For good or bad, Otis Baylor was not one of these.
IN A NUMBER of well-written movie scripts, a forensic psychologist undoes the maniacal workings of a serial killer by somehow placing himself inside the killer’s head. As a consequence, the forensic psychologist goes a bit mad himself.
This makes for great entertainment. But I don’t think it has anything to do with reality. What goes on in the mind of a sociopath? No one knows. Without exception, they take their secrets to the grave and lie about their deeds and the whereabouts of their victims, even when they have nothing to gain. The only group I know to be as secretive are conjurors or, in South Louisiana, what we call “traiteurs.” They claim to be healers who receive their power from the forces of good. If you press them on the question, they’ll add that a traiteur can pass on his power at the hour of his death to a member of the opposite sex and only to a member of the opposite sex. Press them further and you will probably get a lesson in buried hostility. Why are they defensive? They never say. And that is what’s most disturbing about them.
On Thursday morning Alafair walked to her volunteer job at the evacuee shelter in City Park and Molly drove to her job at the Catholic self-help foundation on the bayou, and because the day was such a fine one, I walked the few blocks from my house to the sheriff’s department. At noon I checked out a cruiser and drove it home for lunch. As I pulled into the driveway behind Molly’s car, I saw Molly come around the back side of the house. She had just gotten home.
“Dave, come look at this,” she said.
I got out of the cruiser and followed her into the backyard. “What’s up?”
She pointed at the screen door. We usually latched it when we were gone to prevent Snuggs or Tripod from pawing it open and entering the house through the pet flap in the hard door. The screen had been cut and the latch unhooked from the eyelet screwed into the jamb. The lock on the hard door had been pried loose with a flat-bladed screwdriver.
“Have you been inside?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Wait here,” I said, and unsnapped the leather strap on my .45.
I went through the kitchen into the living room and main bedroom, the .45 still holstered, my palm resting on the butt. Then I looked into the bathroom and walked down the hall and into Alafair’s room.
Her manuscript had been torn into long strips and scattered on the floor and on her bedspread. The screen on the monitor had been broken in the center with what I suspected was a ball-peen hammer. The keyboard hung in two pieces by its connection wire on the back of her chair. The metal housing on the computer had been punched with holes, peeled back from the frame, and the innards torn out and stomped into the wood floor. Her laser printer, which she had bought in Portland with money she had made working in the college bookstore, had been crushed flat, probably by someone standing on top of it.
Her backup floppy disks had been scissored into small pieces. Her two notebooks and the hundreds of pages of blue calligraphy on them floated in a half inch of dark yellow urine at the bottom of a waste can. I opened my cell and punched in 911. When I finished the call, Molly was standing in the doorway.
“Ronald Bledsoe?” she said.
“Take it to the bank,” I replied.
I PARKED UNDER the live oaks in front of the recreation building in City Park and went inside. The floor of the basketball court was lined with cots, many of them piled with personal belongings, as though the cot itself had become a residence. Alafair was reading a book to a group of children who were sitting in a circle on the floor. I tried to seem relaxed as I walked toward her.
“Got a minute?” I said.
She put a marker in her book and went outside with me. I told her what had happened, my hand touching her arm. While I spoke, she stared down the slope at our house on the far side of the bayou, her face never changing expression.
“He destroyed everything?” she said.
“That’s the way it looks,” I replied.
“But there’s no evidence it’s Bledsoe? nobody saw him?”
“I talked with the neighbors. Nobody saw anything.”
“He urinated on my notebooks?”
“He’s a sick man. Why even talk about him?”
“You don’t have to tell me what he is.”
“We’re going to Lafayette this evening and buy a new computer and printer. In the meantime, the crime lab is at the house.”
“This guy’s a jerk, Dave. I send my work-in-progress file every day to a friend in Portland. I also send one to Ernest Gaines. My notebooks are in a floppy disk on top of my bookshelf. Did he get into my bookshelf?”
“No.”
“Like I said, he’s a jerk.”
“You’re quite a gal, Alf.”