There wasn’t much—a camouflage-colored T-shirt with a single pocket, a pair of black jeans with the seat worn thin and the legs turned up several times at the cuffs, brown socks with the elastic shot, and a pair of all-purpose black shoes with a dressy style but with padding sewn into the uppers so you could also run comfortably in them.
The label in the T-shirt was too faded to read, but the jeans had been made by Wrangler, not that it helped. Any lettering that had once been inside the shoes was gone.
Remembering the clues he’d found on the bottoms of the shoes belonging to Beverly’s brother, he turned this pair over for a look, but he saw only smooth, unremarkable rubber, most likely washed clean by the street sweeper that had sprayed him.
He picked up the jeans and unfolded the left cuff, finding for his trouble only some damp lint. As he was unfolding the other cuff, something in it made a crinkling sound. It proved to be a crushed piece of tan cellophane.
Tan . . .
A color he’d seen before.
With fingers suddenly rendered stiff and clumsy, he unfolded the cellophane and drew a sharp breath.
The name was the same. . . .
Maybe it was just a coincidence. He couldn’t be the only one who did that. . . .
He searched the smaller lettering on the cellophane. There . . . that should help him decide.
Not wanting to remove any of the victim’s artifacts from the morgue, he memorized what he’d found and put the clothing back in the bag. He put a biohazard sticker on the bag and two on the corpse, then quickly shed his autopsy gear and hurried to the elevator.
Reaching his office, he dashed to his desk, pulled out the middle drawer, and shoved his hand inside. He came out with one of the cellophane-wrapped lemon balls he regularly bought for Kit from a confectioner in Paris. The cellophane he’d found in the pants downstairs had once held the same candy.
He’d never seen them available anywhere in this country, but if he could buy them through the mail, so could others. He found the lot number on the candy from his desk. . . .
It was the same as the one downstairs.
There was a chance he was wrong, but he knew he wasn’t. The man on the table in the morgue had been involved in Kit’s disappearance.
THAT’S LONG ENOUGH, TEDDY LaBiche thought angrily, throwing his legs over the side of his bed in the Royal Sonesta. Kit’s father had told him about Gatlin’s belief Kit might have been kidnapped, and he’d called Gatlin as requested. The guy who’d answered had said he’d contact Gatlin and have him return the call as soon as possible. That was ten minutes ago, and he wasn’t waiting any longer.
A minute later, he stepped out of the hotel’s front door and into the usual throng of tourists ranging down Bourbon Street. His destination was about fourteen blocks away, but there was no point in taking the truck . . . easier to go on foot.
He headed downriver, walking as briskly as the crowd would allow, ignoring a guy swallowing a four-foot red balloon, and, a few yards later, barely glancing at a magician standing in the street, marking off a circle around his props with water from a squeeze bottle. “Come on, folks, step up to the circle. We’re not allowed to block the sidewalks.”
At St. Louis Street, he turned toward the river and walked down to Royal, where the antique trade drew a somewhat smaller crowd. He had no real plan, just anger and the belief that the Schrader, the ship whose captain had been so uncooperative when he and Kit were down at the docks on Saturday, had something to do with her disappearance. All through the weekend, he’d had the feeling she wasn’t through with that ship. If she’d returned to it Monday morning and become too aggressive . . . There his imagination stalled, because he had no idea why the captain would want to hide the fact the guy Kit was asking about had been on the Schrader— if indeed he had been on it.
He stayed on Royal until he reached Esplanade ten minutes later and turned toward the docks.
Another ten minutes brought him to the dock warehouse, which was much busier than when he and Kit had been there on Saturday, the forklifts now creating an obstacle course that gave him an uneasy feeling as he walked the central roadway between stacks of grain and cotton. Over his concern about being run down from behind, he began to think about what he was going to do. And he soon realized that if he met much resistance, he’d be thwarted.
Then, remembering the tiny pistol he always carried so he’d never be caught in one of his alligator pits unarmed, he felt better about his chances.
