'Some of them don't get a lot of exposure to the outside world.'
'Anyway, narrowing it down to the last ten years, there are at least seventeen unsolved homicides involving females that share some similarity with the murder of Cherry LeBlanc. You want to take a look?' she said, and handed me the folder. 'I have to go down to the sheriff's office and get my building keys. I'll be right back.'
It was grim material to read. There was nothing abstruse about the prose. It was unimaginative, flat, brutally casual in its depiction of the bestial potential among the human family, like a banal rendering of our worst nightmares: slasher cases, usually involving prostitutes; the garroting of housewives who had been abducted in broad daylight in supermarket and bowling-alley parking lots; the roadside murders of women whose cars had broken down at night; prostitutes who had probably been set on fire by their pimps; the drowning of two black women who had been wrapped to an automobile engine block with barbed wire.
In almost all the cases rape, sodomy, or torture of some kind was involved. And what bothered me most was the fact that the perpetrators were probably still out there, unless they were doing time for other crimes; few of them had known their victims, and consequently few of them would ever be caught.
Then I noticed that Rosie Gomez had made check marks in the margins by six cases that shared more common denominators with the death of Cherry LeBlanc than the others: three runaways who had been found buried off highways in a woods; a high school girl who had been raped, tied to a tree in a fish camp at Lake Chicot, and shot at point-blank range; two waitresses who had gone off from their jobs without explanation and a few hours later had been thrown, bludgeoned to death, into irrigation ditches.
Their bodies had all showed marks, in one way or another, of having been bound. They had all been young, working class, and perhaps unsuspecting when a degenerate had come violently and irrevocably into their lives and had departed without leaving a sign of his identity.
My respect for Rosie Gomez's ability was appreciating.
She walked back through the door, clipping two keys onto a ring.
'You want to talk while we take a ride out to Spanish Lake?' I said.
'What's at Spanish Lake?'
'A movie director I'd like to meet.'
'What's that have to do with our case?'
'Probably nothing. But it beats staying indoors.'
'Sure. I have to make a call to the Bureau, then I'll be right with you.'
'Let me ask you an unrelated question,' I said.
'Sure.'
'If you found the remains of a black man, and he had on no belt and there were no laces in his boots, what speculation might you make about him?'
She looked at me with a quizzical smile.
'He was poor?' she said.
'Could be. In fact, someone else told me about the same thing in a less charitable way.'
'No,' she said. She looked thoughtfully into space, puffed out one jaw, then the other, like a chipmunk might. 'No, I'd bet he'd been in jail, in a parish or a city holding unit of some kind, where they were afraid he'd do harm to himself.'
'That's not bad,' I said. Not at all, I thought. 'Well, let's take a ride.'
I waited for her outside in the shade of the building. I was sweating inside my shirt, and the sunlight off the cement parking lot made my eyes film. Two of the uniformed deputies who had been grinning through my glass earlier came out the door with clipboards in their hands, then stopped when they saw me. The taller one, a man named Rufus Arceneaux, took a matchstick out of his mouth and smiled at me from behind his shades.
'Hey, Dave,' he said, 'does that gal wear a Bureau buzzer on each of her boobs or is she just a little top- heavy?'
They were both grinning now. I could hear bottleflies buzzing above an iron grate in the shade of the building.
'You guys can take this for what it's worth,' I said. 'I don't want you to hold it against me, either, just because I outrank you or something like that. Okay?'
'You gotta make plainclothes before you get any federal snatch?' Arceneaux said, and put the matchstick back in the corner of his mouth.
I put on my sunglasses, folded my seersucker coat over my arm, and looked across the street at a black man selling rattlesnake watermelons off the tailgate of a pickup truck.
'If y'all want to act like public clowns, that's your business,' I said. 'But you'd better wipe that stupid expression off your faces when you're around my partner. Also, if I hear you making remarks about her, either to me or somebody else, we're going to take it up in a serious way. You get my drift?'
Arceneaux rotated his head on his neck, then pulled the front of his shirt loose from his damp skin with his fingers.
'Boy, it's hot, ain't it?' he said. 'I think I'm gonna come in this afternoon and take a cold shower. You ought to try it too, Dave. A cold shower might get the wrong thing off your mind.'
They walked into the shimmering haze, their leather holsters and cartridge belts creaking on their hips, the backs of their shirts peppered with sweat.
Rosie Gomez and I turned off the highway in my pickup truck and drove down the dirt lane through the pecan orchard toward Spanish Lake, where we could see elevated camera platforms and camera booms silhouetted against the sun's reflection on the water. A chain was hung across the road between a post and the side of the wood-frame security building. The security guard, the wiry man with the white scar embossed on his throat like a chicken's foot, approached my window. His face looked pinched and heated in the shadow of his bill cap.
I showed him my badge.
'Yeah, y'all go on in,' he said. 'You remember me, Detective Robicheaux?'
His hair was gray, cut close to the scalp, and his skin was browned and as coarse as a lizard's from the sun. His blue eyes seemed to have an optical defect of some kind, a nervous shudder like marbles clicking on a plate.
'It's Doucet, isn't it?' I said.
'Yes, sir, Murphy Doucet. You got a good memory. I used to be with the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Department when you were with N.O.P.D.'
His stomach was as flat as a shingle. He wore a.357 chrome-plated revolver, and also a clip-on radio, a can of Mace, and a rubber baton on his belt.
'It looks like you're in the movie business now,' I said.
'Just for a while. I own half of a security service now and I'm a steward for the Teamsters out of Lafayette, too. So I'm kind of on board both ways here.'
'This is Special Agent Gomez from the FBI. We'd like to talk to Mr. Goldman a few minutes if he's not too busy.'
'Is there been some kind of trouble?'
'Is Mr. Goldman here?'
'Yes, sir, that's him right up yonder in the trees. I'll tell him y'all on your way.' He started to take his radio off his belt.
'That's all right. We'll find him.'
'Yes, sir, anything you say.'
He dropped the chain and waited for us to pass. In the rearview mirror I saw him hook it to the post again. Rosie Gomez was looking at the side of my face.
'What is it?' she said.
'The Teamsters. Why does a Hollywood production company want to come into a depressed rural area and contract for services from the Teamsters? They can hire labor around here for minimum wage.'
'Maybe they do business with unions as a matter of course.'
'Nope, they usually try to leave their unions back in California. I've got a feeling this has something to do with Julie Balboni being on board the ark.'
I watched her expression. She looked straight ahead.
