Assassination at Bayou Sauvage

by D. J. Donaldson

  “If I do, I’ll call for help.” It was 10:32 p.m. and Broussard was dressed as usual, in slacks, short sleeved white shirt, and a bowtie. He crashed through the bushes to the body of Betty Bergeron and stood for a moment, surveying the scene in the lights the crime scene team had erected. What he saw was a white female dressed in black pants, running shoes, and a teal boat-neck pullover with three-quarter sleeves. She was lying face-up so that he could easily see the small white objects moving between the lids of her closed eyes and her slightly open lips. Her face was swollen and there was a faint roadmap developing in her skin, the result of blood hemolysis in its superficial vessels. In his long career, he’d seen all these things many times. But the vertical slashes in her teal pullover were something new.

  As he sat his leather bag on the trampled weeds beside him, he was a collage of emotions. His blood was singing with the chase, but at the same time, he was saddened by the death of someone so young. Compressed between those feelings was rage at the scurrilous perpetrator of this detestable act. From his bag he produced a padded wooden block. Kneeling on the block, he returned to his bag for a pair of rubber gloves that he quickly pulled over his pudgy hands.

  Though the crime scene lights were bright, they did not dispel all shadow. This sent him back to his bag for the battery powered headlamp he’d long ago found much more useful than a penlight. He donned the headlamp and switched it on. Aided by the extra light, he examined the discolorations he’d noted a moment earlier on the front and sides of the girl’s neck. Satisfied that he’d seen all they had to offer, he lifted the girl’s right arm and tested it for rigor, finding as he’d fully expected that it had come and gone. He examined the fingertips of her hand and grunted with recognition. What he hoped to find there did indeed seem to be present.

  He then inspected the slashes in the pullover more closely, finding their edges slightly soiled. He rolled up the lower edge of the garment until he could see the skin beneath. Now he understood, not the mind behind this obscene event, but why the fabric around the slashes was not bloodied. Before he’d arrived, the crime scene investigators had done a thorough search of the area and hadn’t found a handbag or the girl’s cell phone. Though he didn’t see a bulge in her pockets that might be her phone, he did a quick pat check anyway. He got up and went back to where everyone waited.

  Passing the crime scene investigators, he said, “Okay, you can bag her hands now.” Then he looked at his body-removal team. “When they’re finished with her hands, you can take her. And be gentle, like she was your own daughter.”

  Broussard joined Gatlin, Kit, and Teddy, by Kit’s car. Without prompting, Broussard told them what he thought. “Death by strangulation.”

  “How long ago?” Gatlin asked.

  “Long enough for the blowfly eggs laid in her eyes and mouth to hatch. Those flies can smell death from a mile away, so the eggs were probably laid within an hour after she was dumped. I’ll have to look at the larvae under a microscope to determine their stage of development but the condition of the body indicates she’s been dead for at least two days.”

  “I’ve got a surveillance video of her leaving her place of employment last Thursday night . . . actually early Friday morning,” Kit said.

  “What time exactly did she leave?” Gatlin asked

  “The bar closes at 12:30. She came out at 12:45.”

  “I’d guess she was abducted shortly after she left work,” Broussard said.

  “That’s almost three days ago,” Kit said. “Has she been dead all that time?”

  “Ask me again tomorrow morning.”

  “Crime scene guys didn’t find her handbag or phone,” Gatlin said. “You check her pockets?”

  “Not there either.”

  “Well, it was here,” Kit said.

  “Any way to know where she was killed?” Gatlin asked.

  Broussard shook his head. “Maybe here, maybe not.”

  The body removal team approached, pushing a gurney containing the sheet-covered body.

  “Was there a cell phone under her?” Broussard asked.

  “No sir,” Sam Parker, the senior member of the team said.

  “I guess her killer took it,” Kit said.

  “What’s with those slashes in her shirt?” Gatlin asked.

  “Knife cuts,” Broussard said. “She was stabbed fifteen times.”

