Every Dead Thing (36 page)

I thought of these things as Morphy disappeared below the surface of the bayou, but I also thought of the young girl who might have been dumped in these waters, where creatures she couldn’t name bumped and clicked against the side of her tomb while others searched for rust holes through which to get at the rotting meat inside.

Morphy surfaced after five minutes, indicated the short, northeastern bank, and shook his head. Then he submerged again and the line on the ground snaked south as he swam. After another five minutes the rope began to pull out quickly. Morphy broke the surface again, but this time some distance from where the rope entered the water. He swam back to the bank, removed the mask and mouthpiece, and breathed in short gasps as he gestured back toward the southern end of the bayou.

“We got a couple of metal boxes, maybe four feet long, two feet wide, and eighteen inches deep, dumped down there,” he said. “One’s empty, the other’s locked and bolted. Maybe a hundred yards away there’s a bunch of oil barrels marked with red fleurs-de-lys. They belong to the old Brevis Chemical Company, used to operate out of West Baton Rouge until a big fire in eighty-nine put it out of business. That’s it. Nothing else down there.”

I looked out toward the edge of the bayou, where thick roots lay obscured beneath the water.

“Could we pull in the box using the rope?” I asked.

“Could do, but that box is heavy and if we bust it open while hauling it in we’ll destroy whatever’s inside. We’ll have to bring the boat out and try to haul it up.”

It was getting very warm now, although the trees on the bank provided some shade from the sun. Morphy took two bottles of still mineral water from the cooler and we drank them sitting on the bank. Then Morphy and I got into the boat and took it out to his marker.

Twice the box caught on some obstacle on the bottom as I tried to pull it up, and I had to wait for Morphy to signal before I could start hauling it in again. Eventually, the gray metal box broke the surface of the water, Morphy pushing up from beneath before he went back down to tie the marker rope to one of the oil barrels in case we had to search them.

I brought the boat back to the landing and dragged the box up onto the shore. The chain and lock securing it were old and rusted, probably too old to yield anything of any use to us. I took the axe and struck at the rusty lock that held the chain in place. It broke as Morphy walked onto the bank. He knelt beside me, the air tank still on his back and the mask pushed up on his forehead as I pulled at the lid of the box. It was stuck fast. I took the blunt head of the axe and struck upward along the edges until the lid lifted.

Inside was a consignment of breech-loading Springfield .50 caliber rifles and the bones of what seemed to be a small dog. The butts of the rifles had almost rotted but I could still see the letters
LNG
on the metal butt plates.

“Stolen rifles,” said Morphy, pulling one free and examining it. “Maybe eighteen seventy or eighteen eighty. The authorities probably issued a stolen arms proclamation after these were taken and the thief dumped them or left them there with the intention of coming back.”

He prodded at the dog’s skull with his fingers. “The bones are an indicator of some kind. Pity nobody been seein’ the Hound of the Baskervilles out here, else we’d have the whole mystery cleared up.” He looked at the rifles, then back out toward the oil drums. He sighed, then began to swim out to the marker.

Hauling in the drums was a laborious process. The chain slipped off three times as we tried to pull in the first drum. Morphy came back for a second chain and wrapped it, parcel style, around the drum. The boat almost overturned when I tried to open the barrel while I was still on the water, so we were forced to bring it back to dry land. When we eventually got it to the bank, brown and rusting, it contained only stale oil. The drums had a hole for loading and pouring the oil, but the entire lid could also be pried off. When we opened the second drum it didn’t even contain oil, just some stones that had been used to weigh the barrel down.

By now, Morphy was exhausted. We stopped for a time to eat some of the chicken and bread, and drink some of the coffee. It was now past midday and the heat in the bayou was heavy and draining. After we had rested, I offered to do some of the diving. Morphy didn’t refuse, so I handed him my shoulder holster, then suited up and strapped on the spare tank.

The water was surprisingly cool as I slipped into it. As it reached my chest, it almost took my breath away. The chains were heavy across my shoulder as I guided myself along the marker rope with one hand. When I reached the spot where the rope entered the water, I slipped the flashlight from my belt and dived.

The water was deeper than I expected and very dark, the duckweed above me blocking out the sunlight in patches. At the periphery of my vision, fish twisted and spun. The barrels, of which five remained, all piled in a heap, were gathered around the submerged trunk of an ancient tree, its roots buried deep in the bottom of the bayou. Any boat that might have been using the bayou bank to land on would have avoided the tree, which meant that the barrels were in no danger of being disturbed. The water at the base of the tree was darker than the rest, so that without the flashlight the barrels would have been invisible.

