‘You could have made a mistake.’
‘Dupree, listen to me. Woolrich set Byron up. He killed my wife and daughter. He killed Morphy and his wife, Tante Marie, Tee Jean, Lutice Fontenot, Tony Remarr and he killed his own daughter too. He’s running, do you hear me? He’s running.’
‘I hear you,’ said Dupree. His voice was dry with the realisation of how wrong we had been.
One hour later, they hit Woolrich’s apartment in Algiers, on the south bank of the Mississippi. It lay on the upper floor of a restored house on Opelousas Avenue above an old grocery store, approached by a flight of cast-iron stairs girded with gardenias that led on to a gallery. Woolrich’s apartment was the only one in the building, with two arched windows and a solid oak door. The New Orleans police were backed up by six FBI men. The cops led, the feds taking up positions at either side of the door. There was no movement visible in the apartment through the windows. They had not expected any.
Two cops swung an iron battering ram with ‘Hi, y’all’ painted in white on its flat head. It took one swing to knock the door open. The FBI men poured into the house, the police securing the street and the surrounding yards. They checked the tiny kitchen, the unmade bed, the lounge with the new television, the empty pizza cartons and beer cans, the Penguin poetry editions which sat in a milk crate, the picture of Woolrich and his daughter smiling from on top of a nest of tables.
In the bedroom was a closet, open and containing an array of wrinkled clothes and two pairs of tan shoes, and a metal cabinet sealed with a large steel lock.
‘Break it,’ instructed the agent in charge of the operation, Assistant SAC Cameron Tate. O’Neill Brouchard, the young FBI man who had driven me to Tante Marie’s house centuries before, struck at the lock with the butt of his machine pistol. It broke on the third attempt and he pulled the doors open.
The explosion blew O’Neill Brouchard backwards through the window, almost tearing his head off in the process, and sent a hailstorm of glass shards into the narrow confines of the bedroom. Tate was blinded instantly, glass embedding itself in his face, neck and his Kevlar vest. Two other FBI men sustained serious injuries to the face and hands as part of Woolrich’s store of empty glass jars, his laptop computer, a modified H3000 voice synthesiser and a flesh-coloured mask, designed to obscure his mouth and nose, were blown to pieces. And amid the flames and the smoke and the shards of glass, burning pages fluttered to the ground like black moths, a mass of Biblical apocrypha disintegrating into ash.
As O’Neill Brouchard was dying, I sat in the detective squad-room in St Martinville as men were pulled in from holidays and days off to assist in the search. Woolrich had switched off his cellphone but the phone company had been alerted. If he used it, they would try to pinpoint a location.
Someone handed me a cup of coffee in an alligator cup and, while I drank it, I tried Rachel’s room at the motel again. On the tenth ring the desk clerk interrupted. ‘Are you . . . Do they call you the Birdman?’ he said. He sounded young and uncertain.
‘Yes, some people do.’
‘I’m sorry, sir. Did you call before?’
I told him that this was my third call. I was aware of an edge in my voice.
‘I was buying lunch. I have a message for you, from the FBI.’
He said the three letters with a sort of wonder in his voice. Nausea bubbled in my throat.
‘It’s from Agent Woolrich, Mr Birdman. He said to tell you that he and Ms Wolfe were taking a trip, and that you’d know where to find them. He said he wanted you to keep it to just the three of you. He doesn’t want anyone else to spoil the occasion. He told me to tell you that specifically, sir.’
I closed my eyes and his voice grew further away.
‘That’s the message, sir. Did I do okay?’
Touissant, Dupree and I laid the map across Dupree’s desk. Dupree took out a red felt-tip and drew a circle around the Crowley-Ramah area, with the two towns acting as the diameters of the circle and Lafayette as its centre.
‘I figure he’s got a place in there somewhere,’ said Dupree. ‘If you’re right and he needed to be close to Byron, if not to the Aguillards as well, then we’re looking at an area as far as Krotz Springs to the north and, damn, maybe as far as Bayou Sorrel to the south. If he took your friend, that probably delayed him a little: he needed time to check motel reservations – not much, but enough if he was unlucky with the places he called – and he needed time to get her out. He won’t want to stay on the roads, so he’ll hole up, maybe in a motel or, if it’s close enough, his own place.’