  “I don’t get it,” Gatlin said. “Why no blood on her shirt?”

  “He did that after she was dead . . . at least an hour after. No blood pressure, no blood comes out of the wounds.”

  Kit shuddered. “Fifteen times. That sounds personal.”

  “Maybe she just reminded him of someone he had a grudge against,” Gatlin said. His next question wasn’t directed at anyone in particular. “Why the interval between strangling her and stabbing her?”

  “Seems to me they had some kind of argument,” Kit said. “Whoever was with her became so angry he snapped and choked her to death. Then he panicked and dumped her. Maybe they were already here or he drove here from another place, I don’t know. I think he left for a while, not intending to come back, but then remembered her phone. If it was someone she knew, his name might be in her contact list, maybe even some text messages or pictures. So he returned. At some point between the time she was killed and when he came back, the battery on her phone died. That’s why I was able to track it to this area. He gets back, finds her bag and her phone, then suddenly, his anger flares up again and he completely loses it, stabbing her until he’s spent.”

  “That’s one scenario,” Gatlin said.

  “What else fits?” Kit asked.

  “Somebody she doesn’t know abducts and kills her because he hates dark haired attractive girls, or maybe he hit on her where she works or at school and she told him to shove off. He hasn’t been taking his medication, he flips out.”

  Kit now remembered the sandy haired guy at the bar. “There was a guy whose been harassing her at school and at work. His name is Jes DeLeon. I just learned his name earlier tonight, so haven’t had time to work on him.”

  “You do a background check on that Leo Silver you told me about?”

  Kit was impressed that he remembered the name. “I did, but he has no criminal record. Let’s just say it was one of those guys. Neither of them is anybody she’d be calling on her phone. Why take it?”

  “To sell, maybe. Handbag was gone too. I’m not saying the sequence you laid out for us is wrong. I just don’t want you to get wedded to an idea too early. Do that, and it’s sometimes hard to accept an alternate explanation even when the evidence is pointing in a new direction.”

  Teddy thought of an example of how what Gatlin said was true, but since he was merely a bystander in the discussion, he kept it to himself.

  “Another piece of advice,” Gatlin said. “I’m sure you’re aware of the pitfalls in using circumstantial evidence to decide someone is guilty but it’s equally risky to eliminate a suspect based on it.”

  Kit nodded. “I’ll remember what you said. Not to be a pest about it, but Betty’s phone records could be a big help. When exactly will we have them?”

  “Soon,” Gatlin replied. “Maybe sometime tomorrow.”

  Kit looked at Broussard. “I assume it’ll be awhile yet before you know if she was sexually assaulted.”

  “That isn’t usually determined in the field. But her clothes were all in order. I’m thinkin’ she probably wasn’t.”

  “Unless he put everything back in place,” Kit said.

  Broussard tilted his head and looked at her through the bottom of his glasses. “I’ve always believed that when the truth is easily obtained, speculation about it is time ill spent

  . . . But you’re right.”

  “Anything under her nails?” Gatlin asked.

  “I think she got him.”

  “Well, that’s it then,” Kit said. “We’ll get his DNA profile from that.”

  “Which will take six weeks,” Gatlin said. “A
nd if he’s never been arrested for a felony, his profile won’t be in anybody’s database.”

  “So we keep working,” Kit said.

  “We keep working,” Gatlin agreed.

  An hour later, back in Kit’s apartment, she went straight to her computer and did a background check on Jes Deleon, Teddy watching over her shoulder.

  In a few minutes, she pointed at the screen and said, “A year ago he served 60 days for sexual battery.”

  “Two months isn’t much,” Teddy said. “Must have been considered a misdemeanor. Does it say what he did?”

  “No.”

  “Whatever it was, he might be capable of much worse.”

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  Kit got up and they both went to the couch, where Kit kicked off her shoes.

  “C’mon,” Teddy said, “Put ‘em up here.”

  “Just what I’ve always wanted,” Kit said, putting her feet in his lap. “A man who knows his place.”

