“Got to go, Bailey.”
“Every time we talk, I feel like someone extracted my heart.”
I eased the phone down in the cradle and stood at the window, looking down at the Teche and the sunlight flashing as brightly as daggers on the current.
• • •
I CALLED DESMOND CORMIER’S home number. There was no answer. I called Sean McClain on his cell phone. “This morning at the airport, who’d you see get on the plane?”
“There was two planes,” Sean said.
“Okay, who’d you see get on?”
“I don’t know their names.”
“You saw Desmond Cormier?”
“No, sir.”
“How about Lou Wexler?”
“I don’t know who that is. What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know where Alafair is.”
“You think—”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what I think, and it scares the hell out of me.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Go back to the airport and find out who was on those planes.”
“Maybe Alafair will show up, Dave. Don’t get too worried.”
“Do you remember what Hilary Bienville’s body looked like?” I asked.
• • •
I WENT FROM HOUSE to house up and down East Main, asking my neighbors if they had seen Alafair leave our simple shotgun home. I mention its simplicity at this point in my story to indicate the contrast I felt between the loveliness of the morning, the leaves blowing along the sidewalks, the flowers blooming in the gardens, the massive live oaks spangled with light and shadow, all of these gifts set in juxtaposition to the violence and cruelty that had fallen upon us like a scourge and now seemed to have cast their net over my daughter.
I walked past the Steamboat House, which sat like a dry-docked ornate paddle wheeler in an ambience of Victorian and antebellum splendor that often belied the realities of slavery and, later, the terrorism of the White League during Reconstruction. Farther down the street, an elderly lady was on her hands and knees, weeding the garden in the old Burke home, a pair of steel-frame spectacles on her nose. She looked up at me and smiled. “How do you do, Mr. Robicheaux?”
“Just fine,” I said. “Alafair went somewhere with a friend while I was at Mass. I wondered if you might have seen her.”
“I didn’t see her, but I did see an unusual car stop in front of your home,” she replied, still on her hands and knees. “I’ve seen it before.”
“Unusual in what way?”
“I think the name is Italian.”
“A Lamborghini?”
“I’m not much on the names of cars.”
“What color was it?”
“Definitely cherry-red. No question about that.”