The girl dreamed. She wept as she did.
Ipar licked her burning forehead. She struggled in her nightmare and raised a hand as if to push something away from her face. “I’m just a girl!” she whimpered, still asleep.
In her half-awake state, the girl knew this was a nightmare, but that knowledge offered her no consolation. If she opened her eyes, she’d be lost and surely die. She didn’t want to wake, she didn’t want to be killed again, and that dilemma made her so terribly sad.
She didn’t want to die, but she was terrified of the storm.
The Lady is here, chanted the chorus in her head.
I’m scared! she replied.
The Lady is coming, insisted the child-murdering ghouls, indifferent to her plea.
She scares me! Amaia protested, begging for mercy.
64
CONFIRMING IDENTITY
The swamp
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Thirteen years later in a dark hunting lodge, the child’s anguished plea and the grown woman’s explanation became a single voice. Amaia told them, “A child who believes everyone is conspiring to murder her will be terrified even of a rescuer.”
Bull heard her clearly but had no idea what she was talking about. Charbou, on the other hand, stared at her, intrigued, both amazed and bewildered.
Johnson started to say something, but with a gesture, Dupree cautioned him to remain silent.
Amaia continued. “They stood on the table, trying to keep their heads above water, until the table leg broke. It’s jammed in the corner over there.” She pointed in that direction. “The girls fell into the water on top of one another. They did their best to stay afloat, but they weren’t strong enough. The water rose and they drowned, trapped against the roof. Eventually it subsided and left them here.”
Bull’s sudden interruption broke the spell of her story. “It was an accident, then. Nobody goes to all the trouble of kidnapping girls just to drown them. This was a prison. That’s probably how the Samedi gang handled Médora and the others. They kept them locked up here and transferred them when things quieted down. Nobody would be likely to think kidnappers would use this place.”
“Remember what happened to Médora.” Charbou’s face was grim. “Maybe these poor children were better off.”
Amaia gazed unhappily at the small corpses. “Yes. Maybe the storm saved them from something even worse. The Lady doesn’t do things by half measures. That’s how she operates.”
Johnson raised a hand, cautioning them to be quiet. He cupped his ear and was concentrating, trying to identify something in the distance. It grew louder outside the flimsy wooden walls, and they all heard it. An outboard motor. “His partner’s coming back.”
The whistler had been moving bodies downstairs, so he must have had at least one other associate. No more than that, they’d guessed, because if there’d been more, a second man would have stayed to help with the bodies. And they needed a means of transportation to remove the dead, so there had to be an associate. The snarl of the outboard approaching the hunting lodge confirmed that much.
They rushed down the stairs, hurrying to forestall any precipitate action by the shrimpers. Clive was downstairs and the traiteur was sitting beside Médora, but the older Cajun was nowhere in sight.
“Where’s your friend?” Bull called out.
“My man decide to keep watch out there in the bushes. You say somebody probably coming back.” He gestured toward the corpse floating at the bottom of the stairs.
“No way we gonna let him surprise us like that one did.”
They exchanged alarmed glances. Bull and Charbou rushed to the door, while Dupree, Amaia, and Johnson went to the grime-covered windows. A rifle shot cracked and echoed in the pouring rain. Johnson threw open the window just in time to see a man blasted backward out of an arriving Zodiac. A second man was at the outboard motor. The newcomers had been taken completely by surprise.
“Goddamn it!” Johnson exclaimed.
The second man let go of the throttle, grabbed a shotgun, and fired the first barrel in the general direction of the former hunting lodge. He obviously had no idea where the bullet had come from. He raised his gun again just as the shrimper outside put a slug into his belly. The man clutched his gut and fell forward.
Impelled by inertia, the Zodiac drifted forward and bumped against the lodge. Johnson and Amaia threw themselves over the starboard side as Bull and Charbou climbed aboard on the port side, shouting at the man to put his hands up.
He didn’t, and they saw why. He was too intent on trying to keep his guts from spilling over his jeans.
“Take him inside,” Dupree ordered. Turning in the direction of the shrimper in the bushes, he shouted, “And you—get out of there and put your gun down! You must have scared off every boar in the swamp!”
They worked the boat along the side of the lodge to the main entrance.
They put what was left of the man onto the second table, next to the one where Médora’s body lay. Charbou had improvised a pressure bandage from oily rags in the bottom of the boat. He’d done a fairly good job of stemming the blood flow and containing the victim’s intestines. The man was unconscious. He looked about forty years old.
The traiteur examined him quickly and shook his head. “I can pray for his soul, but there’s nothing to be done for his body. He’s bleeding out. He’ll die in an hour, maybe less. And it’s going to hurt.” He turned and went back to Médora.
“Traiteur!” Dupree took his arm and waded with him to the foot of Médora’s improvised bier. He pointed to the gunshot victim. “He may be the only one who can tell us where the girls are. They were taken from their homes just like Médora, and they’ll wind up like her if I can’t get to them. I’ve been trying all my life to track them down. We got really close when Médora was taken, so close that they murdered her brother and my partner. Dozens of teenage girls have disappeared from their homes since then. Nobody gave a damn about them, nobody cared where they were going to wind up. We’re as close as we can be to cracking this case. They had six young girls upstairs. I don’t know how many more they have stashed away, but I do know that we’re the only ones who’re going to do anything about it.”
“How is that possible?” the traiteur asked.
Dupree looked confused. Amaia was the one who answered. “Come with me.”
“What?”
“Come upstairs with me.” She pointed toward the attic.
Dupree stopped her. “Salazar, I don’t know if that’s a good idea—”
“I will,” the traiteur told Dupree. “I believe your colleague wants to show me something more than just bodies.” He followed her upstairs. Dupree went with them.
The lantern was still lit, for in the rush and confusion of the boat’s arrival, no one had thought to extinguish it. Its dim reddish light glowed in the asphyxiating space and gave the place the bizarre appearance of a bedchamber for slumbering dolls. All the drowned girls lay on their sides, except for the one Dupree had turned on her back. Their arms were stretched out, and their hair obscured their faces. Each looked as lifeless as the ancient hunting trophies downstairs.
Amaia shined her flashlight across those small corpses one by one. “We are looking for a demon, and his greatest achievement is making us think that he doesn’t exist. This kind of predator can stay active for years. He hides his tracks or the bodies of his victims, making them look like disappearances, runaways, accidents, or suicides. He chooses vulnerable girls, black teenagers who are socially marginalized, girls whose disappearances won’t be noticed or will seem unimportant. His victims are poor but attractive. The sort of girl who’s lucky if her family pays any attention to her; a girl likely to run away because she doesn’t like school, her parents are strict, or they don’t let her date. Everyone in the town, in the neighborhood, knows about them. Maybe they’re outcasts or they shun company because they prefer to be alone.