“And the ground was undisturbed? There was no trash lying on top of it?”
This time he didn’t answer but simply walked away, like a man who no longer cared what the world thought or did not think about him.
“What’s the importance of the broken teacup?” Helen said.
“On the last day of Bernadette Latiolais’s life, she went into a dollar store and bought two teacups and saucers. The cups were painted with lavender flowers.”
“Where’d you get that?”
“I talked with a sheriff’s detective in Jeff Davis Parish. A clerk in the store said she was carrying the cups and saucers in a paper bag. She walked past a bar with them and was never seen alive again.”
Helen put on her sunglasses and looked at the yellow crime-scene tape vibrating in the wind. There were tiny beads of perspiration on her forehead and upper lip. The paramedics were zipping up the body bag on the remains of the female who had been buried among the trees. Red ants were crawling on the outside of the bag; the paramedics averted their faces when they picked up the bag and set it on the gurney, then one of them bent over and gagged in the weeds. Our coroner, Koko Hebert, a huge, sweaty, fat man, was blowing his nose into a dirty handkerchief. I could see Helen’s chest rising and falling, her hands opening and cl
osing at her sides. “The day it doesn’t bother you is the day you should quit,” I said.
“We’re going to get whoever did this,” she said.
THE NEXT MORNING Koko Hebert came into my office wheezing, a folder in his hand. When he sat down in a chair, his body seemed to deflate, like a giant air bladder collapsing upon itself. He smoked more cigarettes than anyone I had ever known, and he ate the most unhealthy food that was available in New Iberia’s restaurants. He waged war against his own body and seemed to take pleasure in alienating himself from others. After his son was vaporized by a roadside bomb in Iraq, Koko attended the funeral service in Virginia by himself and told no one where he was going. He also refused to acknowledge the condolences of friends and colleagues. He lived alone in a house that was sheathed with broken asbestos shingles, and often occupied his time driving his lawn tractor up and down his two-acre lot on the bayou, mowing great swaths through the buttercups that tried to bloom on his property.
“Mind if I smoke?”
“There’s no smoking anywhere in this building.”
“Somebody just spat tobacco in the water fountain. Which habit do you think is worse?”
I gazed out my window at Bayou Teche and at the live oak trees in City Park. A young mother was sailing a Frisbee with her children by one of the picnic shelters. The children were leaping in the air and rolling in the grass and chasing one another in the shade. Their voices made no sound coming across the water, as though their lives were completely sealed off from the work we did in our building. I looked back at Koko. When I dealt with him, I had to remind myself that no matter what happened in my life, I would probably never be as unhappy a man as he was.
He leaned forward and pitched the folder on my desk. “She was mush inside,” he said. “Approximate date of death is hard to say. My guess is she was in the ground at least two weeks. Age between nineteen and twenty-two. Evidence of rape? Not per se. Vaginal penetration? Almost any young girl these days has a train tunnel down there. A tattoo on the butt, one on the ankle, one on the shoulder. No traces of drugs. You got any coffee?”
I had to think before I could answer his question. “Downstairs.” I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. I tried to hide my exasperation with both his callousness and his passive-aggressive behavior. I opened the folder on my desk blotter and glanced at autopsy forms he had filled out. His handwriting was indecipherable. “What’s the cause of death?”
“What do you want?”
“What do I want?”
“Because it’s take your choice. It wasn’t blunt trauma. She wasn’t shot or stabbed. Was she asphyxiated? Could be. But I doubt that’s what did her in. It could have been an aneurysm or heart failure, maybe brought on by prolonged fear, asphyxiation, and general abuse. The big word in there is ‘fear,’ as in scared shitless.” He was wearing an oversize Hawaiian shirt, and he began pulling at the fabric as though it was stuck to his body, shifting his shoulders around, putting on a performance. “Is your air-conditioning working?”
“What aren’t you telling me?”
“It’s written there on the first page, if you care to look at it. She had ligature marks on her wrist, deep ones. I think she was bound up for a long time. Her stomach was empty. Whoever grabbed her didn’t feed her too good.”
“Why do you say ‘grabbed’?”
“She was obviously held against her will. That means she was probably abducted. Her tox screen was clear, which tells me she wasn’t a prostitute. So I suspect she was grabbed off the street or lured into a captive situation. Maybe she met a guy on the Internet. You know how many bimbos are out there now flirting with guys who can’t wait to tear them apart?”
“Koko, I just need the information. I don’t need an interpretation of it. I don’t need the drama, either.”
“You trying to tell me something?”
“Yeah, everybody experiences loss.”
He got up from the chair. His body had the sloping contours of a haystack. “Keep the file. I got the Xerox in my office,” he said.
“You test people. That’s all I was saying. It gets to be a drag.”
“You want my opinion of how she went out? The Bible says Jesus sweated blood. At a certain level of fear and depression, it can happen. The capillaries pop, and blood issues from the pores with a person’s sweat. You want to know if this girl suffered? You bet your ass.”
When he closed the door behind him, his odor clung to the furniture like a gray fog.