Paul was close to the end of his endurance but he knew they couldn’t stop, not even for a moment. Their pursuers were bound to catch up to them, despite the head start they’d gotten. It was a desperate race against time, against the enemies who had posed as his friends, against death itself.
His companion’s condition had to be worse than his. She was nearly twice his age and had led a sedentary life for the past several years. If their pursuers didn’t catch them and kill them, this race to safety through the shallow bayou might be her undoing. He’d already lifted her from the mud and water once. She was slowing him down, making it easier for them to catch him.
But he couldn’t quit, couldn’t just leave her here, even if it meant his own survival. Not now, not when he’d thrown away everything he’d held sacred for the past three years.
“You got to come!” he urged her. “We’re almost there!”
She slipped in the mud and fell again. This time she barely kept her head out of the fetid water. “Can’t – go – leave – me,” she panted. “Save – self – go—”
“Not on your life!” he hissed. “I don’t be leaving you!”
“Can’t – keep up – with you—”
Something rustled in the woods above the bank of the small bayou. “You come with me!” He knelt down and grabbed her under the arms. “The police station just over that levee! We can make it!”
“Can’t – see it – too – too dark.”
“Don’t have to see it! I know it’s there. Now get y’self up! Move, old woman!”
She let him drag her upright and they staggered a few more steps, splashing through the algae floating on the surface. After a moment she added her meager strength to his efforts, and they headed toward the shallower bank of the bayou.
They were making better time now. The police station was just over the rise of the bayou’s left bank – he hoped. If they hadn’t gotten turned around in their frantic flight. If he recognized the land at night, when everything looked different. If that was the right levee.
He didn’t know her name or what she’d done to be condemned. He wasn’t sure if he’d survive this night whether she reached safety or not. All he knew was that he had to try.
The fog parted before them and he saw the glow of light from over the levee. “Look!” he whispered in her ear. “There! It be the police station! We almos’ there!”
They stepped out of the water and began climbing the bank. His legs were stiff and sore and every step hurt, but he refused to quit. He refused to allow this woman to die.
He wrapped his arm around her waist and tugged. “Come on! We’re almost there! We’ll be safe!”
She grabbed his shirt and pulled herself along with him. “Thank – you,” she panted. “You’re a – a good man.”
He frowned but didn’t stop. He wasn’t a good man. He was just tired of being bad. And he had to do this one last good thing before he died.
Suddenly she fell out of his embrace and thudded to the ground. He lurched to a stop and bent down to pick her up again and everything went black.
*****
He tried to inhale but only found foul water in his mouth. Frantic for air, he scrambled for a handhold and found a tree root. As he coughed brackish liquid from his throat, he pulled himself up onto the bank of the bayou and took a deep, shuddering breath, trying to think around the throbbing coming from the back of his head.
What had happened?
He rose to his hands and knees and felt something soft and squishy under his left hand. When it didn’t react to the pressure he put on it, he knew it wasn’t something alive that might hurt him. He picked it up and brought it closer to his face so he could identify it by the wan moonlight.
Then he wished he hadn’t.
He threw the section of intestine in one direction and turned the other way to vomit. As his stomach emptied itself, he heard something moving slowly toward him on the bank above him.
He looked up, knowing what he’d see if not who.
A tall, rangy man with immense shoulders, wearing a long black duster and a flat-brimmed black hat with a silver band, knelt down near the young man’s head. <You should not have taken her, Paul,> he said in continental French. <It only made things worse for her and – well, there is no way we can trust you now, is there?>
Paul closed his eyes and shook his head. He knew what was coming, that there was no escape for him now. <No,> he sighed. <You cannot trust me.>
The tall man gently placed his hand on Paul’s shoulder. <For the sake of your past service, I will make it quick.> He paused to breathe for a moment. <And for what it is worth, I am sorry.>
Paul nodded. <Thank you, my lord. I understand. Will you tell my mother what happened?>
The tall man paused again and sighed. <No. I will not.>
And then Paul was dead.
*****
Lead investigator Robert Gautreaux shook his head. He’d worked in the Homicide division for eleven years, as a uniformed patrolman for twelve years before that, and had grown up in the New Orleans area. He’d seen people attacked by alligators or ravaged by dogs, and once there had been those two hikers who’d been mauled by a rogue cougar. He’d never figured out where the big cat had come from, either, only that the officer on the scene had barely managed to kill it with his service pistol before the beast could claw him into hamburger.