  As Teddy began to message Kit’s feet, Fletcher stretched out on the floor beside them.

  “I’m sorry about tonight,” Kit said. “I didn’t mean for all that to happen.”

  “Don’t apologize. You did something extremely worthwhile and I was privileged to be a small part of it. One of the things that causes marriages to fall apart is boredom. Looking back on all the things that have happened to me since I’ve known you, I don’t think boring ever gets anywhere near you.”

  “Are you going home tomorrow?”

  “Have to.”

  They hadn’t yet talked about how their marriage was going to work with their respective professions requiring Kit to be in New Orleans, and Teddy, two and a half hours away. Two days ago, in thinking about how this evening would play out, she’d hoped to discuss the distance problem after dinner. Now, considering what they’d found down by the river, the time just didn’t feel right. And that wasn’t the only thing the discovery of Betty Bergeron’s body had affected.

  She looked at Teddy massaging her feet and tried to find the best way to say what was on her mind. Finally, she just came out with it. “Would you mind if tonight in bed we didn’t . . . if we just . . .”

  “Not at all,” Teddy said. “We can’t act as though that young woman’s death means nothing. We can at least give her tonight.”

  She’d never had any doubts about Teddy being the man for her, but what he’d just said was so in tune with her feelings she felt closer to him now than ever.

  It had been a long day for Broussard. And it wasn’t over.

  He’d followed the body of Betty Bergeron to the morgue and supervised her transfer from the removal van to autopsy room #1. The complete post mortem could wait until morning, but he needed to do one thing tonight.

  Hands gloved, the headlamp he kept in the morgue securely seated on his head, he went to a nearby drawer and withdrew an insulated beaker and a pair of forceps. He carried these items to the sink, turned on the hot water tap, and when the water was as hot as it could get, filled the beaker half full. He then went to the body, where, working carefully, he began picking the largest maggots from around Betty’s mouth and dropping them one by one into the beaker. The water would kill them quickly without changing their dimensions. He chose the largest because they were the oldest and would therefore, be the best time of death indicators.

  After he had about a dozen specimens, he carried the beaker to the dissecting microscope, withdrew one maggot, and placed it on a small white ruler resting on the microscope stage. With a nearby pen and a note pad, he jotted down the length of the maggot then photographed it with a camera attached to the scope. He dropped that one into a tube of 70% alcohol and repeated the entire procedure with another of the creatures.

  When all the chosen maggots were measured and photographed, he averaged the lengths and took the note pad to a battered desk, where he sat down and looked at a graph that plotted maggot length against time for several different temperatures.

  He did all this because determining time of death is one of the most difficult tasks he regularly faced. Unless the killer is still stabbing the victim when the cops arrive, figuring out the time of death can be an adventure. The body alone and a lifetime of observer experience rarely provide an entirely satisfactory answer. Other factors are needed. And, depending on later developments, an accurate time can be crucial when a suspect is identified. So, where most people were repulsed by maggots Broussard had such an appreciation for them that when a blowfly got in his house, he’d go to inordinate lengths to let it out rather than hit it with a flyswatter.

  Now he was sure, Betty Bergeron had been killed between 1:00 and 2:00 a.m. after she left work Thursday night.

  Chapter 19

  Broussard had a lot to do today. So he made himself a simple breakfast of eggs en cocotte with cream. Before leaving for the morgue, where he would do the complete autopsy on Betty Bergeron, including scraping the skin cells of her killer from under her fingernails, he went to his study and began comparing the list of birthday picnic invitees with the signatures on Uncle Joe’s card. He’d expected to find the invitation list in alphabetical order, but it wasn’t. So he worked his way down the invitation list, making a checkmark beside a name, then searching the card for that name. If a name was in both places, it received a plus sign beside the checkmark. If someone was not on the card, they received a minus sign by their checkmark. The job was made more difficult by the haphazard arrangement of signatures on the card.

