Blood on the Bayou

by DJ Donaldson

  “In the spring of 1912, the slashed bodies of a widow and her twelve-year-old son were found on a poorly traveled road near Selkirk, Manitoba. The victims had been clawed so severely that their faces weren’t recognizable. The marks on the bodies were those of a bear. A few days later, a canoe washed ashore at a nearby lake. In it were the similarly disfigured bodies of a young couple. A search of the woods in the area turned up Samuel Dresden—a peat digger who had disappeared from Selkirk two months earlier—living in a limestone cave. When they found him, he was in a deep sleep. In his hand was the amputated paw of a large grizzly, its claws covered with blood that contained hair subsequently shown to match samples from the latest female victim.

  “At his trial, Dresden said that he left Selkirk and moved to the woods because he’d begun to feel that the town was closing in on him. A week before he was caught, he shot a large bear and skinned it. As a trophy, he also took one paw. A few days later, he got a terrific headache and passed out. When he awoke, he found the paw with fresh blood on it in his hand. Since he had cut himself off from all contact with civilization, he didn’t know about the widow and her son. Nor did he have any memory of what had happened. He likewise had no recollection of killing the young couple. He was convicted by a scar in the heel of one of his boots that matched an impression left in the ground around the first murders.”

  Kit paused. So far, so good. “Collectively these cases represent several varieties of the same mental disease, an illness in which the victims suffer episodic delusions in which they behave like a predatory animal, seeking out humans, either living or dead, as their prey. And when they strike, they do so like an animal, biting, clawing, or tearing. This is what we’re looking for, a victim of the disease that for want of a better word has been called lycanthropy.”

  Gatlin uncrossed his legs and stood up. “Wait a minute, Doc. What’s the common name for it?”

  “The common name is… misleading.”

  “Werewolfism, isn’t that it? You’re telling me I’m looking for a werewolf. Oh, the press is gonna love this.”

  Kit’s presentation and Gatlin’s comment about werewolves turned up the volume on the phrase that had been crying for attention in Broussard’s brain since the old pathologist first saw the body of Paula Lyons. Never go boo-lie during a full moon. Having now heard the phrase, he turned the volume back down. A warning from his childhood. A bit of Cajun nostalgia. Interesting in a historical perspective, but of no significance for their present dilemma.

  “First of all, there’s nothing supernatural about this,” Kit said to Phillip. “We’re simply dealing with someone who has organic brain disease, a biologic abnormality like victims of epilepsy. And like epilepsy, where seizures can be brought on by certain stimuli such as repetitive flashing lights in a disco or bicycling on a street where the sunlight is coming through the trees in a dappling pattern, I think we’ll find that our murderer is set off by some environmental cue.”

  Gatlin looked at Broussard. “Andy, what do you think?”

  “I think you should listen to the expert.”

  Gatlin sucked his teeth and considered what had been said.

  “When you find him, he’ll be someone who grew up in a rural background,” Kit added. “For some reason, lycanthropes never come from cities. It’s as if the organic basis of the disease is potentiated by early and frequent contact with animals in a natural environment. As you can see from the examples I’ve cited, some lycanthropes attack bare-handed. Others utilize weapons of some sort. Our killer’s gardening claw is like Samuel Dresden’s bear paw—an object that causes the kind of damage an animal might inflict. I suspect, though, that if our killer didn’t have his gardening claw, he’d find something else, something that might not relate as well to animal behavior—a knife, a club fashioned from anything handy, never a firearm. But whatever the weapon, when his victim is dead or dying, he must deliver the classical lupine coup de grace—his teeth at their throat.”

  “You said something about our murderer being set off by environmental cues,” Gatlin said. “Like what? Not the full moon, I hope.”

  Kit shook her head. “The moon’s in the first quarter.”

  “You checked?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus… Rain then… what about rain? It’s been raining a lot, and that one guy you told us about, that army officer, had his first attack on a rainy day.”

  “It’s not going to be that simple,” Kit said. “The first murder took place six days ago. I checked the weather section of the paper for each day since this all began. And while it’s true that it did rain on each night there was a murder, it also rained on nights when nothing happened.”

  “Yeah, but two of those nights, half the department was down there in plainclothes,” Gatlin said. “Maybe we scared him off.”

  “That’s possible, but night before last, you weren’t down there and nothing happened then, either. There was three-tenths of an inch of rain that night, the exact amount we had the night the musician was killed.”

  Gatlin looked at Broussard. “Who knows what’s going on in this nut’s mind?”

  Broussard had been listening carefully to the conversation. Kit knew that because he’d refrained from stroking the bristly hairs on the end of his nose, a habit that always accompanied his mental departure from a room. He unfolded his arms and wiggled his index finger in Kit’s direction, sighting along it like a rifle. “She knows,” he said.

  “Well, whatever the cue is, we’re gonna be down there again tonight.”

  “If conditions are wrong, you’ll be wasting your time,” Kit said.

  “But we don’t know what the right conditions are, do we?”

  “Not yet, but I’m working on it.”

  “Then we’ve got to be there just in case.”

