“That’s your right, sir. But we’re not your enemies,” Betsy said.
“Stop lying,” Thelma said.
“Say that again?” Betsy replied.
“You’re here to put my father in prison. Stop pretending you’re his friend. My father never hurt anybody in his life. You’re scum, all of you,” Thelma said.
“That’s enough, Thelma,” Otis said.
Betsy’s colleague came from the back of the house with the Springfield looped upside down over his shoulder, the bolt open on the magazine. He carried a carton of .30–06 shells in his left hand. “The marine sniper’s dream,” he said.
Betsy looked down at Thelma. “Did you see the faces of those black dudes?” she said.
“Yes,” Thelma said.
“Where?” Betsy said, surprised.
“Mr. Robicheaux showed me pictures of them the other day.”
“Did you ever see them before the night they came to your house?” Betsy asked.
“No.”
“Nobody in your family would have any reason to shoot them, huh?” Betsy said.
Thelma’s mind was working fast now, her eyes locked on Betsy’s, her expression as flat as paint on canvas. “You know that I was raped by black men, don’t you? You’re using what happened to me to build a case against my father.”
“From what I know of your father, he wouldn’t arbitrarily shoot someone. What about that, Thelma?” Betsy said.
“That’s it. You have what you came for. Now please leave our home,” Otis said.
“Give it some thought, Mr. Baylor. You’re an intelligent man. We have a reason for taking your rifle. By noon tomorrow we may have evidence that can send you or a member of your family away for the rest of your life. Is that what you want?”
His eyes were glistening, his jaws locked tight.
Outside, I got in the back of the vehicle, glad to be gone from the Baylor home and the fear and angst we had just sowed inside it. The sky was dark now, the lights of houses reflecting off the surface of Bayou Teche. I could see Betsy’s face in the glow of the dashboard. “You were
pretty quiet inside, Dave,” she said.
“It’s like using a speargun on fish in a swimming pool,” I said.
“Funny attitude for a cop,” the man behind the wheel said.
Betsy was half turned in her seat, her eyes searching my face. “You know something you’re not telling me,” she said.
“Maybe.”
“We’re on the same side, aren’t we, buddy? How about losing the role of the laconic man from Shitsville?” the driver said, looking in the rearview.
“Thelma Baylor looked stricken when I showed her mug shots of the looters. I think they’re the guys who raped and tortured her. I think she wanted to conceal that fact from me because it would drive the nail in her dad’s coffin.”
“You just now decided to tell us that?” the driver said.
I leaned forward against my safety restraint. There were small pits in the back of the driver’s neck, just below his boxed hairline. His jowls had a wrinkled sag in them, like those of a man whose face doesn’t belong on his youthful body. “My conclusions are speculative in nature. In fact, they’re based entirely on personal perception and have no prosecutorial value,” I said.
The moon was bright overhead and the cane in the fields that had been mashed flat by Rita looked dry and hard on the ground, like thousands of discarded broom handles. The driver glanced at a row of Negro shacks speeding past us. Several of them had lost their tin roofs, and plywood and blue felt had been nailed across the exposed joists. Up ahead, a drunk man was walking unsteadily along the side of the road, his body silhouetted by the neon beer sign on a rusted house trailer that served as a bar. “This is quite a place,” the driver said. “A person needs to visit it to get the full bouquet.”
THE NEXT MORNING a technician from the Acadiana Crime Lab lifted a print off Clete’s car tag in the spot where Ronald Bledsoe had rubbed off the mud to see a number more clearly. We ran the print through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System and came up with nothing.