I wrapped the top barrel in chains and yanked once to test its weight. It tumbled from the top of the pile, yanking the rope from my grasp as it headed for the bottom. The water muddied, and dirt and vegetation obscured my vision, and then everything went black as oil began to leak from the drum. I was kicking back to get into clearer water when I heard the dull, echoing sound of a gunshot from above me. For a moment, I thought that Morphy might be in trouble until I remembered what the gunshot was supposed to signal and realized that it was I, not Morphy, who was in trouble.

I was breaking for the surface when I saw the ’gator. It was small, maybe only six feet long, but the flashlight beam caught the wicked-looking teeth jutting out along its jaws and its light-colored underbelly. It was as disoriented by the oil and dirt as I was, but it seemed to be angling toward my flashlight. I clicked it off and instantly lost sight of the ’gator as I made a final kick for the surface.

When I broke the water the marker rope was fifteen feet in front of me, Morphy beside it.

“Come on!” he shouted. “There’s no other landing around you.”

I splashed hard as I swam to him, all the time aware of the reptile cruising beneath me. As I splashed, I spotted it on the surface to my left, about twenty feet away from me. I could see the scales of its back, its hungry eyes and the line of its jaw pointed in my direction. I turned on my back so I could keep the ’gator in my sight and kicked out, sometimes using the rope to pull myself along, at other times using my hands.

I was still five feet from the boat when the ’gator moved, working its way swiftly through the water in my direction. I spat the mouthpiece out.

“Shoot it, goddammit,” I shouted. I heard the boom of a gun and a spume of water kicked up in front of the ’gator, then a second. The creature stopped short and then a sprinkling of pink and white fell to my right and it turned in that direction. It reached the objects just as a second shower fell, farther away to the right, and I felt the boat against my back and Morphy’s hands helping me to haul myself up. We turned for the bank as Morphy sent a third handful of marshmallows into the air. When I looked at him, he was grinning as he popped a last marshmallow into his mouth. Out on the bayou, the ’gator was snapping at the last of the candy.

“Scared you, huh?” Morphy smiled as I shrugged off the air tank and lay flat on the bottom of the boat.

I nodded and kicked off a flipper.

“I think you’re going to have to get your dry suit cleaned,” I said.

We sat on a log and watched the ’gator for a while. It cruised the bayou looking for more marshmallows, eventually settling for a wait-and-see policy, which consisted of it lying partially submerged near the marker rope. We sipped coffee from tin cups and finished off the last of the chicken.

“You should have shot it,” I said.

“This
is
a nature reserve and there are laws about killing ’gators,” responded Morphy testily. “Not much point in having a nature reserve if people can come in when they please and shoot all the wildlife.”

We sipped the coffee some more, until I heard the sound of a boat coming our way through the rice and grass.

“Shit,” said a familiar Brooklyn drawl as the prow of the boat broke the grass, “it’s the Donner Party.”

Angel emerged first, then Louis behind him, controlling the rudder. They moved steadily toward us and tied up at the maple. Angel splashed into the water, then followed our gaze out to the ’gator. He caught one sight of the partially submerged reptile and ran awkwardly onto the bank, his knees high and his elbows pumping.

“Man, what is this, Jurassic Park?” he said. He turned to Louis, who jumped from his boat to ours and then onto the bank. “Hey, didn’t you tell your sister not to be swimmin’ in no strange ponds?”

Angel was dressed in his usual jeans and battered sneakers, with a denim jacket over a Doonesbury T-shirt that depicted Duke and the motto
Death Before Unconsciousness.
Louis was wearing crocodile-skin boots, black Levi’s, and a white collarless Liz Claiborne shirt.

“We dropped by to see how you were,” said Angel, casting anxious glances out at the ’gator after I had introduced him to Morphy. He held a bag of donuts in his hand.

“Our friend’s gonna be real upset if he sees you wearing one of his relatives, Louis,” I said.

Louis sniffed and approached the water’s edge. “Is there a problem?” he asked at last.

“We were diving and then Wally Gator appeared and we weren’t diving anymore,” I explained.

