CHAPTER 25
THE STORM WAS still in full progress when we arrived at the accident scene, the sky roiling with blue-black clouds, the lights of farmhouses barely visible inside the rain. The state troopers had ignited emergency flares along the edge of the coulee where, according to a witness, Alafair’s Honda had been hit at high speed by a tractor-trailer that had never slowed down. The Honda had rolled over at least three times before it landed on its roof at the bottom of the coulee, the driver’s window pinched into a slit. A trooper with a flashlight in one hand and a radio in the other approached us as soon as Clete and I got out of the truck.
“You’re Detective Robicheaux?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“It’s probably going to be another fifteen or twenty minutes before the Jaws are here. I don’t know the status of the guy inside. He’s generally incoherent and uncooperative,” the trooper said. He had a square jaw and tight mouth and eyes that kept looking at everything around him rather than at me.
“Did you get a name?”
“No. I’m trying to get a crane in here. Did you see one on the road?”
“No,” I said.
“The attempt to locate didn’t give us very much information. What’s the deal on your daughter?”
“I think she may have been abducted.”
His eyes met mine before he gazed down the road again, his expression neutral. “We don’t quite understand what happened here. The witness says two other cars seemed to be traveling with your daughter’s car. But they didn’t stop. From what we can gather, the guy driving the semi may be DUI, but the two companion vehicles fleeing the scene don’t add up.”
“What kind of description do you have on them?”
“The witness says one was white, the other dark-colored. If you want to talk to the guy inside your daughter’s car, you’d better do it now.”
“He’s not going to make it?” I said.
“We’re trying to open an irrigation lock and divert the water out of the coulee. I give it about ten more minutes before it’ll be over his nose. If we have to chain-pull the car out-” He didn’t finish his thought. “Take a look for yourself.”
Clete and I worked our way down the side of the coulee, each of us holding a flashlight the troopers had given us. The rain was warm and pattering on the exposed undercarriage of the Honda. Through the opening between the roof and the window jamb, I could see a man’s head and shoulders wedged against the steering wheel, the safety strap still in place across his chest. His face was contorted, the water in the coulee flowing thick with mud and dead vegetation through the broken windows, touching the top of his head.
“Dave, that’s Andy Swan, the guy who was on the execution team at Raiford,” Clete said.
“You’re sure?” I said.
“I ought to know. I kicked his ass.”
I got on my knees in the water and leaned down to the window. “I’m Detective Dave Robicheaux. My daughter is the owner of this car. Where is she?” I said.
Swan’s gaze would not focus. I realized that one of his eyes had been knocked askew inside the socket. “Did you hear me?” I said.
He didn’t answer. I shone the light inside the car, the beam spearing into the crevasses between the crushed metal and the seats, and over the buckled doors and the folded glass that looked like green ice blown from a fountain. I could smell gasoline and oil and brake fluid and the dirty burnt odor of rubber that had been scoured off the tires.
“What are you doing inside Alafair’s car?” I asked.
Andy Swan made no reply. Clete knelt next to me, one hand propped against the car body. “Remember me?” he said through the window.
Swan’s good eye watered in the glare of the flashlight.
“I’m going to line it out for you,” Clete said. “I’ve got no reason to deceive you. One way or another, we’re going to get Alafair back. But right now you’ve got about eight minutes before you do the big gargle. If you do the right thing now, Dave and I promise you we’ll pick up this car with our bare hands and get you out of this ditch and into federal custody and on the way to a federal hospital. Your pals screwed you with a RotoRooter, Andy. Are you going to take their weight on a kidnap and maybe a murder beef? This is Louisiana. You thought Raiford was a bitch? You know what it’ll be like on death row at Angola for a guy who was on an execution team? Every trusty in the kitchen will spit in your food before it’s brought to your cell. In the shower you’ll be anybody’s bar of soap. Think the hacks will be looking out for you? Most of them wouldn’t blow their nose on your shirt.”
Swan opened his mouth to speak, and I realized that something was wrong with his throat or that something was broken inside his chest. His words were clotted, wrapped with phlegm, blood leaking over his lip from a dark gap in his teeth. “Under the hay,” he said, almost in a whisper.
“What hay?” I asked.
“Baled hay. Go through the door. It’s under the hay.”
“What’s under the hay?” I said.
“The place they were taking her. By the river.”
“What place? Which river?” I said.
“I’m not from here. There’s a tractor-” he began.
“Say it.”
The coulee was running higher, the current sweeping along the crown of his skull, startling him, his eyes opening wide. “I don’t know the name of the place.”
“Who took her?” I said.
He twisted his head and looked straight into my face, his ruined eye protruding obliquely from the socket, his good eye almost luminous, as though it were seeing through me, watching a scene or images that no one else saw.
“Talk to me,” I said. “Don’t let go. Don’t let a collection of shits write your epitaph.”
Then he did something I had seen in a dying man only two or three times in my life. His face became filled with dread, the jaw going slack, the tissue transforming to a puttylike gray, even though his blood had already drained into his head. The exhalation of his final breath was as rank as sewer gas.
I hit the side of the car with my fist.
“What was he talking about?” Clete said. “A tractor? Baled hay?”
“By a river,” I added.
Clete’s face was round and hard in the reflection of the flashlight. “What are you thinking?” he asked me.
“The video from Herman Stanga’s DVD player,” I said. “The stones in the wall. They’re not indigenous to Louisiana. They’re the kind that were carried as ballast in nineteenth-century sailing ships. The place in the video was a barracoon.”
“I didn’t get that last part,” he said.
“A jail for slaves. A lot of blackbirders were bringing in slaves from the West Indies after the prohibition of 1809. Jim Bowie and Jean Lafitte brought them up the Mermentau River and sold them into the cane fields.”
“That shack or whatever full of hay bales where we got into the shoot-out?” Clete said. “There was a rusted- out tractor next to it. You think that’s the place where the girls were?”
“Maybe,” I said.
Above us on the road, someone was setting up a generator-powered bank of flood lamps. Suddenly, the coulee was lit by an eye-watering white brilliance. The state trooper in charge of the accident scene was silhouetted against the glare, the rain blowing like bits of crystal in the wind. “We got the Jaws,” he called down. “You guys find out anything?”
“The guy’s name was Andy Swan,” Clete hollered up the slope. “He worked with the execution team that fried Bundy. He’s probably checking in with him about now.”
But Clete’s cynical remark served as a poor disguise for our mood and the hopelessness of our situation. Our investigation into the accident by the coulee had eaten up time that Alafair may not have had. While we dithered, she suffered. We got back on Interstate 10 and headed west toward Jeff Davis Parish while I tried to get through