If necessary, he’d force them to show him every inch of the ship. The fact he’d never bothered to get a permit to carry the gun was of no consequence.
He arrived at the big door where the Amaepma still blocked the view of anything else and he went out onto the docks. He continued downriver until he cleared the stern of the Amaepma, then froze in disbelief.
The spot where the Schrader had been tied up on Saturday was now occupied by a different ship.
His concern for Kit blinded him to the simple truth that his trip down here was based purely on conjecture, and he became convinced that had the ship still been there, he’d have found her. But it was totally out of his hands now. The police would have to enlist the Coast Guard to run the ship down.
Hurrying back the way he’d come, he kept his eyes open for anyone using or carrying a cell phone, but he saw none. Reaching the point where he’d entered the warehouse, he went down the steps and across the crushed gravel and the railway tracks to N. Peters Street, where he paused to think.
Suppose he did find a phone? Who was he going to call— Gatlin? He hadn’t been in earlier and might not be there now. Then what—stand around next to a pay phone or hang out in a grocery store for God knows how long?
When he was here Saturday with Kit, they’d walked down to the French Market and had seen three NOPD patrol cars, as if the area was some kind of cop hangout. And those cars would have radios that could probably contact Gatlin wherever he was. So that’s the direction he went, arriving at the flea market section a few minutes later.
Saturday, the cops had been in the street that runs along the right side of the market. From where he was standing, the view of the street was obscured by hundreds of people and dozens of temporary flea market stalls with dolls and kites, straw hats, Chinese lanterns, and lacquered alligator heads hanging from their superstructures.
He plunged into the crowd, sidestepped his way along a display of sunglasses in a long white plastic display case, edged past a tarot reading table, a display of fossils, and a stall selling voodoo dolls, and then he was in the street, which was congested with vans and old pickup trucks loaded with produce . . . but no patrol cars.
Damn.
Hoping to find one, he crossed the street, stepped up on the sidewalk, and headed toward Jackson Square, passing on the way empty storefronts, produce wholesalers, and a lot of shabby endeavors whose purpose was not apparent.
At Ursulines Street, a plywood construction barricade around the next section of the French Market forced him to go right on Ursulines and continue his search down Decatur. Decatur was no Rodeo Drive, but at least it was lined with stores and shops that had real doors instead of chainlink gates and see-through windows instead of glass thick with paint.
But for all the improvement, it didn’t produce a patrol car.
He was still looking for one when a guy carrying a brown paper sack stepped out of a grocery and came his way. He was wearing a red-and-green-checked short-sleeved shirt, olive slacks, and black Boston Celtics sneakers. He was cleanshaven and young—maybe mid-twenties—an ordinary guy who’d never have drawn Teddy’s attention had he not been wearing a white cap with AMAEPMA across the front in red letters.
Teddy was aware that the cap the chief mate from the AMAEPMA had given Kit could not be the only one in the world and this fellow might even be from that ship. But as the two men passed each other, Teddy saw a small gold anchor on the cap.
12
Teddy kept walking in the same direction
he’d been going, but at a slower pace and with a glance backward every few seconds. When the fellow in the cap was half a block away, Teddy stepped into the doorway of a Vietnamese restaurant and watched to see where he’d go.
At Ursulines, the guy turned toward the French Market and Teddy felt a stab of fear, realizing if he got in that crowd, he could just disappear. As the guy passed out of view behind the construction barricade, Teddy darted across the street and sprinted along the barricade after him.
At the corner, he pulled up and cautiously leaned around the barricade for a quick look. That same instant, a big mustard-colored camper turned onto Ursulines from Decatur and stopped behind two cars held up by some pedestrians crossing at the next intersection, so now his view was totally blocked.
Heart pounding in his ears, Teddy started around the rear of the camper, and for some fool reason the damn thing started moving in reverse, forcing him back to the barricade. Cursing under his breath in Cajun French, he ran along the camper and got a look at the sidewalk on the other side.
Empty.