He tapped the pen in the centre of the circle. ‘We’ve alerted the locals and the state police. That leaves us – and you.’
I had been thinking of what Woolrich had said, that I would know where to find them, but so far nothing had come to me. ‘I can’t pin anything down. The obvious ones, like the Aguillard house and his own place in Algiers, are already being checked, but I don’t think he’s going to be at either of those places.’
I put my head in my hands. My fears for Rachel were obscuring my reasoning. I needed to pull back. I took my jacket and walked to the door, almost bumping into a deputy in the process. He handed me two sheets of paper.
It was a fax message from Agent Ross in New York, a copy of a series of surveillance details on Stephen Barton and, briefly, his stepmother. Most of the names appeared repeatedly over a period of weeks. One, ringed in felt-tip, appeared just twice: Woolrich. At the bottom of the page, Ross had written just two words: ‘I’m sorry.’
they can sniff each other out
‘I need space to think,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay in touch.’
Dupree seemed about to object, but he said nothing. Outside, my car was parked in a police space. I sat in it, rolled down the windows and took my Louisiana map from the glove compartment. I ran my fingers over the names: Arnaudville, Grand Coteau, Carencro, Broussard, Milton, Catahoula, Coteau Holmes, St Martinville itself. I started to drive out of town.
The last name seemed familiar from somewhere, but by that point all the towns seemed to resonate with some form of meaning, which left them all meaningless. It was like repeating your name over and over and over again in your head, until the name itself lost its familiarity and you began to doubt your own identity.
Still, St Martinville came back to me again. Something about New Iberia and a hospital. A nurse. Nurse Judy Neubolt. Judy the Nut. As I drove the car, I recalled the conversation that I had had with Woolrich when I arrived in New Orleans for the first time after the deaths of Susan and Jennifer. Judy the Nut. ‘She said I murdered her in a past life.’ Was the story true, or did it mean something else? Had Woolrich been toying with me, even then?
The more I thought about it, the more certain I became. He told me that Judy Neubolt had moved to La Jolla on a one-year contract after their relationship broke up. I doubted that Judy had ever got as far as La Jolla.
Judy Neubolt wasn’t in the current directory. I found her in an old directory in a gas station – her phone had since been disconnected – and I figured I could get directions in St Martinville. Then I called Huckstetter at home, gave him Judy’s address and asked him to call Dupree in an hour if he hadn’t heard from me. He agreed, reluctantly.
As I drove, I thought of David Fontenot and the call from Woolrich that had almost certainly brought him to Honey Island, a promise of an end to the search for his sister. He couldn’t have known how close he was to her resting place when he died.
I thought of the deaths I had brought on Morphy and Angie; the echo of Tante Marie’s voice in my head as he came for her; and Remarr, gilded in fading sunlight. I think I realised, too, why the details had appeared in the newspaper: it was Woolrich’s way of bringing his work to a larger audience, a modern-day equivalent of the public anatomisation.
And I thought of Lisa: a small, heavy, dark-eyed girl, who had reacted badly to her parents’ separation, who had sought refuge in a strange Christianity in Mexico and who had returne
d at last to her father. What had she seen to force him to kill her? Her father washing blood from his hands in a sink? The remains of Lutice Fontenot or some other unfortunate floating in a jar?
Or had he simply killed her because he could, because the pleasure he took in disposing of her, in mutilating his own flesh and blood, was as close as he could come to turning the knife on his own body, to enduring his own anatomisation and finding at last the deep, red darkness within himself?
Chapter Fifty
Neat lawns mixed with thick growths of cypress as I drove along the blacktop of 96 back to St Martinville, past a ‘God is Pro-Life’ sign and the warehouse-like structure of Podnuh’s nightclub. At Thibodeaux’s Café, on the neat town square, I asked for directions to Judy Neubolt’s address. They knew the place, even knew that the nurse had moved to La Jolla for a year, maybe longer, and that her boyfriend was maintaining the house.