  Gatlin went out the door first. As Broussard followed, Kit called him back. “Dr. B?” Her form of addressing him was a compromise between his wish that she call him Andy and her own feeling that he deserved more. “Thanks for backing me up.”

  A look of surprise appeared on Broussard’s face. “Wouldn’t you do the same for me?”

  “Sure, but that’s different. You’re always right.”

  He chuckled deeply and patted her shoulder. “Then my confidence in you can’t be misplaced, can it?”

  CHAPTER 9

  Left alone in her office, Kit pulled out the phone book and roamed through the state and federal listings, finally finding the number she was looking for under NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE. The phone was promptly answered by a woman.

  “May I speak with one of your weathermen, please.”

  “Weathermen are what you see on television,” the woman said frigidly. “Here, we have meteorologists.”

  Kit was tempted to ask what she would call people who study meteors, but she let it go. “A meteorologist, then,” Kit said.

  “If you want the local forecast, you can get that by calling seven-six-seven-eight thousand.”

  “That’s not what I want.”

  “I’ll see if someone is available.”

  Mel Tormé began to sing “Stormy Weather” in the ear Kit had pressed to the phone. After a few bars of that, there was a clicking sound and a nasal voice said, “Floyd Dill, may I help you?”

  “Mr. Dill, this is Kit Franklyn. I’m with the medical examiner’s office. We need some weather information to help with a case we’re working on and I wondered if I could come out and talk with you.”

  “When?”

  “As soon as possible.”

  “I’m here until five.”

  “I see you’re at the airport. Where exactly?”

  Thirty minutes later, Kit was standing in front of the weather-service receptionist’s empty desk, waiting for “The World’s Greatest Secretary” to appear—if the little plastic sign in the sickly potted palm on the edge of the desk was to be believed. On the wall behind the desk, in a thin black frame, was a poem:

  Big whirls have little
whirls

  That feed on their velocity.

  And little whirls have lesser whirls

  And so on to viscosity.

  “Gotta remember that one,” Kit muttered.

  Reluctant to begin wandering about on her own, Kit chose to wait for the desk’s occupant to return, which she did a few minutes later. She looked to be in her mid-twenties, a big-boned girl who could have drawn less attention to her mule-like face had she chosen to wear her hair up instead of long and curly.

  “I’m here to see Mr. Dill,” Kit said.

  The girl’s eyes made a quick trip from the tortoiseshell comb in Kit’s hair to her new Aigner pumps, and she shifted subtly into a defensive posture, lifting her chin slightly, raising the papers in her hand into a shield that she held to her chest with folded arms. “I’ll tell him you’re here.”

  She returned with a thin man whose legs seemed to start at his sternum. “Mr. Dill, I’m Kit Franklyn. We spoke on the phone.”

  “Of course, come on back.”

  Kit followed Dill into a huge room filled with computer screens and blinking electronics. In the center of the room, there was a large circular table with several tiers of shelves rising from the center like a wedding cake. Arranged into a large semicircle around the wedding cake were several workstations containing banks of computers, printers, and radar screens in color-coordinated shades of blue. At the worktable, a nicely dressed fellow with a skullcap of skin showing through the hair on the top of his head was drawing curving lines on a map. He didn’t look up.

  To her right, against the wall, was a bulletin board with a series of complex-looking maps hanging in neat rows. In fact, neat was the operative word here; all the equipment was laid out for maximum efficiency, no piles of loose papers, everything under control—just the way Kit liked things, just the way she kept her own office. Her penchant for neatness was probably why she hated to cook. There was simply no way to prepare a meal without making a mess of the kitchen. The complexity of the equipment made Kit understand why the secretary had taken offense when earlier she’d asked to speak to a weatherman.

  Dill pulled a deeply cushioned rolling chair over to the nearest workstation, motioned her into it, and turned his own chair toward her. When Dill held his head just right, his thick glasses made the tiny skin tags under his eyes look as big as grapes.

  “As I mentioned on the phone, I’m with the medical examiner’s office,” Kit began. “And I’m working on a series of murders we’ve had in the French Quarter. We have reason to believe that the perpetrator of these crimes is being set off by a weather-related stimulus, and I was hoping you could give me a list of possible stimuli.”

  “I can tell you the various parameters we keep track of.”

  “That’s what I mean.” Kit slid her pen off the cover of the spiral steno pad she’d brought and flipped to a fresh page. Dill raised one hand and began to run through a well-memorized list, ticking off each item by touching his thumb to a different finger. “Sky cover, surface visibility, barometric pressure, temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, precipitation, evaporation and ground temperature at two different depths.”

  When he finished, Kit was still writing.

  “Evaporation and ground temperature?”

  He nodded.

  Kit looked over the list. “This first one… sky cover. How is that expressed?”

  “By a series of numbers from one to ten. One is clear; ten is overcast.”

  “How do you measure it?”

  Dill shrugged. “We just go outside every hour and look up.”

  “Even at night?”

  “Sure, you can usually see okay, if not by the moon, by the reflection of lights from the city.”

