All the Devil's Creatures (11 page)

Bobby glanced at Wayne—knocked out on the road—and kept his pistol trained on Duane. The long-haired twin said, “Whatcha gonna do, Barbie? Shoot us?”

And it would be so easy. It had been two-on-one. They had a knife, had taken him by surprise. He could make it look even better by uncuffing Duane after the double-execution. No one would ask many questions—especially after the lab confirmed the twin’s truck matched the one at the Bordelon lynching.

Bobby aimed at Duane’s degenerate face. He heard a round enter the chamber. But by then his rage had left him. A bitter loathing for the subhuman twins remained, but loathing alone could not justify vigilantism. He lowered his weapon and, acting with the last of his adrenaline-fueled strength, hog-tied Duane and cuffed the unconscious Wayne. Then he clutched his bloody arm and stumbled to his cruiser to call for back-up.

G
eoff parked around the corner from the diner on Prytania Street. He felt sore and dizzy, like he had taken tumble down a rocky hill in his sleep. Marisol looked rested and alert.

The waitress was manic as she served them coffee. They looked like tourists. She asked them where they were staying, where they dined, what they saw. Like the storm had never happened. Or it had happened and everything was fixed. Or better.

When Eileen joined them, the tourist mask dropped away. The waitress looked sad and pitiful and hard when she set down Eileen’s cup. “Any progress, hon?”

“Not much, I’m afraid.”

Geoff knew they were talking about insurance, rebuilding—progress toward normalcy. A new standard greeting question among locals. Like the quirky cliché
Where y’at?
Or, in the weeks after the storm,
How much water did you take?

They ordered food and Eileen said, “Sorry I’m late.”

Geoff introduced the two women. Eileen barely glanced at Marisol. “You hired a private investigator?”

Geoff felt a flash of irritation when Marisol answered before he had a chance. “Sort of provisionally. We’ll see if Mr. Kincaid needs my services, through Geoff.”

Geoff said, “We doubt he will—we’re meeting him this afternoon before he talks to the sheriff again, but I’m not too worried about it. Not after our meeting with T-Jacques last night.”

“Oh?”

“He didn’t have much. Just a flash drive with no data except a number on it—here.” As his stomach completed three summersaults in rapid succession, Geoff pulled it from his pocket a scrap of paper on which he had transcribed the number—three zeros, then a bunch of eights and sixes. “Mean anything to you, Eileen?”

“No.” She had hardly glanced at it. “That’s all T-Jacques had?”

“That’s all that was on the drive,” Marisol said. “I even scanned for metadata—nothing.”

“So it was a wasted trip, except for some decent jazz.” Geoff pocketed the scrap. “How’s the report coming?”

“It’s coming. No surprises.” The scientist seemed to relax a little. “The plume of contamination is clearly emanating from the refinery. There are several regulated pollutants present. It’ll be your job to prove as a legal matter that this is a continuing violation of the Clean Water Act—something I think you can handle. Case closed.”

“Thanks, Eileen.”

Nodding, she sipped her coffee.

“Ms. Kim, did Dalia’s work include any research on unusual animals at the lake?”

Eileen looked at Marisol straight on for the first time. “What?” She paused. Geoff recognized her old temper flaring, her taking in of breath to keep it at bay. Eileen would never correct her, but could guess his old friend the professor would have preferred that Marisol call her “doctor.” But he also sensed that Eileen’s annoyance went deeper than the mere omission of an honorific. She seemed nervous, almost frightened. Paranoid. His mind drifted to T-Jacques.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Eileen said. “What makes you ask that?”

“T-Jacques mentioned evidence of weird creatures—”

“
Creatures
? Dalia was a serious scientist. She wasn’t out there looking for ‘creatures,’ like some crackpot taking fuzzy pictures at Loch Ness. She
was
studying the lake’s biodiversity. And, yes, it is an interesting ecosystem—I wouldn’t be one bit surprised if there are species of insects, say, whose only habitat is the lake. But these perennial stories of supernatural beasties are nothing more than the childish myths of the ignorant.”

“Calm down, Eileen. It’s just a question.” Geoff looked toward the kitchen. The void in his gut cried for grease. “What had Dalia learned on that front, beyond her work on the lawsuit?”