Perkins Street started almost opposite the entrance to Evangeline State Park. At the end of the street was a T-junction, which disappeared on the right into a rural setting, with houses scattered at distant intervals. Judy Neubolt’s house was on this stretch, a small, two-storey dwelling, strangely low despite the two floors, with two windows on either side of a screen door and three smaller windows on the upper level. At the eastern side, the roof sloped down, reducing it to a single storey. The wood of the house had been newly painted a pristine white and damaged slates on the roof had been replaced, but the yard was overgrown with weeds and the woods beyond had begun to make inroads on the boundaries of the property.
I parked some way from the house and approached it through the woods, stopping at their verge. The sun was already falling from its apex and it cast a red glow across the roof and walls. The rear door was bolted and locked. There seemed to be no option but to enter from the front.
As I moved forward, my senses jangled with a tension I had not felt before. Sounds, smells and colours were too sharp, too overpowering. I felt as if I could pick out the component parts of every noise which came to me from the surrounding trees. My gun moved jerkily, my hand responding too rapidly to the signals from my brain. I was conscious of the firmness of the trigger against the ball of my finger and every crevasse and rise of the grip against the palm of my hand. The sound of the blood pumping in my ears was like an immense hand banging on a heavy oak door, my feet on the leaves and twigs like the crackling of some huge fire.
The drapes were pulled on the windows, top and bottom, and across the inner door. Through a gap in the drapes on the door I could see black material, hung to prevent anyone from peering through the cracks. The screen door opened with a squeak of rusty hinges as I eased it ajar with my right foot, my body shielded by the wall of the house. I could see a thick spider’s web at the upper part of the door frame, the brown, drained husks of trapped insects shivering in the vibrations from the opening door.
I reached in and turned the handle on the main door. It opened easily. I let it swing to its fullest extent, revealing the dimly lit interior of the house. I could see the edge of a sofa, one half of a window at the other side of the house and, to my right, the beginning of a hallway. I took a deep breath, which echoed in my head like the low, pained gasp of a sick animal, then moved quickly to my right, the screen door closing behind me.
I now had a full, uninterrupted view of the main room of the house. The exterior had been deceptive. Judy Neubolt, or whoever had decided on the design of the house’s interior, had removed one floor entirely so that the room reached right to the roof, where two skylights, now encrusted with filth and partly obscured by black drapes stretched beneath them, allowed thin shafts of sunlight to penetrate to the bare boards below. The only real illumination came from a pair of dim floor lamps, one at each end of the room.
The room was furnished with a long sofa, decorated with a red and orange zigzag pattern, which stood facing the front of the house. At either side of it were matching chairs, with a low coffee table in the centre and a TV cabinet beneath one of the windows facing the seating area. Behind the sofa was a dining table and six chairs, with a fireplace to their rear. The walls were decorated with samples of Indian art and one or two vaguely mystical paintings of women with flowing white dresses standing on a mountain or beside the sea. It was hard to make out details in the dim light.
At the eastern end was a raised wooden gallery, reached by a flight of steps to my left, which led up to a sleeping area with a pine bed and a matching closet.
Rachel hung upside down from the gallery, a rope attached from her ankles to the rail above. She was naked and her hair stretched to within two feet of the floor. Her arms were free and her hands hung beyond the ends of her hair. Her eyes and mouth were wide open, but she gave no indication that she saw me. A small, clear Band Aid was attached to her left arm. A needle emerged from beneath it, attached to the plastic tube of a drip. The drip bag hung from a metal frame, allowing the ketamine to seep slowly and continuously into her system. On the floor beneath her was stretched an expanse of clear plastic sheeting.
Beneath the gallery was a dark kitchen area, with pine cupboards, a tall refrigerator and a microwave oven beside the sink. Three stools stood empty by a breakfast nook. To my right, on the wall facing the gallery, hung an embroidered tapestry with a pattern similar to the sofa and chairs. A thin patina of dust lay over everything.