He’d also seen far too many people killed, butchered, and savaged by other human beings. His life in the bayou country had shown him both how wonderful most people could be and how barbaric others could be.
But he’d never seen anything like this before. Not on the job, at least.
Cause of death for the young man was easy to determine. His neck had been broken by someone who was extremely strong and quite skilled in killing. His body still lay half-way in the water of the small bayou, and the young officer who was standing over the body with a long stick, guarding it from fish and turtles and other scavengers, was careful not to look up the bank toward the levee behind the station house. Robert didn’t know his name, but he had the look of the academy’s most recent graduating class – except for his wide eyes and pale complexion.
Identifying the other victim was going to be difficult.
The coroner, Dr. Walter Smith, had found enough body parts to pronounce the second victim to be female, probably fifty to sixty years of age with poor muscle tone, and had probably not been particularly attractive in life.
With her body torn into a dozen or more pieces and scattered over the bank of the levee, she wasn’t very attractive in death, either.
Smith looked up from where he was kneeling. “Robert, would you come and take a look at this?”
Robert shook his head. He couldn’t count the number of times he’d reminded the coroner that his first name was pronounced “Row-
bear” in the French manner, with the emphasis on the second syllable, yet Smith refused to remember. And this wasn’t the time to make of it an issue.
“What do you wish for me to see, eh, Walter?” asked Robert.
Walter lifted up a bloody piece of flesh. “This is the lower left leg of the second victim. It ends just below where the leg would meet the knee joint.” He pointed to the icky part. “Note how the flesh has been severed rather raggedly but straight, as if this were one cut instead of several cuts. And the ends of both the tibia and fibula are also broken off along the same plane.”
Robert knelt down close enough to see but not close enough to touch. “Meaning what?”
Walter frowned. “I think it means that her leg was severed by one single blow, one that tore through both flesh and bone.”
Robert didn’t like the way that sounded. “Like a sword or an axe, maybe?”
Walter shook his head. “No. More like a ragged blade on a hydraulic press. I don’t think this leg was cut from the rest of her body. I think it was torn away, almost as if it had been bitten off.”
Now Robert really didn’t like what he was hearing. “Do you say that a wild animal killed her?”
“I’m not saying that at all. A wild animal would have eaten something or carried away body parts, but the only part I haven’t found yet is her left forearm. Except for a few gnawed places where those opossums were nibbling on the remains when that young man found the bodies, there are no indications of animals feeding here. It’s almost eight in the morning now, and these deaths probably happened right here between three and four o’clock this morning.”
“You are certain these body parts were not simply dumped here? Perhaps as a statement to the police?”
Walter sat back on his haunches. “There’s too much blood here for that. We’ve found fresh blood all over the bank, way too much for a body dump. She was killed right here.”
Robert took a deep breath and stood. After a moment, Walter followed suit and pulled off his latex gloves.
Robert didn’t want to ask, but he knew he had to know. “Walter, have you any idea who or what killed this poor woman?”
Walter didn’t look at Robert. “I know that she was probably disemboweled first, then her limbs were removed, then her throat was torn out and her head separated from her torso. And I’m pretty sure from the blood evidence on the ends of the severed limbs that her heart was still beating when they were being removed.” He finally fixed his gaze on the homicide investigator. “But I can’t tell you how any single human being could physically do this. There had to be a group of them, maybe five or six, all working on her at once, and working very quickly, using tools that would make a lot of noise and be difficult to carry.”
The detective frowned. “Yet we have found no footprints, no tire tracks, no indication that anyone other than our two victims were here last night. How could someone have done such a terrible thing without leaving any evidence of it?”
“I don’t know. I wish I did.”
Robert grimaced and looked up at the cloudy sky. “How long – I mean – when did she die?”
“I assume you’re asking me which wound killed her?” Robert nodded and Walter rubbed his face with one hand. “Any of them would have been fatal after a few minutes, but the method used to remove her limbs crushed the severed ends of her blood vessels and prevented her from bleeding out quickly. Much as I hate to say this, it appears that she was still alive and probably alert when her throat was ripped out.”
Robert closed his eyes and breathed a quick prayer. Let it not begin again, he asked. Not again. Please.