  For the first five names, he found four on the card, interestingly, the person who hadn’t signed the card was Lewis Broussard, the only one of Joe’s four kids that Amelia said was having financial problems. As Broussard checked off the sixth name on the invitation list, he heard the sound of a horn in the driveway.

  He’d stayed home to meet with Remy LeBlanc, his distant cousin contractor, to discuss some work that was needed on the backyard deck. He’d already told Remy what required attention, so when he found him in the backyard a few moments later, Remy was already on his knees examining the deck’s joists.

  “You’re right on time,” Broussard said.

  “Morning,” Remy said, standing up. “You’d be surprised how many jobs we get just by showing up when we’re supposed to for an estimate meeting.”

  “Actually, I wouldn’t.”

  Remy brushed his hand off on his jeans and extended it. They exchanged a warm handshake and Remy said, “I never thanked you for recommending us for that job in the quarter, the one where Dr. Franklyn lives.”

  “Glad to do it.” Having noticed Remy’s name on the birthday card as he was searching it, he said, “The picnic Saturday certainly didn’t go as anybody planned, did it? How are you handling it?”

  Remy shrugged. “I’m okay. But when the shooting started I didn’t know what was happening. I thought we were all going be targets. And you were sitting right there by Joe.”

  “It wasn’t an experience I’ll soon forget,” Broussard said.

  “It sure brought those park rangers out of their bungalow in a hurry.”

  “We’re you and Joe close?”

  “He didn’t really make himself personally available to people. But when I graduated from high school, he sent me a note saying he had set up a trust for me that would pay for my entire college education or any trade school I wanted to attend. You have to respect a guy who doesn’t think the only way to happiness is through college. And to do that for me

  . . . c’mon . . . sure, I’m a relative, but I’m pretty far downstream. There has to be a special place in hell for the guy who killed Joe. And whenever the guy gets there, I hope it’s exquisitely painful.”

  This recounting of Joe’s generosity and wisdom renewed Broussard’s regrets about the distance that had grown between them over time. But all Broussard could do now was learn from the lesson.

  “Remy, I’m gonna leave you here alone to look things over. When you’ve got an estimate for what it’ll take to put that deck right,
send it to me by e-mail. And let me know when you can start.”

  Fresh from an early morning jog after seeing Teddy off for his drive home, Kit pressed the door opener on the Dauphine garage where she kept her car. As the opener engaged all its gears and slide upward, she was thinking about Jes Deleon, the guy who’d harassed Betty Bergeron at school and at the bar, touching her on both occasions. Kit had accessed DeLeon’s driver’s license from the DMV and was planning to head over to the address she’d found on it. His earlier arrest for what appeared to be misdemeanor battery would not have allowed the police to take a DNA sample. That could only be done for a felony. Thus, his DNA profile would not already be in the system.

  Presently, what she knew about his relationship with Betty Bergeron did not rise to the level of probable cause for Betty’s murder. So at this point, she couldn’t force him to give a DNA sample. It would all have to be voluntary. Because of that, she planned to swing by the morgue and pick up some buccal swab kits in the hope she could talk him into cooperating.

  When the garage door opened, the overhead lights came on automatically. They would stay on until a few minutes after the door was closed. In the dim light, Kit was shocked at what she saw. Her windshield was shattered by what appeared to be two separate blows from a blunt object like a big wrench. And there was something written on her hood with a Magic Marker.

  She walked over and saw what it said: FIRST TIRES, NOW THIS. WHAT’S NEXT? STOP PLAYING DETECTIVE!

  Damn it! How did they even get in here?

  She walked outside and looked up at the two small windows well above the street. The glass in the one on the right was broken. And it was obvious how the vandal got up there, one foot on that electrical panel down low, then up on the top of the gate next door, and he was there.

  She went inside to see how he got down. But there was no apparent answer. Then, looking closer, she saw scrape marks on the brick . . . most likely from his shoes as he lowered himself with a rope held by an accomplice on the street. He’d finished by dropping onto the hood of the other car that parked there.