“Before I joined the homicide squad in New Orleans, I was a deputy sheriff in Terrebonne. Folks there are superstitious, and farther out in the swamps, they’re even more so. Living in the swamp gives you a whole different idea of the universe, and it wasn’t exceptional for the sheriff’s department to have to look into a report that somebody saw a rougarou or that lutins were active. But in the Lirette family’s case, nobody’d heard or seen anything at all. We were surprised.”
Johnson spoke. “Rougarou? Lutin?”
“The rougarou or loup-garou is a swamp monster, sort of like a wolf-man. The lutins are a little harder to explain. Folks think they’re mischievous spirits, kind of like goblins. And then there’s also fifolets, the ghost lights over the swamp. Saint Elmo’s fire probably, but Cajuns see them as evil spirits, ghosts of the drowned who’re drifting in the currents down in the bayous.”
Johnson was astonished. “The Terrebonne police responded to those kinds of reports? When I was looking into criminal religious sects, we usually found local authorities more skeptical than not.”
“I guarantee you that if you’d been living here for a while, none of it would seem ridiculous. The swamp is alive. If, as a law officer, you work in cooperation with an ethnic group like the Roma or Cajuns or Native Americans, you have to understand their customs, or you’ll be completely lost. And besides, it’s no secret that south Louisiana is a land of voodoo.”
“‘Voodoo’?” Amaia echoed him, skeptical. “You mean witchcraft?”
Bull grimaced, uncomfortable, but answered her with great seriousness. “Voodoo is the major religion in countries like Togo and Benin. The Caribbean version is the official religion of Haiti, because the slaves brought it with them from Africa hundreds of years ago. It got mixed up with Christianity and spawned cults. Santería, for example, or candomblé and Umbanda. And, yes,” he said, looking at Johnson, “you can bet your life the local police are going to accept calls and reports of any kind of suspicious activity. When a belief system is so deeply embedded in a culture, it’s going to influence things. You have to accept some rituals you might normally find distasteful or disturbing, like animal sacrifice, midnight meetings, tomb desecration, corpses stolen from their graves—”
“That’ll do.” Johnson held up a hand to stop him.
“Jerome screwed up,” Dupree said. “His sister had been gone for more than a week, and we’d turned up absolutely nothing. No one had seen a thing, or even worse, if they had—as we suspected—they weren’t going to squeal. So, without telling us, Jerome offered a twenty-thousand-dollar reward for information about Samedi. Twenty thousand bucks is a tidy little fortune in those parts. He put out the word he was ready to pay that much, and it spread like wildfire.
“We’d been trying to contact Lirette for hours, with no success. Late that morning, we went to his house. His mother was scared out of her wits, a shotgun in her hands, but she finally opened the door to us. You couldn’t blame the poor woman. She told us her son wasn’t home. Jerome knew the hospital was going to release his mother that morning, but he hadn’t come to pick her up. She was sure something terrible had happened. We thought so too; everybody knew Jerome Lirette was devoted to his family. He wouldn’t have abandoned his mother, especially right after losing his sister and his grandmother. We called the sheriff and were about to send search parties out when an anonymous caller told us where we could find his body.
“At practically the same moment, Jerome’s mother called us in hysterics with a message her son left for us. We thought maybe someone was playing a practical joke on us. Or somebody interested in the reward had called her with a made-up story. We split up. I went with the sheriff, Detective Bull, and some deputies to where the tipster said we’d find Lirette’s body; Carlino went to talk with Jerome’s mother.”
“It was a trap,” Charbou guessed.
“No. No, it wasn’t, and that’s the strangest part of it. Jerome had left us a note at his mother’s house about the reward he’d offered. And we found Lirette’s body exactly where the caller said it would be. He’d been decapitated. They’d nailed his headless torso to a tree trunk in a dreary swamp. He was naked.”
“What about Carlino?” Johnson asked.
Dupree exhaled completely. “When we got there, Agent Carlino was lying full length on Lirette’s porch, a terrible wound in his chest. He was still alive. Six feet away, carefully planted on the top porch step, was Jerome’s head. I leaned close to my partner. He was trying his best to say something. The blood gushing from his mouth choked off his words; I tried to stop him from talking, but he was desperate to tell me something. I pressed my ear to his mouth and finally understood what he was saying: ‘Lirette is alive.’
“He was talking about Jerome, which was insane, considering that the man’s decapitated head was there in full sight. I thought the shock of his injury was making Carlino delusional, so I answered, ‘Sorry I was too late. Lirette is dead.’
“He shook his head and coughed up more blood. ‘No, no, he’s alive,’ he said, waving toward the head over on the top step. The cut through the neck was jagged and messy, as if Jerome’s head had been torn off instead of cut. I could see tendons and tissue spread out from the neck, exactly what I’d expect to see if a head was ripped off a body. The skin was blueish white, gray in some places. His mouth was half-open, a swollen white tongue protruded from between his lips. His eyes were closed, and there was hardly any trace of the handsome Jerome Lirette I’d known. But it was Jerome, there was no doubt about that.
“And right then, that decapitated head opened its eyes and looked at me. The tongue slipped back into the thing’s mouth, and the lips quivered as if it were trying to say something.”
Dupree stopped to watch for Amaia’s reaction; she nodded, accepting his story without question. “I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I was deafened by the mother’s screams inside the house and stunned by that vision. My partner grabbed my hand to attract my attention. I leaned over close to try to make out what Carlino was saying. ‘Samedi ripped my heart out. He took it with him.’
“I looked down, appalled, at my friend’s terrible wound. It looked like they’d blasted him point blank with a shotgun. All I saw was a deep cavity with irregular borders that shivered inward with each breath he tried to take. My partner struggled to speak as I tore off my shirt and stuffed it into the wound. ‘If you follow him, he’ll tear your heart out,’ he said.
“Carlino was alive all the way to the hospital. We drove him to Houma and evacuated him to Baton Rouge by helicopter. I was with him all the way; it took about twenty minutes. He knew he was dying. I kept holding his hand and talking to him; he lost consciousness mere seconds after the helicopter landed. They hooked him up to the emergency room monitors, but it was no use; he was dead. Carlino was a young man, only thirty-three, so the doctor refused to give up. He used the defibrillator several times, but got no result, so he pushed the paddles into the wound to touch the heart muscle. When he did, he couldn’t believe what he found. Agent Carlino had no heart.”