Walter tapped him on the elbow. “What will you tell the press?”
Robert opened his eyes and looked at the tops of the trees across the bayou. “As little as possible. I suggest that you refrain from repeating to anyone what you have said to me just now. The last thing we need in this city is a panic like—”
Walter waited for a long moment, but when Robert didn’t continue, Walter just nodded. “I’ll start working on the identification of the victims as soon as I get all the body parts in the ambulance.”
“I hope that, at least, goes well.”
“It should. The young man is fully intact except for a couple of turtle bites, and we just found the woman’s head a few minutes ago.”
Something in Robert’s stomach opened onto a black abyss. “Where was her head?”
Walter grimaced and pointed. “Funny thing. Not ‘ha-ha’ funny, of course, but most unusual. We found it almost at the top of the levee, facing the police station. Her hair was pulled back away from her face, almost as if it had been arranged that way.” He lowered his arm. “I think we’ve learned all we can here. It’s time to load them up.”
Robert nodded once and Walter took a step up the bank. “Walter?” said Robert.
“Yes?”
“When did you come to New Orleans?”
“Let’s see, I was hired away from the Little Rock, Arkansas coroner’s office thirteen years ago, in nineteen eighty-six.”
“So you were not in the city in nineteen seventy-two?”
“No. I started my residency in Fayetteville that year. Why?”
“No reason.”
Walter paused, but when Robert moved down the bank toward the intact body, he climbed the levee and waved for his assistants.
Robert stopped beside the young officer standing guard. “Are you well, young man?”
The boy gulped. “I’m – I’m just fine, sir.”
He wasn’t, of course, but Robert wouldn’t call him on it. “Dr. Smith is going to place this young man’s body in his ambulance. Would you be so kind as to return to the station and tell your commander that we are almost finished here? And that I will check in with him before I leave?”
The young man turned and Robert read “D’Aquisto” on his name tag. “Yes, sir, right away.”
Officer D’Aquisto walked downstream about a dozen yards, far enough to get clear of the worst of the blood splatter, then scrambled over the top of the levee. Robert hoped that the young man would stick with police work. He’d overcome his natural revulsion to seeing something so horrible and done his job well. Perhaps the young man might even help him solve this case quickly.
Yet Robert feared that this was only the beginning. The horror he’d seen twenty-seven years before seemed to have returned. This death was too much like so many of those back then, and as a youth he’d railed against the police and the politicians and the press for suppressing the truth.
But now that he was faced with it himself, he understood. This news could not be made public, lest the city – perhaps the entire state – fall into a panic. He only hoped they could contain the carnage this time.
Stopping it altogether was surely a vain hope.
He paused, inhaled, and let the foul memories come again, the ones he sought to banish with time, activity, hobbies, and the occasional soused weekend.
In nineteen seventy-two, fifty-eight people had died in ways similar to the way this unidentified woman had died the night before. Twenty-seven more had disappeared and had never been found. The killings and the disappearances had begun during Mardi Gras that year and had halted abruptly seven weeks later, after Easter. Some people had blamed the hippie population which convened almost daily in Jackson Square, playing guitars and bongos and singing songs of love and peace and drugged euphoria.
But the city had grown since then, had absorbed many new people, and things were not as they had been.
Except, possibly, for one thing.
Death stalked the city yet again. Rougarou – the one called Loup-Garou by some, especially the Cajun natives – had returned to New Orleans.
And Robert could not combat the menace alone. He needed help, and he would begin with the coroner, then make a phone call to a certain number in Metropolis.
He laboriously climbed the bank and guided the doctor off to one side. “Walter, I must speak with you on a matter of grave importance.”
Smith lifted an eyebrow. “From almost anyone else, I’d consider that a pun of very poor taste. What’s on your mind?”
Robert glanced around. No one paid them any undue attention, yet he felt that they were being watched. “Not here. I will meet you for lunch at my home at twelve-thirty. Tell no one where you are going or who you are meeting.”
Smith nodded toward the ambulance. “I take it this has to do with our guests of honor this morning?”
“Take it any way you wish. But please come to my home for lunch today. And tell no one. It is most important.”
“A matter of life and death, eh, Robert?”
Robert took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “No, Walter. It is far more than that. It is a matter of survival.”
