I stood up and looked at the shafts of sunlight shining through the canopy. I brushed off my fingers. I looked at her and then at my hands. “I haven’t had much sleep the last couple of nights.”
“Don’t go weird on me, bwana. Let’s get whatever we can to the lab.”
The paramedics placed Smiley into a body bag and pulled the zipper over his chin and nose and eyes and the crown of his head, then dropped him onto the gurney and trundled him into the ambulance, the bag shaking as though it were filled with porridge.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
TWO HOURS LATER, I was at Clete’s motor court. He sat silently in a chair by the window, his profile silhouetted against the window shade, while I told him everything that had happened in the park.
“I never believed Wimple would get capped by an amateur,” he said.
“He probably had a box of old ammunition and got careless after he was wounded at the motel.”
“Thanks for reminding me,” he said.
“It’s not your fault.”
“I didn’t say it was. What’s the plan?”
“There’s an APB on Butterworth.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“We take him down and give him his alternatives. We stop screwing around. I don’t believe there’s just one guy anymore. Cormier could have stopped all this a long time ago.”
“I’ll take it a step further,” Clete said. “From what I know, or what you’ve told me, I think Cormier and the rest of them are on the spike and their heads glow in the dark. Maybe the bunch of them are into S and M. I hear Cormier has a pole you could fly the flag on.”
As always, I was awed by the images Clete picked out of the air. “I wouldn’t know,” I said.
More important, I didn’t want to believe that the shy redbone boy whom I had always admired was capable of allowing a murderer and a sadist to thrive in our midst. By the same token, I had no doubt there was a cruel element in his personality, one that was like a candle guttering and flaring alight again.
“I feel like we’ve passed over something,” Clete said.
“That’s the way every investigation goes,” I said.
“This is different. This ritual stuff, the tarot, posing the victims, yeah, that’s all real. But there’s something we missed, something real simple.” He waited for me to speak. “Come in, Houston,” he said.
“I saw some crushed flowers by Wimple’s body. There were no flowers anywhere around the crime scene. I picked them up in my hand and tried to show them to Helen and they turned into leaves.”
He lifted his shoulder holster from the back of a chair and slipped his arm through it. “We’ve got enough problems, noble mon.”
“I interviewed three people at the picnic who said they saw a man answering Wimple’s description talking to two little girls who were wearing flowers in their hair and around their necks. No one knew who they were or where they came from.”
“Drop it.”
“It was you telling me we may be living in a necropolis. How cheerful a thought is that?”
“That’s why I never listen to myself,” he replied.
“I went by St. Edward’s this aft
ernoon. I think I might be headed for the barn. You know the feeling. Don’t tell me you don’t.”
“If you go down, so do I. So fuck that.”
Clete removed his .38 snub from his holster, flicked out the cylinder from the frame, and dumped the rounds into the wastebasket. He took a fresh box of shells from the kitchen cabinet and began dropping them one at a time into the chambers, his eyes clear, his face untroubled. “Who do you think the little girls were?”
“A woman said she heard one of them say her name was Felicity and her friend’s was Perpetua.”