by Greg Iles
He groans in exasperation. “You want to go in without backup and talk to a woman you think viciously murdered six men?”
“That’s right. We won’t be in any danger. She’s only interested in killing child abusers, not cops.”
“Margaret Lavigne’s stepfather didn’t abuse anybody, but he’s just as dead as the other five victims.”
“That killing was obviously a mistake, caused by a false memory recalled by Margaret Lavigne.”
Sean nods like I’m making his point for him. “Yeah. And who killed Dr. Malik? Who set that skull on his lap? The Hair Club for Men?”
“I’m hoping Evangeline Pitre can tell us that.”
Sean doesn’t reply. He’s staring at me intently, but he no longer sees me.
“What is it?” I ask, knowing an idea has hit him. “What do you have?”
“Maybe nothing. Hang on.” He picks up his cell phone and punches in a number. He’s calling the Second District police station, where Quentin Baptiste worked as a homicide detective. He asks to speak to O’Neil DeNoux, a detective I’ve never heard of.
“Who’s that?” I whisper.
“Baptiste’s partner. Hello? O’Neil? Sean Regan. I need to know something about Quentin. Cop to cop…Yeah, I know I’m working with the task force. But this isn’t going to the Bureau, okay?…Did Quentin carry a throwdown gun?…Fuck, man, this is serious…. Yeah?…” Sean nods at me, his eyes wide. “What caliber?…Thanks, man. I owe you…. I know you won’t forget it.”
He hangs up, his face pale. “Quentin Baptiste sometimes carried a Charter Arms .32 as a throwdown.”
My cheeks are cold. “Jesus.” I look down at the photo of Evangeline Pitre, suddenly unwilling to accept what I know to be true. She is the killer.
“What do you have against bringing in the task force?” Sean asks. “Do you have to be the one who personally breaks this case open?”
I look at him in disbelief. “Can you say projection, Sean? Shit. I don’t want this case to break open at all.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not sure the person behind these killings should go to prison. Not yet, anyway.”
His mouth drops open. “You’re shitting me.”
“I’m not.”
“Six men are dead!”
“Child molesters. All but one.”
“The punishment for sexual abuse isn’t the death penalty.”
“Maybe it should be. For repeat offenders, anyway.”
He slowly shakes his head. “That’s for the legislature to decide. And a judge and jury after that, if it becomes the law.”
“The legislature doesn’t understand the magnitude of this crime. Look, I killed Billy Neal a few hours ago, and you didn’t have a problem with that.”
“That’s totally different! He was raping you. And he was going to kill you.”
“Granted. But child molesters aren’t just committing rape, Sean. They’re committing murder. The victims keep walking and talking, so we think they’re still alive. But their souls are dead. That’s one thing Dr. Malik had right.”
Sean leans over the table. “You’re too close to this subject to make objective decisions.”
Yet again, Dr. Malik’s words come from my mouth. “You’re right. This isn’t something anyone should be objective about. It’s the worst crime in the world. That’s what Malik told me when I first met him, and now I know he’s right. The victims are innocent children. Totally unable to protect themselves.”
Sean holds up the photo of Evangeline Pitre. “This isn’t a helpless child. She’s twenty-two years old.”
“You’re speaking in chronological terms.” Still quoting Malik. “You have no idea what’s going on behind that girl’s eyes. For all you know, she may never have matured past the age of six. Not emotionally.”
With a groan Sean gets up and takes a beer from my refrigerator. When I see the sweating bottle, I crave alcohol for the first time in many hours.
“I’ve almost shitcanned my career,” he says, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “Over you and me, Cat. If we do what you want now, and we get caught…that’s it for me.”
I just stare at him. “You made your choices freely. You broke the rules on your own. I never asked you to do that. I’m going to talk to Evangeline Pitre tonight, with or without you. But be warned, Sean. If you try to go around me on this—if you call the task force before I’m satisfied that I’ve gotten the truth from Pitre—then I’ll go to your wife and tell her everything we ever did. And everything we ever planned to do.”
