In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead (Dave Robicheaux 6)

"Not really. Who's that yelling in the background?"

"Guess. I can't convince him he's lucky he wasn't in the trailer."

"Let me guess again. He wants Julie Balboni in custody."

"You must be psychic," the sheriff said. He paused. "I've got some bad news. The lab report came in late this evening. That utility knife's clean."

"Are they sure?"

"They're on the same side as we are, Dave."

"We can use testimony from the pathologist about the nature of the wounds. We can get an exhumation order if we have to."

"You're tired. I shouldn't have called tonight."

"Doucet's a monster, sheriff."

"Let's talk about it in the morning."

A sheet of gray rain was moving across my neighbor's sugarcane field toward the house, and lightning was popping in the woods behind it.

"Are you there?" he said through the static.

"We've got to pull this guy's plug in a major way."

"We'll talk with the prosecutor in the morning. Now go to bed, Dave."

After I replaced the receiver in the cradle I sat for a long time in the chair and stared out the open back door at the rain falling on the duck pond and cattails at the foot of my property. The sky seemed filled with electric lights, the wind resonant with the voices of children.

Chapter 19

The rain was deafening on the gallery in the morning. When I opened the front door, islands of pecan leaves floated in muddy pools in the yard, and a fine, sweet-smelling, cool mist blew inside the room. I could barely make out the marsh beyond the curtain of rain dancing in a wet yellow light on the bayou's surface. I put on my raincoat and hat and ran splashing through the puddles for the bait shop. Batist and I stacked all the tables, chairs, and umbrellas on the dock in the lee of the building, roped them down, hauled our boats out of the water, and bolted the shutters on the windows. Then we drank a cup of coffee and ate a fried pie together at the counter inside while the wind tried to peel the tin roof off the joists.

In town, Bayou Teche had risen high up on the pilings of the drawbridges and overflowed its banks into the rows of camellia bushes in the city park, and passing cars sent curling brown waves of water and street debris sliding across curbs and lawns all the way to the front steps of the houses along East Main. The air smelled of fish and dead vegetation from storm drains and was almost cold in the lungs, and in front of the courthouse the rain spun in vortexes that whipped at the neck and eyes and seemed to soak your clothes no matter how tightly your raincoat was buttoned. Murphy Doucet arrived at the courthouse in a jail van on a wrist chain with seven other inmates, bare-headed, a cigarette in the center of his mouth, his eyes squinted against the rain, his gray hair pasted down on his head, his voice loud with complaint about the manacle that cut into his wrist.

A black man was locked to the next manacle on the chain. He was epileptic and retarded and was in court every three or four weeks for public drunkenness or disturbing the peace. Inside the foyer, when the bailiff was about to walk the men on the chain to the front of the courtroom, the black man froze and jerked at the manacle, made a gurgling sound with his mouth while spittle drooled over his bottom lip.

"What the hell's wrong with you?" the bailiff said.

"Want to be on the end of the chain. Want to set on the end of the row," the black man said.

"He's saying he ain't used to being in the front of the bus," Doucet said.

"This man been bothering you, Ciro?" the bailiff said.

"No, suh. I just want to set on the end this time. Ain't no white peoples bothered me. I been treated just fine."

"Hurry up and get this bullshit over with," Doucet said, wiping his eyes on his sleeve.

"We aim to please. We certainly do," the bailiff said, unlocked the black man, walked him to the end of the chain, and snapped the last manacle on his wrist.

A young photographer from the Daily Iberian raised his camera and began focusing through his lens at Doucet.

"You like your camera, son? . . . I thought so. Then you just keep it poked somewhere else," Doucet said.

It took fifteen minutes. The prosecutor, a high-strung rail of a man, used every argument possible in asking for high bail on Doucet. Over the constant interruptions and objections of Doucet's lawyer, he called him a pedophile, a psychopath, a menace to the community, and a ghoul.

The judge had silver hair and a profile like a Roman Soldier. During World War II he had received the Congressional Medal of Honor and at one time had been a Democratic candidate for governor. He listened patiently with one hand on top of another, his eyes oblique, his head tilted at an angle like a priest feigning attentiveness to an obsessed penitent's ramblings.