  “Do you take hourly readings on all these parameters?”

  “Most of them.”

  “Would it be possible for me to get the hourly observations for each parameter over the last six days?”

  “You can get them from the climate data center in Asheville, North Carolina.”

  “How long would that take?”

  “If you wait for the regular report… about two months.”

  “That won’t do me any good. We’re trying to figure out what sets him off so we can prevent any more murders.”

  “Come to think of it, the Climate Center reports wouldn’t help, anyway. They only show three-hour observations.”

  “So what can I do?”

  “Well… what you want is all stored in our computers. I suppose I could retrieve it for you.”

  Kit touched Dill’s arm lightly. “Would you? I’d really appreciate it.” In the reflection of a glassed office behind Dill’s workstation, Kit saw the secretary watching them, one hand poised on a jutting hip. “How long would it take?”

  “Two or three days. I’ve got a lot of other work to keep up with.”

  “I wish it could be quicker, but I’ll take what I can get. Would it be possible to include values for the days between now and when the data is ready?”

  “I think so.”

  Kit wrote her name and office phone number on the edge of a page in her notepad, folded it, and tore it off. “Please… call me as soon as you have it.”

  The secretary reluctantly stepped aside to let Kit pass, then followed her into the reception area. As Kit was on her way out the door, she said, “In case you didn’t know, Dill is mine.”

  Kit paused and looked back. “Your plant could use some water.”

  Hurrying to her car, Kit had to admit that Dill had one thing going for him. Neat as he kept his workplace, he probably didn’t leave his dirty socks on the floor for someone else to pick up like David did.

  David.

  She still hadn’t made that phone call giving him her decision. On the way back to town, Kit’s mind played a David Andropoulas retrospective for her, juxtaposing the good and the bad: the safe warm feeling when she was in his arms, his thinly veiled lack of respect for psychologists, his remarkable ability in the kitchen, his Paleolithic outlook on the role of women in a relationship, the sex, the constant arguments about getting a family started before it was too late, the sex.

  Then there was Teddy LaBiche… or was there? What did that really amount to? One night of dancing and a message left on her answering machine. There’s a torrid romance for you. He had probably taken Maria St. What’s Her Name aside and said, “Kit Franklyn? Oh, she isn’t a girlfriend or anything, just a regular friend.” And what if he was seriously interested? Was she?

  Sure, David had faults. But who doesn’t? Maybe she was being unrealistic to think that anybody had a better relationship than she and David had. People lie about things like that. David was like a… a car… an old car whose idiosyncrasies you’ve learned to handle, a known commodity. Why trade that for one that might have worse problems? Still, Teddy did smell terrific.

  But he lived too far away and… There was another reason for resisting the attraction she felt for Teddy, one that made her feel so ashamed and so small that she tried to keep it off the table. Yet there it was, naked and ugly. He was not a professional man and, therefore, had limited financial prospects. But gosh, he smelled good.

  Since it was nearly five, Kit went home rather than back to the office. When she arrived, there were two cars in her drive. The one in front belonged to Virginia Lance, the realtor David had hired. Apparently, she was showing the place.

  Kit pulled in beside the two cars and went up the walk just as Virginia and her clients came out the front door. Virginia was a woman of excess: flamboyant flowered dresses with lots of material she could flip and drape over her arm, too much hair, lipstick that was too red—and could anybody really be that happy?

  The couple with Virginia looked like walking mug shots. Both were dressed in purple shorts and tank tops and rubber sandals. Though trim, they both had dry skin and and stiff, lifeless hair.

  “Kit dear!” Virginia crooned. “How lovely to see you. These are the Gleasons, Adras and Ozell.”

&nb
sp; Unsure which was which, Kit refrained from using any names as they shook hands.

  “Dr. Franklyn works for the coroner,” Virginia said. “Something I could never do… all those bodies. How do you manage it?”

  Kit shrugged. “You sort of—”

  “I think the Gleasons like what they saw inside,” Virginia said in a teasing tone. She shook her finger at them as if they were naughty children. “They’re trying to be noncommittal, but I can tell.”

  “I couldn’t help noticing that you eat a lot of convenience foods,” the female Gleason said to Kit. “You really should eat more fiber. Trust me; I’m a dietitian. I know about these things.”

  Then could I have hair like yours? Kit thought. She found herself wondering whether the whole group also had looked in her underwear drawer.

  “We’d all love to talk more, but time and tide,” Virginia said, herding the Gleasons down the sidewalk. “Have a nice evening,” Virginia sang to the back of her clients’ heads.

  Later, after Kit had fed Lucky, she turned on the TV to catch the local news, which led off with an interview in which the chief of police assured the citizens of the city that every effort was being expended to ensure that the French Quarter would soon be as safe as their own homes and that an arrest was imminent. But if you knew anything about body language, you could see that even he didn’t believe what he was saying. The rest of the news was the usual; drug-related crime was up, rainfall was up, there was a hurricane brewing somewhere out in the Caribbean, and the Tulane Greenies had split a double-header with somebody. Another half hour of the national news and Kit was ready for dinner.