He goes pale. “You wouldn’t do that.”
“Look at me, Sean. I will.”
He gazes at me as though seeing me for the first time.
“You have no idea of the intensity of emotions we’re dealing with here,” I tell him. “I know what an abused woman is capable of, okay? And before we throw Evangeline Pitre to the wolves, I’ve got to understand what happened.”
He drains his beer in one long swallow, then tosses the bottle in the trash. “No backup,” he says. “Dumb as it gets.”
A surge of relief goes through me. He’s going to come. “At least Malik is dead,” I tell him, getting to my feet. “If he was Pitre’s accomplice, as you believe, you have one less threat to worry about.”
Sean slips his jacket on over his shoulder holster. Then he bends, takes a small revolver from an ankle holster, and checks the cylinder. “And if it’s one of these other women? Or all of them?”
“Pitre lives alone. It’s a weeknight. She has to work tomorrow, and she’s not expecting anything. We go in forcefully, scare her, then show her a way out.”
“And if someone else is there with her?”
“We take the photos with us. If we recognize one of the other women, we still go in. You take your Glock. I’ll carry your throwdown in my purse. We’ll be fine.”
“How do I explain your presence?”
“The same way you always did when you took me on interviews.”
Sean shakes his head, but a hint of a smile animates the corners of his mouth. “Shit, we were crazy, weren’t we?”
“Certifiable. But we stopped some killers.”
He nods. “Yeah. We did that.”
“We’re going to do it again tonight. Just not the way we used to. This time it’s not about thrills or promotions or even personal satisfaction. It’s about justice.”
He raises one eyebrow. “You figure it’s up to you to mete out justice?”
“This time, I do.”
Sean passes me his throwdown gun, a Smith & Wesson featherweight .38. “Four in the cylinder, an empty chamber under the hammer.”
I nod but say nothing.
“Could you use that on Pitre if you had to?” he asks.
As I feel the cold weight of the gun in my hand, an image of Billy Neal’s bloody corpse rises behind my eyes. I can still feel his hot blood spurting into my mouth. Could I do something like that to a woman?
“Cat?”
“It’s not going to come to that.”
Chapter
64
Evangeline Pitre lives in a dilapidated white house on Mirabeau Street in Gentilly, a tree-shaded working-class neighborhood of one-story clapboards. It’s full dark when Sean parks his Saab behind a beat-up Toyota Corolla at the curb out front—a car that Sean’s partner just told us belongs to our suspect. Sean hangs up his cell phone and surveys the house with a veteran cop’s eye.
“Joey talked to the detectives who interviewed Pitre after her father’s murder. They said they’d hardly asked anything when Kaiser showed up and took over the interview.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” I say, trying to keep the tension out of my voice. “You think Kaiser sensed anything about her? He was a profiler at Quantico for a long time.”
“He may have.” Sean looks across the street, then back at the intersection behind us. He already made two passes along the street, looking for signs of surveillance. He saw none.
> “We’re way off the reservation here, Cat. Farther than we’ve ever been. If Kaiser already suspects Pitre, we could fuck this case up bad.” He looks at me, his eyes sincere. “You don’t want to call him?”
I give Sean a hard look, then get out of the car and hurry up the sidewalk to the screened porch. I hear the fast clicking of heels as he catches up to me.
“Move out of the light,” he says.
While I stand in the darkness under the eaves, Sean makes a quick circuit of the house. The main sound in this neighborhood is the steady hum of air-conditioning units, punctuated by the muted blare of televisions.
“Can’t see shit,” Sean says, trotting up to me. “Curtains closed all the way around.”
Before he can bring up more reasons to wait, I walk up the three concrete steps and knock on the door.
Quick footsteps sound inside. Then the curtain in the window to our left flips sideways, and a dark silhouette peers out. Before I can get a closer look, the curtain drops back into place.
“Who is it?” calls a muffled female voice.
