“He raised her,” I said. Close enough.
Lattesta and Weiss huddled with Bud Dearborn. They were deep in conversation, probably about Calvin and the tiny community out at the bleak crossroads. Hotshot was a group of small houses containing lots of secrets. Crystal had wanted to escape from Hotshot, but she also felt most secure there.
My eyes returned to the tortured figure on the cross. Crystal was dressed, but her clothes had ripped when her arms and legs had changed to panther limbs, and there was blood everywhere. Her hands and feet, impaled with nails, were crusted with it. Ropes did the work of holding her to the crossbar, kept the flesh from ripping free of the nails.
I’d seen a lot of awful things, but this was maybe the most pathetic. “Poor Crystal,” I said, and found tears were rolling down my cheeks.
“You didn’t like her,” Andy Bellefleur said. I wondered how long he’d been out here, looking at the ruin of what had once been a living, breathing, healthy woman. Andy’s cheeks were patched with stubble, and his nose was red. Andy had a cold. He sneezed and excused himself to use a handkerchief.
D’Eriq and Antoine were talking to Alcee Beck. Alcee was the other Bon Temps police detective, and that didn’t make the investigation look too promising. He wouldn’t be too regretful about Crystal’s death.
Andy faced me again after he’d stuffed his handkerchief in his pocket. I looked at his weary, broad face. I knew he’d do his best to find out who’d done this. I trusted Andy. Square-built Andy, some years my senior, had never been a smiley kind of guy. He was serious and suspicious. I didn’t know if he’d chosen his occupation because it suited him, or if his character had altered in response to his occupation.
“I hear she and Jason had split,” he said.
“Yes. She cheated on him.” This was common knowledge. I wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.
“Pregnant and all, like she was?” Andy shook his head.
“Yeah.” I spread my hands.
“That’s sick,” Andy said.
“Yeah, it is. Cheating with your husband’s baby in your stomach between you . . . that’s just specially icky.” It was a thought I’d had but never voiced.
“So, who was the other man?” Andy asked casually. “Or men?”
“You’re the only guy in Bon Temps who doesn’t know she was screwing Dove Beck,” I said.
This time it registered. Andy glanced over at Alcee Beck and back to me. “I know now,” he said. “Who hated her that much, Sookie?”
“If you’re thinking Jason, you can just think again. He would never do that to his baby.”
“If she was so free with herself, maybe it wasn’t his baby,” Andy said. “Maybe he found that out.”
“It was his,” I said with a firmness I wasn’t sure I felt. “But even if it wasn’t, if some blood test says it wasn’t, he wouldn’t kill anybody’s baby. Anyway, they weren’t living together. She’d moved back in with her sister. Why would he even go to the trouble?”
“Why were the FBI at your house?”
Okay, so this questioning thing was going to go one way. “Some questions about the explosion in Rhodes,” I said. “I found out about Crystal while they were there. They came along out of professional curiosity, I guess. Lattesta, the guy, thinks this might be a hate crime.”
“That’s an interesting idea,” he said. “This is undoubtedly a hate crime, but whether or not it’s the kind of thing they should investigate, I don’t know yet.” He strode off to talk to Weiss. Lattesta was looking up at the body, shaking his head, as if he was noting a level of awfulness he’d thought couldn’t be reached.
I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was in charge of the bar, and the crime scene was on bar property, so I was determined to stay.
Alcee Beck called, “All people on the scene who are not police officers, leave the area! All police officers who are nones sential to the crime scene, step into the front parking lot!” His gaze fell on me, and he jabbed a finger toward the front. So I went back to lean against my car. Though it was cold enough, it was lucky for all of us that the day was bright and the wind wasn’t blowing. I pulled my coat collar up around my ears and reached into the car to get my black gloves. I tugged them on and waited.
Time passed. I watched various police officers come and go. When Holly showed up for her shift, I explained what had happened and sent her home, telling her I’d call when I’d gotten permission to reopen. I couldn’t think of any other course of action. Antoine and D’Eriq had left long ago, after I’d entered their cell numbers on my phone.
Jason’s truck screeched to a halt beside my car, and he leaped out to stand in front of me. We hadn’t spoken in weeks, but this was no time to talk about our differences. “Is it true?” my brother asked.
“I’m sorry. It’s true.”
“The baby, too?”
“Yeah.”
“Alcee come out to the job site,” he said numbly. “He come asking how long it had been since I’d seen her. I haven’t talked to her in four or five weeks, except to send her some money for the doctor visits and her vitamins. I saw her once at Dairy Queen.”
“Who was she with?”
“Her sister.” He took a long, shuddering breath. “You think . . . was it bad?”
No point beating around the bush. “Yes,” I said.
“Then I’m sorry she had to go that way,” he said. He wasn’t used to expressing complex emotions, and it sat awkwardly on him, this combination of grief and regret and loss. He looked five years older. “I was so hurt by her and mad at her, but I wouldn’t want her to suffer and be afraid. God knows we probably wouldn’t have been good as parents, but we didn’t get a chance to try.”
I agreed with every part of what he’d said.
“Did you have company last night?” I said finally.
“Yeah, I took Michele Schubert home from the Bayou,” he said. The Bayou was a bar in Clarice, only a few miles away.
“She stay all night?”
“I made her scrambled eggs this morning.”
“Good.” For once my brother’s promiscuity paid off—Michele was a single divorcée without children and forthright to boot. If anyone would be willing to tell the police exactly where she’d been and what she’d done, Michele was the woman. I said as much.
“The police have already talked to her,” Jason told me.
“That was fast.”
“Bud was in the Bayou last night.”
So the sheriff would have seen Jason leave and would have noted whom he’d left with. Bud hadn’t kept the job of sheriff this long without being shrewd. “Well, that’s good,” I said, and couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“You think maybe she was killed because she was a panther?” Jason asked hesitantly.
“Maybe. She was partially changed when she was killed.”
“Poor Crystal,” he said. “She would have hated anyone to see her like that.” And to my amazement, tears ran down his face.
I didn’t have the slightest idea how to react. All I could do was fetch a Kleenex from the box in my car and shove it in his hand. I hadn’t seen Jason cry in years. Had he even cried when Gran had died? Maybe he really had loved Crystal. Maybe it hadn’t been solely wounded pride that had caused him to set up her exposure as an adulteress. He’d fixed it so both her uncle Calvin and I would catch her in the act. I’d been so disgusted and furious with being forced to be a witness—and with the consequences—that I’d avoided Jason for weeks. Crystal’s death had shunted aside that anger, at least for the moment.
“She’s beyond that now,” I said.
Calvin’s battered truck pulled up on the other side of my car. Quicker than my eye could track, he stood in front of me, while Tanya Grissom scrambled out the other side. A stranger looked out of Calvin’s eyes. Normally a peculiar yellowish color, those eyes were now almost golden, and the irises were so large that there was almost no visible white. His pupils had elongated. He was not even wearing a light jacket. It made me cold to look at him in more ways than one.
