“You going to help this man while I’m gone, or search for alligator skins? He’s your responsibility. He got to be cleaned up-top to bottom.”
“Okay,” Parnell said, “I’ll go.”
“And bring the first-aid kit,” she said. She would have bet that Parnell had never changed a baby diaper, much less cleaned up a grown man.
Betty found a mason jar and filled it with questionable water from the faucet-rainwater that came from the cistern beside the cabin. For several minutes, she worked to clean the man’s head wound and soften the dried blood so she could wipe it off. He was in his thirties, she figured. His long blond hair was matted with blood. He opened his mouth and said something that sounded to Betty like “Ca…zah?”
“I’m here to help you, sir.” She lifted his head, put the jar to his lips, and poured some water in, which he managed to swallow. He opened his eyes and she saw that the right pupil was a tight pinpoint set in a bright blue iris; the other was fully dilated. Her mother was a nurse’s aide and she had told Betty what different-sized eyes meant. “You going to be just good as new. Betty gone get you to the hospital, and they’ll fix your concussion.”
Finally she heard the door open and Parnell’s lazy ass coming back. He stopped just behind her.
“He’s going to be all right, I think. He’s breathing, and took some water. He got himself a concussion. Did you bring the first-aid kit?”
When Parnell didn’t say anything, she turned and looked up. Betty’s eyes went first to the face-the features covered with tiny red droplets, the forehead filled with crisscrossed scars. She let her gaze shift downward to take in the gore-streaked length of pipe clenched tightly in Leland Ticholet’s large hand, inches from her face. Betty felt her bladder give and the warm wetness as it flowed between her legs and pooled around her knees.
She opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out.
21
Despite the number of other boxes in Manseur’s office, he pointed to the one that had arrived while they’d been out of the office. “The LePointe files.”
Alexa was closest, so she picked it up. The cardboard box was roughly the size typing paper came in, but with flaps that were secured with thin cord wrapped under hard plastic disks the size of quarters. On the end and top someone had used a permanent marker to write the subjects’ names, a pair of consecutive case numbers, and the date of the crime. A bright orange sticker that said CLOSED had been added. As she lifted the box to the conference table, Alexa was struck by how remarkably light it was.
While Manseur looked on, she unwound the cording and opened the flaps. Inside there were file folders, one tabbed with the name Curry LePointe and the second with the name Rebecca LePointe. There were no more than ten sheets of paper in each file, which consisted of the medical examiner’s report on the cause of the deaths; a sketch of the crime scene by homicide detectives, indicating the locations of the bodies; and photocopied pages of the detectives’ spiral case notebooks.
“This is a very thin case file,” Alexa said. “Where are the autopsy pictures, the crime-scene photos?”
“Should all be in there,” Manseur said.
“Well, they aren’t. So where would the rest be?”
“No idea. Maybe it got misfiled in another case box, lost, or stolen. Taken as a souvenir or something. Those were different days for the department, to say the least.”
Alexa was familiar enough with the New Orleans PD’s reputation for corruption and criminality that came to a head in the early nineties, when the FBI came in and arrested a large number of cops, a lot of whom went to jail, two ending up on death row. The FBI had almost taken over the department, and state troopers had been used to patrol the streets alongside the cops who hadn’t been arrested in the initial days of the crackdown. It was one of the reasons New Orleans cops didn’t care for the FBI-like they needed more reasons than the cops in most other cities had collected in their own day-to-day dealings with the Bureau.
Alexa held up the detectives’ report. “Investigating detectives were a Harvey Suggs and Robert Bryce. They still around?”
“Both are dead,” Manseur said.
“Wasn’t Suggs your predecessor? Wasn’t he murdered when Winter Massey…”
Manseur nodded. “Suggs was beaten to death with an aluminum baseball bat by a crooked businessman named Jerry Bennett, who murdered a judge and his wife. Bryce was dead before I got here-killed by Suggs-and totally crooked.”
“So, the files could have been sanitized by those two detectives for some reason.”
Manseur nodded, took some of the papers from her, and thumbed through them, reading. “Reason would be money.”
Alexa said, “The patrolman who answered the alarm that night was named Kenneth Decell. He suffered an injury when he disarmed the perpetrator, Sibby Danielson. The name Decell seems familiar to me.”
“Decell was at the Wests’ house last night when we got there. Red-haired fellow in his early fifties. Been a private detective since he retired about ten years ago. Mostly rich people uptown call him when they have family that get themselves entangled with issues of the unpleasant type. Police problems, runaway or out-of-control kids or spouses, extortion threats, cheating husbands or wives, background checks on people they are curious about. Security issues.”
“He bent?”
“Bent? Oh.” Manseur shrugged. “More than some, less than others. He was a detective and…” Manseur turned his sad eyes to hers. “New Orleans has all kinds of people in it. Some rich.”
“Expensive, is he?”
“People Decell works for don’t complain about price when the work gets the results they want. He’s got a pretty big operation, with lots of licensed investigators. Some were cops, some weren’t. He’s well connected.”
“As in, to the mob?”
Manseur shrugged. “As in, to lawyers, prosecutors, police officials, politicians, and the like. Around here more people go to prison for doing other people favors than for stealing cars. ‘Do me one’ is a way of life. A friend will help you move across town today, and in return he might ask you to help him move a body across town.”
Alexa laughed. Then she said, “The murderer was a twenty-one-year-old woman. Why did she kill them?”
“She was crazy. It was a long time ago. The reasons for things that happen here aren’t always written down accurately. Most people on the job in New Orleans could teach a creative writing course. Back when that report was written, our detectives wrote more fiction than Anne Rice.”
“That still the case?”
“I wouldn’t know for sure, naturally.”
Alexa went over to Manseur’s computer, and within seconds she had the LePointe murders’ media coverage on the screen. “Says here that Sibhon Danielson was a paranoid schizophrenic. Committed to a state facility for the criminally insane.”
“She went by ‘Sibby,’” Manseur said.
“Maybe it’s just me, but I find it an odd coincidence that Dr. LePointe, the brother and brother-in-law of the victims, is a psychiatrist who’s an expert on criminal psychology. Don’t you find that strange?”
“I find it an interesting coincidence,” Manseur said. “But in New Orleans, painting your privates blue and dancing in the street with a bottle in your hand while people file past isn’t considered noteworthy. Curry LePointe was the star of that family. William was smart, but without the charisma and personality his big brother Curry had.”
Alexa said, “I wonder if there was any connection between our psychopath and Dr. LePointe before the murders. But I guess, however interesting all this is, the question for us is whether we waste valuable time chasing down twenty-six-year-old murder information.”
“I doubt this has anything to do with finding Gary West. It’s a sidetrack of the investigation at best. And I’m not writing a book or investigating for some cold-case television show,” Manseur said.
“Seeing that we’re talking about Dr. LePointe-the number-one philanthropist and authority on mental