“Police,” says Sean, all authority. “Please open the door, ma’am. I’ve got identification.”
After a few moments, the doorknob clicks, and the door opens to the length of a chain latch. Sean flips open his wallet and holds his badge up to the crack in the door.
“Detective Sergeant Sean Regan, ma’am. NOPD Homicide. Are you Evangeline Pitre?”
“Maybe.”
“I was a friend of your father’s.”
“I don’t remember you. What do you want?”
“You are Evangeline Pitre?”
“Yes. What’s this about?”
“Your father’s murder.”
There’s a pause. “I already talked to some detectives. The FBI, too.”
“I’m aware of that, ma’am. But we take the death of a fellow officer very seriously. We need to speak to you again.”
“Well…”
The door closes, but after a brief rattle, it opens again, revealing the face from the photograph I studied under the vanity light during the drive over. Evangeline Pitre looks older than she did in the photo. And though her name is Cajun, she looks like a blend of Cajun and mountain blood. Dark hair and eyes mated with pale skin, and thin to the point of emaciation. Her lank hair hangs as if it hasn’t been washed in days, and there’s a purple suck mark on her neck.
“Sorry,” she says. “I’ve been paranoid ever since it happened. How can I help you?”
“Could we come inside?” Sean asks.
“Is it going to take that long?”
“It could. You do realize we’re dealing with a serial killer here?”
“That’s what the papers say.” Pitre looks doubtfully behind her, as though unwilling for us to see the squalor in which she lives. “Do you really need to come in?”
“We’d prefer it. You know how nosy neighbors can be.”
A quick flash of hatred in the eyes. Evangeline Pitre doesn’t get along with her neighbors. “Okay,” she says finally. “Come on in.”
She backs up, giving us room to enter.
The front door opens into a den. I’ve seen a lot of houses like this one in New Orleans. A door at the back of the den opens directly into the kitchen. Through it I can see glass doors that will open from the kitchen to a square cement patio outside. To my right is a hallway that leads to a couple of bedrooms—three at most—and a bathroom at the end of the hall.
The den is furnished with a flower-print sofa/love-seat combination that looks like it was bought at a thrift store. The sofa stands against the wall opposite the front door, with a rectangular coffee table in front of it. The love seat faces the left wall, where an old television shows the Home Shopping Network. A La-Z-Boy recliner faces the TV, and an old bureau of some kind stands against the wall behind me. Cigarette smoke hangs lazily in the air. I trace it to a cigarette burning in an ashtray on the floor beside the La-Z-Boy.
Evangeline Pitre has not once turned her back to us. She backed slowly into the den, then folded her arms and continued moving backward to the sofa, navigating around the coffee table without even looking down. She either grew up in this house or has lived here a long time.
“Seat?” she offers.
“Thanks,” says Sean.
He turns the La-Z-Boy around so that it faces the sofa and sits. I perch on the love seat with my purse in my lap, barely able to restrain my curiosity. Evangeline Pitre bends her knees and alights on the edge of the sofa like a bird, as though she might take flight at any moment.
“Ms. Pitre,” Sean begins, “we’d like to—”
“Angie,” she cuts in. “Call me Angie.”
Sean gives her his charming smile, but the official tone remains in his voice. “All right, Angie. My colleague is a forensic expert we sometimes consult on cases like this. She wants to ask you some questions about…”
His words blend into a meaningless monotone in my ears. He’s following the script we worked out during the drive over, but now that I’m here, I think it’s a waste of time. We don’t need complex psychological tactics to get this woman to open up to us.
“Angie,” I say in a familiar voice, “Detective Regan isn’t telling you the whole truth.”
Sean stares openmouthed at me.
“I am a forensic expert, but I’m not here to talk to you about forensics. I’m here to tell you what we know about these murders.”
Pitre looks to Sean as though for help. She liked his officious fiction better than the frank tone of my truth. But Sean says nothing.
