“Would the word ‘bricks’ mean anything?” she said.
I thought about it. “Yeah, it could.”
“I’ll let you know what I come up with. Actually this is great material. I’d like to use it in my novel.”
They said good-bye and started out the door. Alafair snapped her fingers in the air. “I forgot my purse. I don’t have any money,” she said. “I was going to pick up a dessert.”
“Here,” I said. I took twenty dollars from my wallet and handed it to her. “I’ll put it on your tab.”
“We won’t be late,” she said.
“I’ll still be up,” I replied, and gave her the thumbs-up sign, the one I had always given her when she was little.
A HALF HOUR LATER, I saw Clete’s Caddy pull into the driveway. I went outside and waited for him on the gallery. He tore the tab on a can of beer and sat down on the steps, his porkpie hat slanted forward on his forehead. He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and lit it and blew smoke out into the yard. He still had not spoken except to comment negatively on the price of gasoline. I took the cigarette from his mouth, walked out to the curb, and dropped it into the storm drain.
“Dave, being around you is like being married. Will you lay off it?”
“What’s on your mind, Cletus?”
“What’s on my mind is I’ve either been living in my own thoughts too long or I’ve developed shit-for-brains syndrome.”
I sat down next to him. The streetlights had gone on and the canopy of oaks that arched over the street ruffled when the wind blew.
“Remember when we were searching the Baylor property and the neighbor came out and asked us what we were doing?” he said.
“Yeah, his name is Tom Claggart.”
“Remember I told you I thought I’d seen him somewhere?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Last year I took a gal for a boat ride out in the Basin. It was cold as hell and I ran out of gas. There were some hunters in a camp up on an island, about three hundred yards from the Atchafalaya. I walked up on them while they were dressing a deer. The deer was hanging by its feet from a tree. There were guts and strips of hide all over the ground. These guys looked pretty uncomfortable. Then I remembered deer season had closed two or three days earlier.
“One guy goes, ‘We got this six-pointer last week, but it froze up on us.’
“I pretended I didn’t know or care what he was talking about. They gave me two gallons of gas and wouldn’t let me pay them for it. Just as I was leaving, a guy with a bullet head and thick mustache came to the door and looked at me. I think it was that Claggart guy.”
“So maybe Claggart hunts deer or has a camp in the Basin,” I said.
“There was a laptop opened on the table behind him. I could see it through the doorway. The image on the screen was a bunch of playing cards floating into a black hat, you know, the kind magicians use. I think it’s one of those video games for gamblers. Bledsoe is always playing them.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them. “No, he doesn’t just play them. He plays that one,” I said.
“Say again?”
“I saw that program running on Bledsoe’s laptop when I was in his cottage.”
“Oh man, we walked right over it, didn’t we? Where you going?”
“To apologize to the FBI.”
I went into the kitchen and called Betsy Mossbacher’s cell phone.
“Hello, Dave,” she said.
“Can we deep-six that conversation we had this afternoon? I need your help,” I said.
“You push me into corners, then you blow hot and cold. I never know who’s coming out of the jack-in-the-box. It can be a drag, Dave.”
Don’t argue, don’t contend, I heard a voice say.
“We’ve been looking in the wrong places for information on Ronald Bledsoe. We’ve been looking for a criminal record that doesn’t exist and faulting ourselves for not finding it. The real story on a guy like Bledsoe is in the facade of normalcy.”
“I don’t follow.”
“The reason guys like BTK and John Wayne Gacy and the Green River guy, what’s-his-name, Gary Ridgway, can kill people for decades is they’re protected. Their family members live in denial because they can’t accept the fact they’re related to a monster, or that they’ve slept with him or had children with him. How would you like to find out your father is Norman Bates?”
“I got the point. What do you need?”
“Everything I can get on a guy by the name of Tom Claggart. He has a house next door to Otis Baylor’s place in New Orleans.”
“What’s his tie-in?”
“He’s an export-import man. Baylor said Claggart attended either Virginia Military Institute or the Citadel. The Citadel is in South Carolina. That’s where Bledsoe seems to be from.”
“How soon do you need this?”
“Right now.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Betsy, Bledsoe sent Bobby Mack Rydel after my daughter. She came within inches of being killed. We’ve been square with you guys. You owe me.”
There was a beat. “I think we do,” she replied.
THE SKY HAD SOFTENED to a dark blue when Molly and Alafair parked their automobile next to Burke Hall, the old drama and arts building hard by a lake that was thick with flooded cypress. Molly had a guest-faculty sticker on her car and almost always used the same parking area when she visited the university because there were no evening classes in Burke Hall and the spot between the building and the lake was secluded and usually empty. She put her purse under the seat and locked the car, then she and Alafair walked across the campus to the library.
The grass in the quadrangle had just been mowed, and the air smelled like flowers blooming and wet hay, and leaves and pecan husks someone was burning in a damp pile. The roofed walkways that enclosed the quadrangle were full of students, the moss in the live oaks limned by the glow of the lighted windows in classroom buildings and student dorms. A sorority was conducting a bake sale in front of the library entrance, the girls wearing sweaters because of the chill, an aura of innocence about them that one would associate with a 1940s movie. The scene I describe is not one of nostalgia. It’s one that existed. It’s one in which we either believe or disbelieve. It represents I think to all of us the kind of moment that should be inviolate.
Unfortunately it is not.
After Molly and Alafair entered the building, a man in a raincoat paused at the bake-sale table and bought a pastry. He wore a rain hat that seemed too large for his head and cupped his ears, like an oversize bowler sitting on a manikin. He also wore a mustache with streaks of white in it. He seemed to be a nervous man, and he gave off a smell that was like a mixture of deodorant and moldy fabric or socks left in a gym locker.
He paid for the pastry with a five-dollar bill and wanted no change. When he pushed the pastry into his mouth, his eyes were fastened on the interior of the library. The coed who had sold him the pastry offered him a napkin. He took it from her and entered the building, wiping his mouth. In his right hand he still held the napkin the coed had given him and the cellophane the pastry had come wrapped in. A trash receptacle was less than three feet from him. But he balled the cellophane and napkin in his palm and shoved them in his coat pocket. Then he walked up the stairs to the second floor of the library, his face lifted, like a hunter glancing upward into the canopy of a forest.
I DIDN’T WAIT for Betsy Mossbacher to call me back with information about Tom Claggart. I used my cell phone, in case Betsy called on the landline, and talked to the state police in both Virginia and South Carolina, but