Louis sniffed again. “Hmm,” he said. Then he drew his SIG and blew the tip of the ’gator’s tail off. The reptile thrashed in pain and the water around it turned bright red. Then it turned and headed off into the bayou, trailing blood behind it. “You should have shot it,” he said.

“Let’s not get into it,” I responded. “Roll up your sleeves, gentlemen, we’re going to need some help.”

I still had the dry suit on so I offered to keep diving.

“Trying to prove to me that you ain’t chicken?” grinned Morphy.

“Nope,” I said, as we untied the boat. “Trying to prove it to myself.”

We rowed out to the marker rope and then I dived down with the hook and chains, leaving Angel topside with Morphy and his gun in case the ’gator showed up again. Louis joined us in the second boat. A thick black film of oil had formed on the surface of the water and hung in the depths below. The barrels had scattered when the topmost drum fell. I checked the ruptured barrel with the flashlight but it appeared to contain nothing except the oil that remained.

It was laborious work, tying the barrel and hauling it up each time, but with two boats it meant that we could transport two barrels at a time to the bank. There was probably an easier way to do it, but we hadn’t figured it out.

The sun was growing low and the waters were bathed in gold when we found her.

I
T SEEMS TO ME
now that when I touched the barrel for the first time to attach the chains, something coursed through my system and tightened in my stomach like a fist. I felt a jolt. A blade flashed before my eyes and the depths were colored by a fountain of blood, or perhaps it was simply the dying sun on the water above reflected on my mask. I closed my eyes for a moment and felt movement around me, not just the water of the bayou or the fish in its depths but another swimmer who twisted around my body and legs. I thought I felt her hair brush my cheek but when I reached out I caught only swamp weed in my hand.

This barrel was heavier than the others, weighed down, as we would discover, with masonry bricks that had been split neatly in half. It would need the combined efforts of Morphy and Angel to pull it up.

“It’s her,” I said to Morphy. “We’ve found her.” And then I swam down to the barrel and maneuvered it slowly over the rocks and tree trunks at the bottom as we brought it up. We all seemed to handle this barrel more gently than the rest, as if the girl inside was merely sleeping and we didn’t want to disturb her, as if she was not long decayed but had been laid within it only yesterday. On the bank, Angel took the crowbar and carefully applied it to the rim of the lid, but it refused to move. He examined it more closely.

“It’s been sealed,” he said. He scraped the crowbar over the surface of the barrel and checked the mark left. “The barrel’s been treated with something as well. That’s why it’s in better condition than the others.”

It was true. The barrel had hardly rusted and the fleur-delys on its side was as clear and bright as if it had been painted only days before.

I thought for a moment. We could use the chain saw to cut it, but if I was right and the girl was inside, I didn’t want to damage the remains. We could also have called for assistance from the local cops, or even the feds. I suggested it, more out of duty than desire, but even Morphy declined. He might have been concerned at the embarrassment that would be caused if the barrel was empty, but when I looked in his eyes I could see that wasn’t the case. He wanted us to take it as far as we could.

In the end, we tested the barrel by gently tapping along its length with the axe. From the difference in sound, we judged as best we could where we could safely cut. Morphy carefully made an incision near the sealed end of the barrel, and using a combination of chain saw and crowbar, we cut an area that was roughly half the circumference, then pushed it up with the crowbar and shined a flashlight inside.

The body was little more than bones and shreds of material, the skin and flesh entirely rotted away. She had been dumped in headfirst and her legs had been broken to fit her into the space. When I shined the beam to the far end of the barrel, I glimpsed bared teeth and strands of hair. We stood silently beside her, surrounded by the lapping water and the sounds of the swamp.

It was late that night when I got back to the Flaisance. While we waited for the Slidell police and the rangers, Angel and Louis departed, with Morphy’s agreement. I stayed on to give my statement and back up Morphy’s version of what had taken place. On Morphy’s advice, the locals called the FBI. I didn’t wait around. If Woolrich wanted to talk, he knew where to find me.

The light was still on in Rachel’s room as I passed, so I stopped and knocked. She opened the door wearing a pink Calvin Klein nightshirt, which stopped at mid-thigh level.

“Angel told me what happened,” she said, opening the door wider to let me enter. “That poor girl.” She hugged me and then ran the shower in the bathroom. I stayed in there for a long time, my hands against the tiles, letting the water roll over my head and back.

