Burning Angel (Dave Robicheaux 8)

“Dave, you were out on the Gulf yesterday. You tracked it into the house.”

“Yeah, that's probably what happened,” I said, and averted my eyes.

“I don't like this voodoo stuff, mon. We keep the lines simple. You got your shield back. It's time to stick it to Pogue and the grease balls .. . Are you listening?”

“The problem's not coming from outside. It was already here.”

“This guy Bertrand again?”

“He's the linchpin, Clete. If he hadn't provided the opportunity, none of these others guys would be here.”

“He's a marshmallow. I saw him in the grocery the other day. His old lady was talking to him like he was the bag boy.”

“That doesn't sound right.”

“Maybe he has a secret life as a human poodle. Anyway, I got to dee dee Just keep gliding on that old-time R and B, noble mon.”

“What did you say?”

“Oh, that's just something Sonny Boy was always saying down in Guatemala,” he said, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “I never thought I'd say this, but I miss that guy .. . What's wrong?”

I spent the next two hours doing paperwork and trying to update my case files, half of which I had to recover from Rufus Arceneaux's office.

“I got no hard feelings,” he said as I was about to go back out the door.

“Neither do I, Rufus,” I said.

“We gonna work that double homicide at Cade together?” he said.

“No,” I said, and closed his door behind me.

I cleared off my desk, then covered it with all the case material I had on Johnny Giacano, Patsy Dapolito, Sweet Pea Chaisson, Emile Pogue, Sonny Boy Marsallus, the man named Jack whose decapitated body we pulled out of the slough, even Luke Fontenot-faxs, mug shots, crime scene photographs, National Crime Information Center printouts (the one on Dapolito was my favorite; while in federal custody at Marion he had tried to bite the nose off the prison psychologist).

What was missing?

A file on Moleen Bertrand.

It existed somewhere, in the Pentagon or at Langley, Virginia, but I would never have access to it. Neither, in all probability, would the

FBI.

But there was another clerical conduit into the Bertrand home, a case file I should have looked at a long time ago.

Julia Bertrand's.

Helen Soileau and I spent the next hour sorting through manila folders and string-tied brown envelopes in a storage room that was stacked from the floor to the ceiling with cardboard boxes. Many were water damaged and tore loose at the bottom when you picked them up.

But we found it.

Halloween of 1983, on a dirt road between two cane fields out in Cade.

Three black children, dressed in costumes, carrying trick or treat bags and jack-o'-lanterns, are walking with their grandfather toward the next house on the road. A blue Buick turns off the highway, fishtails in the dirt, scours a cloud of dust into the air. The grandfather hears the engine roar, dry clods of dirt rattling like rocks under the fenders, the tires throbbing across the baked ruts. The headlights spear through him and the children, flare into the cattails in the ditches; the grandfather believes the driver will slow, surely, pull wide toward the other side of the road, somehow abort what cannot be happening.

Instead, the driver accelerates even faster. The Buick flies by in a suck of air, a mushrooming cloud of sound and dust and exhaust fumes.

The grandfather tries to close his ears as his grandchild disappears under the Buick's bumper, sees a still-lighted and grinning jack-o'-lantern tumble crazily into the darkness. I worked through lunch, read and reread the file and all the spiral notebook pages penciled by the original investigator. Helen came back from lunch at i P.M. She leaned on her knuckles on top of

my desk and stared at the glossy black-and-white photos taken at the scene. “Poor kid,” she said. The original accident report was brown and stiffen the edges from water seepage, the ink almost illegible, but you could still make out the name of the deputy who had signed it. “Check it out,” I said, and inverted the page so Helen could read it. “Rufus?”