“You ever see him before?” Helen said.
“It’s hard to say,” I replied.
“Why is his leg tied like that?” she said.
The image was familiar, but I couldn’t remember where I had seen it. I shook my head.
“It’s from the tarot,” Bailey said.
“The fortune-telling deck?” Helen said.
“It’s a compilation of medieval and Egyptian iconography,” Bailey said. “The gypsies carried it through the ancient world into modern times.”
“So?” Helen said.
“The victim is positioned to look like the Hanged Man,” Bailey said.
“What’s the Hanged Man?” Helen said.
“Some say Judas, others say Peter,” Bailey said. “Others say Sebastian, the Roman soldier martyred for his faith. In death he makes the sign of the cross. In the deck he’s generally associated with self-sacrifice.”
Helen stepped away from the tree and stared at the ground, her hands on her hips. “What’s your opinion, Dave?” she asked. “You still don’t think Hugo Tillinger is our guy?”
“Maybe Tillinger killed his family or maybe he didn’t,” I said. “But I doubt he’s a student of Western symbolism.”
“Who the hell is?” Helen said. “I don’t think this is about tarot cards. I think this is about a guy who likes to kill people and wants to scare the shit out of the entire community.”
I looked at Bailey. She was obviously struggling to hide her discomfort about the odor of the victim; also, I suspected she was wondering if her education and knowledge were about to make her a lonely and isolated member of our department.
“Nobody saw anything except the fisherman who found the body?” I said to Helen.
“No,” she said. “This place will be washed away in another year or so. Cormac says the body has probably been here a week.”
We went back to the other side of the shack. The sun was shining through the trees, the leaves moving in the wind. I could hear a buoy clanging on the bay.
“Maybe the way the leg is tied is coincidence,” I said. “But the walking stick through the chest doubles the coincidence.”
“I don’t understand,” Helen said.
“Our own deck of playing cards comes from the tarot,” I said. “The suit of clubs come from the Suit of Wands. The Suit of Wands upside down is associated with failure and dependency.”
“I don’t want to hear this,” Helen said.
“Then I don’t know what to tell you,” I said.
“Both of you are sure about this?” she said.
“As sure as you can get when you put yourself inside the mind of a lunatic,” I replied.
One deputy lifted another deputy so he could cut the rope that bound the net to the tree limb. Neither of them could avoid touching the body nor escape its full odor. The body thudded on the ground in a rush of flies, the jaw springing open, a carrion beetle popping from the mouth.
• • •
BY MONDAY THE victim had been identified through his prints as Joe Molinari, born on the margins of American society at Charity Hospital in Lafayette, the kind of innocent and faceless man who travels almost invisibly from birth to the grave with no paper trail except a few W-2 tax forms and an arrest for a thirty-dollar bad check. Let me take that one step further. Joe Molinari’s role in life had been being used by others, as consumer and laborer and voter and minion, which, in the economics of the world I grew up in, was considered normal by both the liege lord in the manor and the serf in the field.
He’d lived in New Iberia all his life, smoked four packs of cigarettes a day, and worked for a company that did asbestos teardowns and other jobs people do for minimum wage while they pretend they’re not destroying their organs. He’d had no immediate family, played dominoes in a game parlor by the bayou, and, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, never traveled farther than three parishes from his birthplace. He had gone missing seven days ago. Cormac Watts concluded Molinari had died from either blunt trauma or a load of opioids or both. The decomposition was too advanced to say.
The only asterisk to Molinari’s name was that he had been a janitor at the Iberia Parish courthouse for two years in the 1990s. Otherwise, he could have lived and died without anyone’s noticing.