“It’s my belief that the same guy tried to put a bomb in Clete Purcel’s car,” she replied. “Or maybe we’ve got a tag team at work. Whoever it is, we need to cool them out. Everybody hearing me on this? We don’t get hurt. Civilians don’t get hurt. Bad guys go out of business. Everybody copy?”
There was a collective “Yes, ma’am!”
“You stay, Dave,” she said.
She waited until everyone else had gone. There was a solitary red rose in a slender glass vase on her desk. “This is eating my lunch.”
“Don’t let it,” I said.
“We’ve got a guy killing people all over Acadiana, and we don’t know his name. We don’t have prints or weapons; all we have is two casings from the Cajun Dome that were wiped clean. Nobody is that good.”
“Nothing more from the feds?”
“They’ve heard of a guy working out of Miami named Smiley. They don’t know any more than we do.”
“Maybe we’re all looking in the wrong place,” I said. “Maybe he’s from overseas. The Mob used to bring hitters in from Sicily. They’d stay with a local family, wash the dishes, do the hit, and go back home.”
She tried to straighten the rose in the vase, then picked up a petal that had fallen on the desk and dropped it into the wastebasket. Her eyes seemed out of focus.
“That’s a pretty flower,” I said.
“A fellow gave it to me for my birthday. A fellow I might start seeing.”
I had no idea why she was behaving the way she was. “You okay, Helen?”
“There was a worm right in the middle of the rose. Funny, huh?”
I knew better than to say anything.
“It’s like Smiley,” she said. “He’s out there, invisible, always ready to do harm.”
“He’s just a guy, nothing more.”
She sat back in her chair, her gaze receding. “You know better.”
I wasn’t going to pursue the subject. I had known Red Cross personnel and American soldiers who had been at the liberation of Ravensbrück and Dachau. None of them was ever the same again. They also spent the rest of their lives trying to explain the nature and sources of evil. Cops fall easily into the same trap. A day comes when you see something that you never talk about again, and it lives with you the rest of your days.
“We’ll get him,” I said.
“I’m not talking about Smiley or whatever his name is. It’s something else. And I say ‘it’ deliberately.”
“Keep it simple, Helen.”
“Jimmy Nightingale is involved in this.”
“That’s not what the evidence indicates.”
“Maybe he didn’t rape Rowena Broussard, but I think he knew Kevin Penny did. Maybe he even sicced him on her.”
“We’ll never prove that, Helen. Let it go.”
“I saw him at the Winn-Dixie yesterday. People were lining up to shake his hand. He put his arm over my shoulders. I felt like I’d been molested.”
I had never heard her talk like this. “You think he’s the third Antichrist in Nostradamus?”
“No, I think he’s Huey Long on a national scale, and that scares the shit out of me.”
* * *