“Nothing. Or at least, nothing that you two need to worry about.” Eileen chewed a thumb nail and glared. Marisol looked at Geoff as if she wanted to speak and sought direction from him, to interrogate this freaked out scientist. Geoff closed his eyes and rubbed his temples and pretended not to notice. Then Eileen said, “If T-Jacques really had no additional information, then we have nothing further to talk about.”

Marisol seemed to be losing her cool demeanor, as if Eileen’s unexpected belligerence had put her off guard. “But what about her panicked phone call to you? The one that led Waltz to contact T-Jacques in the first place? And she gave you some kind of sample or something from the lake, right? Well what is it? What’s this all about?”

“Everyone’s jittery down here these days, kiddo. She probably just had a case of the nerves. Dalia’s ‘sample’ as you call it—”

“Come on, Eileen, that’s what you called it.” Geoff felt annoyed at the two of them.

“In any event, it’s nothing.”

“Wait, this doesn’t make—”

The food came, breaking Marisol’s probing, Eileen’s glare. Over plates piled with grits and black beans, ham steak and sausage, eggs, biscuits and fresh fruit, Geoff said, “How’s Lakeview coming along?”

“Slow and steady,” Eileen said, steady herself now. “Families are moving back. Lots of new construction and rebuilding. Much more progress than the Lower Ninth Ward, which is its own source of tension. In any event, I hope to be back in my house by July.”

Marisol said, “Were you here during the storm?”

“Of course not. I evacuated. The whole situation was just …
absurd
.”

“Let me ask you something, as a scientist. Does it really make sense to rebuild this whole city, when it’s mostly below sea level?”

Eileen dropped her fork. Geoff watched the rage building in her eyes like an electrical storm. “Do you know how sick I am—everyone in this city is—of that question? So listen up, kiddo. Plenty of other cities are vulnerable—to flooding, earthquakes, volcanoes.
E.g.
, San Francisco, Seattle, Amsterdam, Tokyo. We need those places; that’s why we employ engineers to make them safe. What happened here was an engineering failure—the levees failed. But more than that it was a corporate and governmental failure on a massive, even criminal scale. The oil companies and shipping interests have been carving up our coastal wetlands—our natural hurricane defenses—for decades. Every American who has ever put a drop of gasoline into an automobile shares some culpability for what happened here. And every American has a responsibility to fix it.”

In the silence, Marisol’s eyes had softened and gone distant, as if Eileen had not only reached her but frightened her. They were the same eyes he had glimpsed over dinner the night before, when he had asked if she had children.

“So do you believe these rumors that the levees were dynamited?”

Eileen seemed ready to breath fire. “Good God, Geoff, where’d you find this one?” Turning to Marisol: “Those stories are being peddled by poor, undereducated people whose grief at the loss of their homes, in conjunction with their long history of oppression, has made them delusional. The storm itself was a natural disaster; the failure of the levees a result of negligence—gross, criminal negligence, as I explained—but there was no conspiracy to drive the poor from New Orleans, as some would lead you to believe. Take Lakeview, for example—my neighborhood. Solidly upper-middle class, utterly obliterated. It doesn’t fit the narrative.”

Geoff paused from shoveling food into his angry gut. “How do you like living in the Irish Channel?”

“It’s great. That old New Orleans charm. You can see it survived pretty much intact. I’m lucky to have found a place to rent, price gouging aside. But I’m ready to have my own house back.”

Marisol ignored Geoff’s attempt to smooth their breakfast. Eileen’s condescension had not seemed to phase her, though her eyes had lost their mistiness. “You’re probably right that the stories are deluded, professor. But T-Jacques Rubell doesn’t think so, and he even thinks Katrina is linked to whatever’s going on in East Texas that Dalia was into—at least in a, I don’t know, spiritual sense. And crazy or not, in my game you try to figure out what people are on about, why they think the things they think. It’s how you get to the truth.”

“I’m a scientist. I know truth. And the truth is, Dalia was killed by racist, redneck scum. Nothing in her work suggests otherwise.” Eileen leaned over her yolk-smeared plate to stare down Marisol. “
Nothing
, kiddo.”

•

They didn’t speak much on the drive out of New Orleans, radio tuned to a local music station he couldn’t get enough of. The station petered out as they crossed over the miles of swampland and neared Baton Rouge.

