“McVane?” she said.
“Yeah, you ever meet him?”
“No. What’s the story?” she said.
“He had a bad rep with his colleagues.”
“For what?”
“Black women didn’t always go to jail.”
“You think it was one of them?” she asked.
“How many poor black women carry a firearm that can blow a hole the size of a tangerine in a guy’s head? Also, he was shot at close range outside the cruiser. There were no other car tracks in the oak grove. Either he met somebody who was on foot, or the person was in his cruiser and the two of them got out and the shooter made his move.”
“Our guy didn’t see it coming, either,” she said.
“Probably not.”
“It’s your baby, Streak.”
“I’ve got enough on my desk, Helen.”
“Sorry, Pops.”
“I don’t get along well with the guys in St. Mary Parish.”
“Boo-hoo,” she replied.
She got into her vehicle and drove away. I returned to the crime scene on the parish line. Everyone was gone. I stepped inside the tape. The wind was still up, bending the grass inside the grove, some of it stiff with blood. The spray pattern of the wound pointed toward the bayou. I stood next to the place the body had been and pressed my hands together and formed a V, like the needle on a compass. Then I aimed between my thumbs as though through iron sights, trying to see where the bullet could have gone. The trees were widely spaced, which was not helpful.
I tried to see the shooter inside my head. Nobody likes cop killers, even when they kill a guy like McVane. Most of them go out smoking. Usually, they’re almost hysterical with fear and get as stoned and drunk as they can before they check out. Sometimes they take their families with them. A cop killer on the loose is like a tiger prowling a school yard. You’re going to hear a lot from him until someone pulls his plug.
The size and character of the entrance and exit wounds indicated the bullet was of large caliber and fired from a serious gun. The round was probably a hollow-point or a dum-dum or a soft-nose that had been notched. The shooter was probably a man, big enough to carry the weapon
on his person without McVane noticing it. But why did McVane pull in to the grove? The St. Mary cops said he didn’t smoke. The grove was too visible for a tryst or even for harmless goofing off on the job. Maybe he was doing his paperwork when a hitchhiker walked up on him. But why would an armed hitchhiker walk up on a cop he didn’t know and shoot him in cold blood?
Maybe the shooter was a fugitive. Maybe he did something suspicious on the road and McVane questioned him. But McVane didn’t call in the encounter, and he hadn’t been alarmed to the point of drawing his weapon, at least not until it was too late.
I looked at the serenity inside the grove, the wind scudding on the bayou, the moss straightening in the trees. It was the kind of spot you associate with rest, peace of mind, withdrawal from the fray. It was an unlikely place for a violent confrontation, a disruption caused by two disparate personalities trying to kill each other, one succeeding.
Why was McVane late in pulling his gun? He was outside the cruiser, at some point obviously aware that he was in mortal danger. Why did he let his defenses down? This wasn’t consistent with the image of a cop who, according to his colleagues, cut suspects no slack and cuffed and searched them roughly and hooked them to a D-ring on the cruiser’s floor.
I didn’t believe the shooter was local. Aside from two antebellum homes, there were only a few trailers and abandoned shacks spaced along the two-lane, and they were not occupied by the kind of people who would chat up a cop like McVane.
It had to be a hitchhiker. Did McVane pick him up? An armed and dangerous man?
No, he must have known and trusted the shooter. But where did the gun come from? The weather was warm, and a hiker on the road wouldn’t have been wearing a coat. Perhaps he was carrying a bag or backpack. He was probably white. Someone so innocuous in appearance that McVane had no fear of him; someone he held in contempt. What kind of person would that be?
I began to see an image of the stroller or hitchhiker, a seemingly harmless character made of Play-Doh, one with a soft mouth and girlish hips and buttocks that waddled, the perfect target for a virile and strong and sadistic male.
Back to weaponry and ballistics. No shell casing had been found. Unless the shooter picked up his brass, the weapon was a revolver. The fatal round had exited the back of McVane’s head and had to be somewhere. It was not inside the blood and brain matter on the grass, which meant it may not have fragmented.
I went from tree trunk to tree trunk, running my hands over the bark. I looked down the slope. The Teche was a tidal stream that swelled up on the banks each day and receded with the influences of the moon. The surface was yellow and swollen and churning with mud and leaves and tree branches scattered by the same high winds that had swept through the area earlier in the day. A rowboat was tied to a cypress root a few feet down the bank. On the far side of the bayou was a weathered boathouse with a sagging dock. I got into the boat and rowed across.
Sometimes you get lucky. A bullet was lodged in the door. I opened my pocketknife and eased it out of the wood. The nose was flattened, the sides morphed out of shape, like a piece of bent licorice. The striations were intact. I wrapped the bullet in a handkerchief and wadded up the handkerchief and put it into my pocket, then rowed back across the bayou.
I called Helen and told her what I had found.