Every Dead Thing

The figures surrounded him-hard-faced men, one with an M16 slung over his shoulder, the others armed with knives and axes, all led by a huge man with reddish brown skin and dark hair streaked with gray. Byron fell to his knees as blows rained down on his back and arms and shoulders. Dazed with pain and exhaustion, he looked up in time to see the big man’s axe scything through the air above him.

Then all was darkness.

We were using Dupree’s office, where a new PC sat ready to receive the dental records Holdman was sending. I sat in a red vinyl chair that had been repaired so often with tape that it was like sitting on cracking ice. The chair squeaked as I shifted in it, my feet on the windowsill. Across from me was the couch on which I had earlier caught three hours of uncomfortable sleep.

Toussaint had gone off to get coffee thirty minutes before. He still hadn’t come back. I was starting to get restless when I heard the sound of voices raised from the squad room beyond. I passed through the open door of Dupree’s office and into the squad room, with its rows of gray metal desks, its swivel chairs, and hat stands, its bulletin boards and coffee cups, its half-eaten bagels and donuts.

Toussaint appeared, talking excitedly to a black detective in a blue suit and open-collar shirt. Behind him, Dupree was talking to a uniformed patrolman. Toussaint saw me, patted the black detective on the shoulder, and walked over to me.

“Byron’s dead,” he said. “It was messy. The feds lost two men, couple more injured. Byron broke for the swamp. When they found him, someone had cut him up and split his skull with an axe. They’ve got the axe and a lot of boot prints.” He fingered his chin. “They think maybe Lionel Fontenot decided to finish things his way.”

Dupree ushered us into his office, but didn’t close the door. He stood close to me and touched my arm gently.

“It’s him. Things are still confused, but they’ve got sample jars matching the one in which your daughter’s”-he paused, then rephrased it-“the jar that you received. They’ve got a laptop computer, the remains of some kind of homemade speaker attachment, and scalpels with tissue remains, most of it found in a shed at the back of the property. I talked to Woolrich, briefly. He mentioned something about old medical texts. Said to tell you that you were right. They’re still searching for the faces of the victims, but that could take some time. They’re going to start digging around the house later today.”

I wasn’t sure what I felt. There was relief, a sense of a weight being lifted and taken away, a sense that it had all come to a close. But there was also something more: I felt disappointment that I had not been there at the end. After all that I had done, after all the people who had died, both at my hands and the hands of others, the Traveling Man had eluded me right until the end.

Dupree left and I sat down heavily in the chair, the sunlight filtering through the shades on the window. Toussaint sat on the edge of Dupree’s desk and watched me. I thought of Susan and Jennifer and of days spent in the park together. And I remembered the voice of Tante Marie Aguillard, and I hoped that she was now at peace.

A low, two-note signal beeped from Dupree’s PC at regular intervals. Toussaint hauled himself from the desk and walked around to where he could see the screen of the PC. He tapped some keys and read what was on-screen.

“It’s Holdman’s stuff coming through,” he said.

I joined him at the screen and watched as Lisa Stott’s dental records appeared, detailed in words, then as a kind of two-dimensional map of her mouth with fillings and extractions marked, and then in the form of a mouth X ray.

Toussaint called up the coroner’s X ray from a separate file and set the two images side by side.

“They look the same,” he said.

I nodded. I didn’t want to think of the implications if they were.

Toussaint called up Huckstetter, told him what we had, and asked him to come over. Thirty minutes later, Dr. Emile Huckstetter was running through Holdman’s file, comparing it with his own notes and the X-ray images he had taken from the dead girl. At last, he pushed his glasses up on his forehead and pinched the corners of his eyes.

“It’s her,” he said.

Toussaint let out a long, jagged breath and shook his head in sorrow. It was the Traveling Man’s last jest, it seemed, the old jest. The dead girl was Lisa Stott, or, as she once was known, Lisa Woolrich, a young girl who had become an emotional casualty of her parents’ bitter divorce, who had been abandoned by a mother anxious to start a new life without the complication of an angry, hurt teenage daughter, and whose father was unable to provide her with the stability and support she needed.

She was Woolrich’s daughter.

49

THE VOICE on the telephone was heavy with tiredness and tension.

“Woolrich, it’s Bird.” I spoke as I drove; a St. Martin ’s deputy had retrieved the rented car from the Flaisance.

“Hey.” There was no life to the word. “What have you heard?”