I set my purse on the floor, thinking for an instant of the revolver inside, then intertwine my fingers over my knees and give Pitre my most confiding smile. “Angie, have you ever seen me before?”
She shakes her head.
“I was a close friend of Dr. Nathan Malik.”
Something has changed in her face. What? A tightening of the jaw? A new rigidity in the neck? Whatever caused the change, it’s so profound that I feel as though a second set of eyes has opened behind the ones I can see. Eyes glinting with a primitive awareness whose only objective is survival. I’ve never met Evangeline Pitre in my life, but I know her.
She is me. I have that second set of eyes, too. The ones that watch in the quivering darkness, waiting for him to come—
“What is it?” Angie asks. “You’re looking at me funny.”
“Angie, my name is Catherine Ferry. Do you know that name?”
She blinks once, slowly, like a cat feigning boredom to a passing mouse. “No.”
“I think you do.”
She swallows.
“I know your father was a bad man, Angie. Other people thought he was good, but I know what he really was.”
Her eyes have taken on a dull glaze.
“I know he touched you, Angie. I know he came to your bed in the dark. He probably hurt other children, too. That’s why he had to die, isn’t it?”
For the briefest instant, her eyes dart toward the back hall. Is she looking for escape? Or for help?
Sean stands quickly. “Do you mind if I take a look around the house?”
I expect Angie to bound to her feet in protest, but instead she settles back against the flowered fabric of the couch. “Sure,” she says. “Whatever.”
Sean moves into the hallway, drawing his gun from beneath his jacket as he goes. To keep the girl from panicking, I engage her in conversation.
“Were you one of the original members of Group X, Angie?”
A faint smile touches her lips.
“You’re afraid to trust me, but you don’t have to be. I know about Dr. Malik’s movie. He wanted to give me the tapes for safekeeping, but I couldn’t take them. The FBI was after me then. They’re still after me now.”
“Why would they be after you?”
“They think I’m involved with the murders. I don’t mind that. They don’t have any real evidence. I also killed a man about four hours ago. He was trying to rape
me, and I killed him.”
The hidden eyes probe me for deception, but they find none. “I don’t get it,” she says. “You’re with a cop.”
“Sean’s not a regular cop. He’s my boyfriend. I was molested, just like you, Angie. I know how it feels to go through that. And I’m not here to hurt you. I’m here to help.”
Her eyes narrow in suspicion. I can only imagine what has been done to this girl by people who promised to help her.
“But for me to help you, you’re going to have to tell me the truth.”
“What about?”
“How it started. I know those six men were punished for what they did. But I need to know how it started.”
Angie’s face is as blank as the head of a mannequin.
“Did you ever meet a woman named Ann Hilgard?”
For the first time, I see fear in her eyes. Why should the mention of my aunt’s name generate fear in this girl?
“Angie, if you don’t talk to me tonight, Sean is going to have to tell the task force what I figured out about these murders. About how you’re involved. And I won’t be able to help you after that.”
The fear ratchets up a notch. “What are you talking about? What did you figure out?”
Here goes…“I know you’re taking saliva from a baby at the day-care center where you work and putting it into the bite marks on the dead men.”
Pitre’s eyes widen, and her bottom lip quivers like a five-year-old’s.
“What I need to know is, have you done all this on your own, or is somebody helping you? Was Dr. Malik helping you? I know he knew about the killings. He told me that. He was going to talk about them in the movie, wasn’t he?”
Angie’s hands are shaking now, and her left leg is bouncing up and down. She’s like a machine that has run reliably for twenty-two years, but is now about to vibrate to pieces. Sean was right: Angie Pitre couldn’t have committed the murders alone.
“Did you videotape the killings for Dr. Malik, Angie?”
She stands so suddenly that I jerk back in my chair.
“This isn’t right!” she cries, jabbing her sinewy arm at me. “You’re not supposed to talk to me like this! You don’t have proof of nothing!”
Sean races back into the den, gun in hand. “What’s the matter?”