Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

“Maybe I can have a second career as the model on the covers of bodice-buster novels. Will you lighten up? You make me feel awful, Dave.”

“What can I say?”

“Try nothing,” he replied.

He began clicking the keys on his computer, his huge shoulders stressing the fabric in his sport coat, his porkpie hat pulled down on his eyes, as though, unconsciously, he wanted to shield them. The first image on the monitor was that of Varina in the nude, her back to the camera, as she approached a naked man lying on the couch, one hand tucked behind his head, his chest hair like a black fan spread across his sun-browned skin. The figure was not Clete.

“Adios,” I said.

“Come on, Dave. I went this far with it. I don’t want to look at it by myself. I already feel like a pervert.”

Then I said something I never thought I would say to Clete Purcel: “I can’t help you with this one, partner.”

My cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I looked at the caller ID. Helen Soileau. “Where are you?” she said.

“In Clete’s office.”

“What are those sounds in the background?”

“Turn the speaker off, Clete,” I said.

“What the hell are you guys doing?” she asked.

“Nothing. I was just leaving.”

“You know anything about hammerhead sharks?” she asked.

“They eat stingrays and their own young. The males bite the females until they mate.”

“I mean where they live or feed or whatever.”

“They go where they want. Why are you asking about hammerhead sharks?”

“The pictures are just coming in on the Internet from Lafourche Parish. We found out what happened to Chad Patin,” she said.

A SPORT FISHERMAN had been trolling with outriggers southwest of Grand Isle when he foul-hooked what he thought was a sand shark. The drag began to accelerate and sing with such velocity that smoke was rising off the reel. To keep from breaking the line, the mate reversed the vessel in the same direction the shark was running. From the stern, you could see a long torpedo-shaped shadow appear briefly beneath a swell, then a dorsal fin slicing through a wave and dipping below the surface again, bubbles trailing after it. For just a moment the line went slack, as though it had been severed, and the mate throttled back the engine and let the boat drift. The slick spots between the waves were undisturbed, the water glistening with a fine sheen like baby oil, the exhaust pipes of the boat gurgling just below the surface. Overhead, pelicans drifted on the breeze, making a wide turn, the way they always do before they cock their wings and plunge down into a wave. However, they seemed to lose interest. Suddenly, a school of baitfish were skittering across a swell, as though someone were flinging handfuls of silvery dimes on the water.

The hammerhead burst to the surface, the line tangled in its gills, streaming blood, its side striped with lesions cut by the steel leader. Its back had been tanned by the sun, giving it the coloration of a sand shark. Its belly was as white as a toadstool that had never seen sunlight. Its eyes, set on the sides of its anvil-like head, gleamed disjointedly, similar to those inside a cubist painting. From nose to tail, it was at least eleven feet long.

All of this was on the sportsman’s cameraphone, along with images of the sportsman and another mate gaffing the shark in the gills and in its mouth and clubbing it with a mallet and finally dragging it high enough on the gunwale to hit it in the head with a hatchet. The sportsman rolled the hammerhead on its back and inserted a knife in its anus and split its belly open. The contents that spilled out on the deck were not what he was expecting to find.

A hammerhead has a small mouth for a shark of its size and takes a while to consume its prey. Evidently, this one had managed to eat and swallow everything it had been provided. The dismemberment of the prey looked like it had been done with a saw. The details are not pleasant to narrate. Only two details of the shark’s engorgement were of significance, at least from a forensic or evidentiary point of view. Glimmering among the spill on the deck were a Caucasian hand and part of a forearm. On the hand was a ring. Later, the coroner in Lafourche Parish removed the ring and found the name of Chad Patin engraved inside it. The other forensic detail of importance was the discovery of two .223 rounds in the back muscles of the victim.

Chad Patin had tried to kill me with a shotgun blast fired from the freezer truck. But as I looked at the images on Helen’s computer screen, I could feel no enmity toward him. When he called me in the middle of the night from Des Allemands, begging for help, I discounted much of what he said, particularly his rant about a cabal of some kind that controlled events in the lives of those at the bottom of the food chain. Also, his mention of a mysterious figure called Angel or Angelle and his description of someone dying inside the iron maiden seemed the stuff of drug-induced psychosis. But I had been selective in listening to Chad Patin. He’d said he transported narcotics and prostitutes from Mexico into the United States. He also indicated he had abandoned his charges in a locked truck and perhaps left them to die of suffocation. Those were statements I believed. He admitted he had tried to kill me and in the same breath asked for money so he could get out of the country. In his mind, the request was perfectly reasonable. I had acted incredulously, but in reality, his point of view was one that people in law enforcement deal with every day. The real problem was not Chad Patin. The real problem lay in my discounting his story about a mysterious island where modern-day people made use of a torture instrument out of medieval Europe.

Helen was tilted back in her swivel chair, chewing on a hangnail, staring at her computer and the frozen image of Chad Patin’s remains on the boat deck. “I don’t get it,” she said.

“Why nobody took the ring off him?” I said.

“That and the fact that he was dumped overboard. Didn’t they learn anything after they put Blue Melton over the side in a block of ice?”

“Maybe they didn’t put him in the water. Maybe he was running and somebody popped him with a couple of .223 rounds, maybe from an AR-15 or M16. He fell off the boat, and they couldn’t find him in the dark.”

“You buy that stuff about an island and a torture chamber on it?”

“Patin was reporting something he heard on a tape. Maybe the tape was bogus, something excerpted from a slasher film. Who knows? Somebody fried Patin’s apartment with a flamethrower. That’s a tough act to follow. The bigger problem for me is this person Angel or Angelle. The notion of a cabal is too much like the New World Order or the Trilateral Commission.”

“You don’t believe in conspiracies?”