After I had dried myself, I wrapped the towel around my waist and found Rachel sitting on the bed, leafing through her papers. She cocked an eyebrow at me.

“Such modesty,” she said, with a little smile.

I sat on the edge of the bed and she wrapped her arms around me from behind. I felt her cheek and her warm breath against my back. “How are you feeling?” I asked.

Her grip tightened a little. “Okay, I think.”

She turned me around so that I was facing her. She knelt on the bed before me, her hands clasped between her legs, and bit her lip. Then she reached out and gently, almost tentatively, ran her hand through my hair.

“I thought you psychology types were supposed to be good at all this,” I said.

She shrugged. “I get just as confused as everybody else, except I know all the terminology for my confusion.” She sighed. “Listen, what happened yesterday…I don’t want to put pressure on you. I know how hard all this is for you, because of Susan and—”

I held my hand against her cheek and rubbed her lips gently with my thumb. Then I kissed her and felt her mouth open beneath mine. I wanted to hold her, to love her, to drive away the vision of the dead girl.

“Thanks,” I said, my mouth still against her, “but I know what I’m doing.”

“Well,” she said, as she eased back slowly on the bed, “at least one of us does.”

The following morning, the remains of the girl lay on a metal table, curled fetally by the constriction of the barrel as if to protect herself for eternity. On the instructions of the FBI, she had been brought to New Orleans, weighed and measured, X-rayed, and fingerprinted. The body bag in which she had been removed from Honey Island had been examined for debris that might have fallen from her while she was being transported.

The clean tiles, the shining metal tables, the glinting medical instruments, the white lights hanging above them all seemed too harsh, too relentless in their mission to expose, to examine, to reveal. It seemed a final indignity, after the terrors of her final moments, to display her here in the sterility of this room, with these men looking upon her. A part of me wanted to cover her with a shroud and carry her carefully, gently, to a dark hole beside flowing water, where green trees would shade the ground under which she lay and where no one would disturb her again.

But another part of me, the rational part, knew that she deserved a name, that she needed an identity to put an end to the anonymity of her sufferings and, perhaps, to close in on the man who had reduced her to this. And so we stood back as the gowned coroner and his assistants moved in with their tapes and their blades and their white-gloved hands.

The pelvis is the most easily recognizable distinguishing feature between the male and female skeletons. The greater sciatic notch, situated behind the inominate bone—which itself consists of the hip, the ischium, the ilium, and the pubis—is wider in the female, with a subpubic angle roughly the size of that between the thumb and forefinger. The pelvic outlet is also larger in the female but the thigh sockets are smaller, the sacrum wider.

Even the female skull is different from that of the male, a reflection in miniature of the physical differences between the two sexes. The female skull is as smooth and rounded as the female breast, yet smaller than the male skull; the forehead is higher and more rounded; the eye sockets, too, are higher and the edges less sharply defined; the female jaw, palate, and teeth are smaller.

The skeletal remains before us conformed to the general pelvic and skull rules governing the female body. In estimating the age of the body at the time of death, the ossification centers, or areas of bone formation, were examined, as were the teeth. The femur of the girl’s body was almost completely fused at the head, although there was only partial joining of the collarbone to the top of the breastbone. After an examination of the sutures on her skull, the coroner estimated her age at twenty-one or twenty-two. There were marks on her forehead, the base of her jaw, and on her left cheekbone, where the killer had cut through to the bone as he removed her face.

Her dental features were recorded, a process known as forensic odontology, to be checked against missing persons files, while samples of bone marrow and hair were removed for possible use in DNA profiling. Then Woolrich, Morphy, and I watched as the remains were wheeled away, covered in a plastic wrap. We exchanged a few words before we each went our separate way, but to be honest, I don’t recall what they were. All I could see was the girl. All I could hear was the sound of water in my ears.

If the DNA profiling and the dental records failed to reveal her identity, Woolrich had decided that facial reconstruction might prove valuable, using a laser reflected from the skull to establish the contours, which could then be compared against a known skull of similar dimensions. He decided to contact Quantico to make the initial arrangements as soon as he had had time to wash and grab a cup of coffee.

But facial reconstruction proved unnecessary. It took less than two hours to identify the body of the young woman in the swamp. Although she had been lying in the dark waters for almost seven months, she had been reported missing only three months before.

Her name was Lutice Fontenot. She was Lionel Fontenot’s half sister.