“What do you think we’re looking at?” I asked.
“Fetishism. A sacrifice. How should I know?”
I could hear the hum of a refrigeration unit. The light in the room was metallic, sterile, warping on angular and sharp surfaces.
“You’d better get this motherfucker, Dave.”
I had never heard Cormac use profanity. “Why?”
“He’s going to do it again.”
• • •
THE IBERIA SHERIFF’S Department was located in city hall, a grand two-story brick building on the bayou, with white pillars and dormers and a reflecting pool and fountain in front. I went into Helen’s office early Monday morning.
“I was just about to buzz you,” she said. “An elderly black minister in Cade called and said his daughter went missing six days ago. Her name is Lucinda Arceneaux.”
“He’s just now reporting her missing?”
“He thought she took a flight out of Lafayette to Los Angeles. He just found out she never arrived.”
“How old is she?”
“Twenty-six.”
“Want me to talk to him?”
“Yeah. What were you going to tell me?”
“About two weeks ago Clete Purcel was fishing on the Mermentau River and saw a guy jump from the top of a boxcar into the water. Clete saw the story in the Iberian about our Jane Doe and thought he ought to tell me. The guy was wearing a white uniform with blue trim on it.”
“Like a Texas convict?”
?
?Possibly.”
There was a beat. “Clete didn’t want to call it in?” she said.
“Ice cream vendors wear white uniforms. So do janitors and cooks. After Clete saw the story in the paper, he found a story on the Internet about a condemned man who escaped from a prison hospital outside Austin. The name is Hugo Tillinger.”
Helen got up from her chair and wrote on a notepad that rested on her desk blotter, her jaw flexing. She had a compact and powerful physique and features that were androgynous and hard to read, particularly when she was angry. “What was Tillinger in for?”
“Double homicide. His wife and teenage daughter. He set fire to his house.”
“Tell Clete he just went to the top of my shit list.”
“He didn’t have the information we have, Helen.”
“Lucinda Arceneaux’s father says she worked for the Innocence Project. They get people off death row.”
I let my eyes slip off hers. “What’s the father’s address?”
“Try the Free Will Baptist Church. Tell Clete I’m not going to put up with his swinging-dick attitude.”
“Cut him some slack. He couldn’t be sure the guy was an escaped convict. He didn’t want to mess up a guy who was already down on his luck.”
“Don’t say another word.”