He darted between the camper and the car ahead, leapt onto the sidewalk, and edged one eye around the corner of the intersecting street. Ten yards away, the guy in Kit’s cap opened a chain-link gate and went through it.
Arriving there himself, Teddy saw the gate was set in a wall of chain link that sealed off an open storefront. He couldn’t see what lay beyond the chain link because there was a paintspattered tarpaulin hanging against it on the inside.
What to do?
He glanced down the street, but there were still no cop cars around.
The guy was in there now. Leave to get help and who knows where he’d be when it arrived.
Teddy’s hand went to his chrome .22 pistol. Carefully, he lifted the gate latch, praying the gate wouldn’t squeak on its hinges.
But it did.
He froze, then carefully let go of the gate so it wouldn’t announce him again.
Anxiously, he looked behind him, toward the temporary plywood wall separating him from the produce market in the open-air building on the other side. He briefly considered running over there and looking for a bottle of olive oil, but to do that, he’d have to go around to the entrance on Ursulines, which meant he’d lose sight of the gate.
Pocketing the pistol, he went to an old Chevy nearby and popped the hood. It took about two seconds to find the dipstick, which he pulled and carried back to the gate. There, he stripped the clinging oil from the lower half onto one hinge and the rest onto the other. Wiping his fingers on his jeans, he went back to the car, replaced the dipstick, and lowered the hood.
This time, the gate barely whispered as it opened. Pistol in his right hand, Teddy moved forward, put his left hand through a slit in the tarp, and pulled the flap back.
In the small amount of light that crept into the building from the top of the tarp and came like dirty dishwater from a large passageway in the rear, Teddy saw that the place was a bare, bombed-out shell with piles of bricks and shattered pieces of lumber scattered over a cement floor. Watching his feet so he wouldn’t kick anything, he moved toward the passageway in back.
When he reached it, he found himself at the mouth of an oval-roofed brick tunnel about fifteen feet high and thirty feet long that ended in an obviously sunlit space. Unaware that he was breathing through his mouth, he moved down the tunnel. At its end, he hugged the brick and stole a look at what lay beyond.
It was a courtyard containing an overgrown rose garden and a large but shabby house trailer. The thought of going for help surfaced again, but the possibility Kit was in that trailer shelved it.
The question now was how to approach the trailer. It was a problem he didn’t have to solve, for his head suddenly exploded in a supernova of white noise.
THERE . . . THERE WAS SOMETHING he hadn’t seen before. Between Broussard’s gloved fingers, amid the strangulation victim’s spread pubic hairs, was a raised welt with a central punctum . . . a bite of some sort. He hadn’t noticed that the first time around. It wouldn’t help lead him to Kit, but if he’d missed one thing, he could have missed another that would help.
He bent again and continued his minute scrutiny of the body, determined to find that lead.
But he discovered nothing, so when the phone rang twenty minutes later, his frustration was evident in his voice.
“Broussard.”
“Hey, whatever troubles you’re having, I’m not the cause,” Blackledge said. “You got that book?”
“Did you receive my message?”
“Now I say yes and then you respond with something acid. Is that the plan? Never mind. I don’t have time for these games. Yesterday, we inoculated some tissue cultures with samples of D’Souza’s blood. . . .”
“She died last night.”
“I didn’t know. . . . I’m sorry. It won’t help her, but I think we’re close to knowing the causative organism. This morning, those cultures I mentioned had cellular inclusions in them and we began processing them for indirect immuno-fluorescence, using antibodies against every known hemorrhagic fever virus. Those results should be ready in about forty-five minutes. If you like, you can watch them come in on our closed-circuit TV. And you could drop off that call book.”
Broussard hesitated. He wanted Blackledge to come to him for the book, but he also wanted very much to see the killer who’d taken Natalie, and perhaps by confronting it, find some respite from the guilt burning in his belly.
But there was Kit to consider. . . . He looked across the room at the eviscerated body of the strangulation victim, who had yet to give up the secret to Kit’s whereabouts. He needed to keep looking. But he was tired now and his mind felt heavy and slow.