Marisol said, “I take it you guys have a history. And not just a professional one.”

“What makes you say that?” Geoff drove, Marisol in the passenger seat, legs crossed over the soft, worn leather.

“The way you interact. The familiarity. I mean, if she were just a consultant you had retained, I would think she would have treated us with a bit more politeness. Client relations, you know?”

Geoff glanced over. “She’s always been rough around the edges. And since the storm …”

“Don’t worry; my feelings aren’t hurt.” She gave him that crooked smile. “Lots of people don’t trust snoops. Especially if they have something to hide. No offense.”

Geoff did not answer right away. Then he said, “I’ve known her for years. So you’re right that we have a history. I do trust her.” He knew he sounded as if he were trying to convince himself. “But…”

“She
is
hiding something. I wouldn’t be worth half my fee if I couldn’t tell you that.” Marisol peered at him over her glasses. “And it just doesn’t make any sense. She’s the one that introduced you to T-Jacques. Let you know that Dalia was working on a side project at the lake, told you she had …
something
Dalia had discovered. And now she goes mum. Why?”

“Because T-Jacques wouldn’t talk to her—he would deal only with me. And now it seems clear that there really is nothing there. Or at least nothing related to the murder or my lawsuit. At most, maybe Dalia was onto some cool research path at the lake. Maybe a new salamander species or whatever. Now Eileen wants to follow it through. Academe is so damn competitive and political, grants and whatnot. I don’t blame her if she doesn’t want to go blabbing to a stranger at this early stage—a P.I. at that.”

Geoff kept his eyes forward as traffic picked up in the capital city, but he could feel Marisol’s gaze burning into his profile. With a tease in her voice, she said, “You’re not regretting bringing me on this assignment, are you, Waltz?”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“Anyway, T-Jacques doesn’t trust her. I picked up that vibe.”

“The vibe I picked up? T-Jacques wouldn’t trust his own mother.”

“Touché.” Marisol paused. “What did you really make of his ramblings—alien technology and cloning and all that? Pure bullshit?”

“Paranoid delusions at best. But you’ve got to understand—everybody down here’s suffering some degree of PTSD since the storm. It’s sad.”

“So should we even bother trying to figure out what that number means?”

“I don’t see much point right now. If my client, Willie, doesn’t get tangled up further in the murder investigation, then I think your work will be done. Whatever else Texronco is up to at the lake—and I’m sure Eileen will explain it to me in her own time, when she’s figured it all out herself—I can’t imagine a scenario in which the company would go so far as to murder a scientist. It’s a publicly traded, multi-national corporation—they just don’t behave that way.”

Marisol jerked her head around and gave him a look as if he had suggested that Mafioso are perfectly nice fellows, pillars of their communities, just misunderstood. Realizing the statement had sounded naïve, Geoff said, “I mean, murder—really? And to stage it like a hate crime? Whatever Dalia had discovered, worst case scenario for the company would be maybe some environmental response costs amounting to a fraction of their earnings.”

“You really are Mr. Rationality, aren’t you?” All the playfulness and all of the sexy edge had fled from Marisol’s voice. “But maybe you don’t understand what these companies are capable of when it comes to covering up their … their crimes against nature.”

Geoff waited a beat and then spoke in the gentlest tone his hangover would allow. “Tell me what you mean.”

“I mean, I’ve seen things, where I’m from.” A pause, and then her voice sounded not just distant but harsh. “Let’s just leave it at that.”

Geoff almost said:
I figured you to be a Libertarian—that doesn’t usually jibe with environmentalism.
But he knew better than to prod. And perhaps in her case the two philosophies were not inconsistent—a Libertarianism arrising from the belief that environmental degradation (
crimes against nature
) stem from corrupt institutions, that all large institutions tend toward corruption, and that the struggle of the individual against such faceless power is both noble and doomed. No wonder she got along with his pal Tony Abruzzo.

They crossed the massive, unadorned iron bridge over the Mississippi in silence, downtown Baton Rouge and the capitol building tower off to their right. Soon, refineries surrounded them in massive industrial jumbles. Then Marisol said, “Hey, I know you’re one of the good guys.” Geoff sensed her smile had returned. “One more question: does your old buddy Eileen call everyone ‘kiddo?’ I mean I’m, what, maybe five years younger than her?”