I checked the hallway behind me. It led into a second bedroom, this one empty but for a bare mattress on which lay a military-green sleeping bag. A green kit-bag lay open beside the bed and I could see some jeans, a pair of cream trousers and some men’s shirts inside. The room, with its low, sloping roof, took up about half the width of the house, which meant that there was a room of similar size on the other side of the wall.
I moved back towards the main room, all the time keeping Rachel in sight. There was no sign of Woolrich, although he could have been standing hidden in the hallway at the other side of the house. Rachel could give me no indication of where he might be. I began moving slowly along the tapestried wall towards the far wall of the house.
I was about half-way across when a movement behind Rachel caught my eye and I spun, my gun raised to shoulder level as I instinctively assumed a marksman’s stance.
‘Put it down, Birdman, or she dies now.’ He had been waiting in the darkness behind her, shielded by her body. He stood close to her now, most of his body still hidden by her own. I could see the edge of his tan pants, the sleeve of his white shirt and a sliver of his head, nothing more. If I tried to shoot, I would almost certainly hit Rachel.
‘I have a gun pointing at the small of her back, Bird. I don’t want to ruin such a beautiful body with a bullet hole, so put the gun down.’
I bent down and placed the gun gently on the ground.
‘Now kick it away from you.’
I kicked it with the side of my foot and watched it slide across the floor and spin to rest by the foot of the nearest chair.
He emerged from the shadows then, but he was no longer the man that I had known. It was as if, with the revelation of his true nature, a metamorphosis had occurred. His face was more gaunt than ever and the dark shadows beneath his eyes gave him a skeletal look. But those eyes: they shone in the semi-darkness like black jewels. As my eyes grew more accustomed to the light, I saw that his irises had almost disappeared. His pupils were large and dark and fed greedily on the light in the room.
‘Why did it have to be you?’ I said, as much to myself as to him. ‘You were my friend.’
He smiled then, a bleak, empty smile that drifted across his face like snow.
‘How did you find her, Bird?’ he asked, his voice low. ‘How did you find Lisa? I gave you Lutice Fontenot, but how did you find Lisa?’
‘Maybe she found me,’ I replied.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said softly. ‘I don’t have time for those things now. I got a whole new song to sing.’
He was fully in view now. In one hand he held what looked like a m
odified, wide-barrelled air pistol, in the other a scalpel. A SIG was tucked into the waistband of his pants. I noticed that they still had mud on the cuffs.
‘Why did you kill her?’
Woolrich twisted the scalpel in his hand. ‘Because I could.’
Around us, the light in the room changed, darkening as a cloud obscured the sunlight filtering through the skylights above us. I moved slightly, shifting my weight, my eye on my gun where it lay on the floor. My movement seemed exaggerated, as if, faced with the potential of the ketamine, everything shifted too quickly by comparison. Woolrich’s gun came up in a single fluid moment.
‘Don’t, Bird. You won’t have long to wait. Don’t rush the end.’
The room brightened again, but only marginally. The sun was setting fast. Soon, there would only be darkness.
‘It was always going to end this way, Bird, you and me in a room like this. I planned it, right from the start. You were always going to die this way. Maybe here, or maybe later, in some other place.’ He smiled again. ‘After all, they were going to promote me. It would have been time to move on again. But, in the end, it was always going to come down to this.’
He moved forward, one step, the gun never wavering.
‘You’re a little man, Bird. Do you have any idea how many little people I’ve killed? Trailer-park trash in penny-ass towns from here to Detroit. Cracker bitches who spent their lives watching Oprah and fucking like dogs. Addicts. Drunks. Haven’t you ever hated those people, Bird, the ones you know are worthless, the ones who will never amount to anything, will never do anything, will never contribute anything? Have you ever thought that you might be one of them? I showed them how worthless they were, Bird. I showed them how little they mattered. I showed your wife and your daughter how little they mattered.’
‘And Byron?’ I asked. ‘Was he one of the little people, or did you turn him into one of them?’ I wanted to keep him talking, maybe work my way towards my gun. As soon as he stopped, he would try to kill both Rachel and me. But more than that, I wanted to know why, as if there could ever be a why that would explain all of this.
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