“You coming or not?” Blackledge asked tersely.
“Where are you?”
“Across the river.”
Broussard had heard that Blackledge operated a lab on the West Bank in an old remodeled army ammunition bunker located in a sparsely populated area appropriate for work on hot viruses. But he didn’t know exactly where it was. “I’ll need directions.”
Before leaving, he called Gatlin, who surprisingly was at his desk.
“Phillip . . . Andy. I got another body here showin’ early stages of hemorrhagic fever. He was strangled sometime last night not far from Kit’s house. And I found a lemon-ball wrapper tucked in his pants cuff, from the same French maker as those I buy for Kit, with the same lot number as my last shipment.”
“I’m interested. We know who he is?”
“No. The detective handlin’ it said there was no wallet on the body, and he got no match when he ran the victim’s prints. I’ve been over the body twice lookin’ for somethin’ to tell me where he’s been, but so far, nothin’. It didn’t help that he was sprayed by a street-sweepin’ vehicle.”
“You don’t know where Teddy LaBiche is, do you? He called me earlier, but when I got back to him, there was no answer at his hotel, and the Franklyns haven’t seen him all day.”
Broussard shook his head. “Can’t help you. Somethin’ I said made you think of that?”
“There’s obviously a relationship between this disease we’re seeing and Kit’s disappearance. When we called Teddy in Bayou Coteau yesterday, he said something about going down to the docks with her and thinking they’d found a lead to the ID of the guy who died at Grandma O’s. But the captain of some ship wouldn’t let them talk to the crew. I want to know the name of that ship.”
“If I hear from him, I’ll get it for you.”
“Who in Homicide is working the strangulation?”
“Evans.”
“I’ll get with him and make sure those prints have been properly run. Call me right away if you come up with anything.”
“I sure wasn’t gonna keep it to myself.”
Broussard was soon headed across the Mississippi River in his turquoise T-Bird. Reaching the other side, he took General de Gaulle Drive and followed it over the Intracoastal Waterway all the way to
its end, where he turned onto Highway 406. Shortly thereafter, he saw the sign Blackledge had told him to watch for, pointing to a road on his left: TULANE CENTER FOR VIRAL STUDIES, 2 MILES.
He turned the steering wheel against the buttons on his shirt and sent the T-Bird onto the side road. The area certainly couldn’t be described as heavily populated, but it did contain an elementary school and a baseball diamond, things he never expected to see this close to the lab. About a mile from where he’d left 406, the Mississippi River levee suddenly loomed before him. On the levee was another sign, directing him left again, to an open gate and down a road that for a time ran through a grassy stretch where an amazing number of armadillos nosed the turf. Their presence made him reflect on what odd creatures they were, the only animal known to contract leprosy and one that when pregnant always bore identical quadruplets. He wondered if they also got tropical hemorrhagic fevers.
The grass gave way to marsh and a verdant carpet of sharp-leafed arrowhead lilies that were being plied by two egrets and a night heron, so intent on what lay in the water around the lilies, they ignored the car. One of the egrets stabbed at the water and came up with a crayfish that he expertly downed, tail-first.
The marsh disappeared into swamp, made darkly sinister by legions of skinny black gum and tupelo that closed ranks against the sun. But where the swamp was cleft by asphalt, the sun was given opportunity, and it clothed the trees in wild roses and yellow jasmine. Broussard rolled his window down and breathed the jasmine scent deep into his lungs; then, picturing viruses from the lab riding that fragrance, he quickly closed it.
A short time after he’d entered it, the swamp suddenly yawned, the blacktop widened, and he was there.
The lab was in a sprawling gray cement structure built like a Quonset hut, its long silhouette clandestinely hugging the ground.
Five cars, a pickup, and a van occupied half the available spaces arranged vertically in front of the lab. Broussard pulled into one designated for visitors, picked Walter Baldwin’s call book off the passenger seat, and left the T-Bird.
Louisiana Fever Page 13