That fella been doin' that kind of stuff, too, Dave?"

"It looks like it."

"Oh, man," he said. Then his face changed. "Maybe somebody ought to show him what happens when you crawl over one of them high barb-wire fences."

"I didn't hear you say that, deputy," Rosie said.

"It don't matter to me," he said. "A fella like that, they's people 'round here get their hands on him, you ain't gonna have to be worryin' about evidence, no. Ax Dave."

In the trunk we had found eleven small pairs of girls' underwear, children's socks, polka-dot leotards, training bras, a single black patent-leather shoe with a broken strap, a coloring book, a lock of red hair taped to an index card, torn matinee tickets to a local theater, a half-dozen old photographs of Murphy Doucet in the uniform of a Jefferson Parish deputy sheriff, all showing him with children at picnics under moss-hung trees, at a Little League ball game, at a swimming pool filled with children leaping into the air for the camera. All of the clothing was laundered and folded and arranged in a neat pink and blue and white layer across the bottom of the trunk.

After a moment, Rosie said, "It's his shrine."

"To what?" I said.

"Innocence. He's a psychopath, a rapist, a serial killer, a sadist, maybe a necrophiliac, but he's also a pedophile. Like most pedophiles, he seeks innocence by being among children or molesting them."

Then she rose from her chair, went into the bathroom, and I heard the water running, heard her spit, heard the water splashing.

"Could you wait outside a minute, Expidee?" I said to the deputy.

"Yeah, sure," he said.

"We'll be along in a minute. Thanks for your help today."

"That fella gonna make bail, Dave?"

"Probably."

"That ain't right," he said, then he said it again as he went out the door, "Ain't right."

The bathroom door was ajar when I tapped on it. Her back was to me, her arms propped stiffly on the basin, the tap still running. She kept trying to clear her throat, as though a fine fish bone were caught in it.

I opened the door, took a clean towel out of a cabinet, and started to blot her face with it. She held her hand up almost as though I were about to strike her.

"Don't touch me with that," she said.

I set the towel on the tub, tore the top Kleenex from a box, dropped it in the waste can, then pulled out several more, balled them up, and touched at her face with them. She pushed down my wrist.

"I'm sorry. I lost it," she said.

"Don't worry bout it."