Disconnection (10 page)

She frowned. “Mom’s fat.”

“I didn’t mean it like that. And your mom’s not fat.”

“She’s got wide hips.”

“You have three kids and then come back and tell me how slim your hips are.”

Clarissa was Lewis’s eldest offspring. She was a bright teenager with a love for Justin Timberlake and Denzel Washington. When she graduated from high school, she wanted to attend Louisiana State University and become a marine biologist. Her favorite word was
whatever
.

The father and daughter strolled from the parking lot and into the local library searching for books on Louisiana’s religious history. Clarissa had a paper to write for school. On Lewis’s only night off, he was glad to help her.

Lewis stumbled on the steps to the nonfiction floor. Clarissa took his hand. “Easy, Dad,” she murmured.

“I’m fine,” he said.

“Whatever.” Her worried face told him that she did not believe him.

For the past few days Lewis had become zombielike. He no longer slept or ate. Dreams frightened him; everything tasted stale. He could no longer see his life in calendar days, but in one long hour after another stretched into an invisible darkness of unanswered questions. Every second, the Fishhook murders were on his mind. Fifteen years on the force, and he had never let a case bother him in such a consuming way.

Chloe Applegate had showed up dead and mutilated on the river shore near Huey P. Long Bridge. From the moment he saw the look of lost innocence on her face, Lewis knew Chloe was different. He understood. On paper, she was the same as the other three. A white girl with no criminal record, no dark past, no apparent reason for anyone to kill her. And yet, every time Lewis studied her photo on the victim’s board above his desk, he could not help but lose himself in the complex simplicity of Chloe’s eyes, the blue stare that looked back at him with such a knowing foreshadowing of death. The look made him shiver.

He understood that somewhere in the universe she was waiting for him to vindicate her.

Chloe Applegate’s life, up until her murder, had been extremely charmed. She came from a rich old Southern family who had inherited most of their fortune from wealthy cotton trading relatives dating back to the late 1800’s. The father, Thomas Ronald Applegate III, owned two fast food restaurants in Baton Rouge that also brought in a healthy income. The mother had been a fairly successful concert pianist before retiring in the mid-nineties. Chloe went to Tulane after graduating from a private Catholic girl’s school three years ago. She was a member of the French Club and Glee Club and lived at her parents’ home in the Garden District. Her major was psychology. She had five credits left before graduating. Her parents reported that Chloe wanted to work with disturbed children after graduation. Now she would never have the chance.

The coroner had declared earlier exactly what Lewis had feared—whoever killed Chloe Applegate had murdered the other three women as well. All four victims had the same tap water in their lungs, proving that they had drowned somewhere else and later been dumped in the river. Soot was also visible in Chloe’s airway, just like the other girls, confirming that water was not the only element that had tortured her before death, but fire as well.

And of course, all four victims had the Fishhook symbol marked on their backs.

Chloe Applegate’s timeline on the night of her death: At 7:30 p.m., she left her parent’s home in the Garden District and went to Johnnie’s Cabaret in the French Quarter, where she met up with her friend, Lisa Hart, who worked there as a stripper. Chloe left Johnnie’s Cabaret at 8:45. Her next—and maybe last—destination was still unknown. Lisa Hart suggested that Chloe had left for a date with a boy whom she had only recently met. When Lewis had asked Lisa if Chloe had mentioned any names, she replied no. Neither Chloe’s parents nor any of her other friends knew the mystery boy whom she was to meet, where they were supposed to meet. Her notebooks and computer files weren’t helpful either. Whatever secrets Chloe might have shared with her Power Mac G5 were unable to be found.

Clarissa interrupted his thoughts. “Dad? The lady said all the religious books were in the seven hundreds.”

“Where are the seven hundreds?”

“The next floor up.”

Last night Lewis and Tabitha had lain in bed talking about a possible move to Metairie. Up until recently they had always enjoyed their New Orleans home, just ten minutes from downtown and the French Quarter, fifteen minutes from the Garden District, and a hop, skip, and a jump from a Walgreens and Winn Dixie. They bought the 1978 Tudor sixteen years ago while Lewis was still a uniformed cop out on patrol. From the first day, they created their nest there. Lewis built bookcases in the living room and pulled up ugly vinyl flooring to reveal the kitchen’s true wooden floors.

For the yard, Tabitha bought azaleas, roses, crape myrtles, day lilies, and lantanas from a local nursery and planted them in landscape designs she had seen in
Southern Living
. Her effort had won the neighborhood prize for Best Yard six years in a row.

Reeling from her success with flowers, and confident in her ability to have a harmonious relationship with soil, Tabitha started a garden in the back of the home where she grew an assortment of fruits and vegetables year round. Because of her efforts, the Klines never had to shop for produce during their numerous to Winn-Dixie.

The happy couple with the new home spent many afternoons at Ethan Allen and Pottery Barn, gradually creating a home of upper middle class grandeur, filling the living room with soft cream curtains and dark blue couches, the kitchen with crystal bowls and square Asian plates, the patio with Restoration Hardware benches and table and chair sets. Pictures of the Kline children—Clarissa, Sam, and the youngest, Marcus—were hung over every inch of the hallway. Today the only empty space was by Marcus’s bedroom door, and this was where Tabitha planned to put his high school graduation picture, when the day came six years from now.

By sheer devotion, their house in a mostly all-white neighborhood had become their home. A real, honest-to-God home. They had never considered moving to be an option.

But the city’s crime wave made them uncomfortable. Tabitha had arrived from Chicago in the late seventies and had already had her fill of violence after witnessing her brother’s death by an anxious gunmen in a 7-11. Her brother had fallen backward into the magazine rack and landed on a Cadbury display while Tabitha huddled near the pork skins and screamed. The gunmen told Tabitha to shut up or else she would die, too. He left the store with five hundred dollars and a bag of beef jerky and the rest of Tabitha’s childhood in his pocket. He was never caught. Tabitha’s family eventually fell apart.

Tabitha told Lewis about her brother’s murder early in their courtship. She had entrusted her secret to him, and in return, he had promised her a beautiful life. As long as she was with him, no one would hurt her or her family again.

“I just don’t feel safe anymore,” she said as she took a glob of Vicks from its blue container and began rubbing it over her chest. “And you’re not home at night.”

“I’m home now.”

“A rarity. Two nights ago the Gaston house was robbed. Did you know about that?” Lewis shook his head. She continued, “Yes. All of Nancy’s grandmother’s jewelry—the ones that have been in the family since the Civil War—gone. That and the TV, and the family cat.”

Lewis arched one dark brow. “What would they want with a cat?”

She shrugged. “Maybe they like cats.”

“Huh.” Lewis turned off the TV, prematurely ending Jay Leno’s late night monologue. “I mean, cats are everywhere; why would the thieves want to drag a cat with them? It just seems like too much trouble to me. I’ve never heard of such a thing. Pass the Vicks, will you, babe?”

“Well, that’s not really the point, is it?” Tabitha asked as she passed the blue jar across the mutual zone of the bed. She turned to him, her lips thinned into a worried frown. “They were robbed, Lewis. Robbed! And with you, a policeman, just across the street. It used to be that thugs were afraid to rob neighborhoods where cops lived. It’s just not like that anymore.”

“So you think Metairie is the answer?” Lewis asked, piling the clear, hospital-smelling paste over his hairy chest.

“I think so. It’s not too far away, but not too close.”

“Crime spreads.”

If Tabitha heard him, she chose to ignore it. “I was thinking about the Fishhook murders earlier, while you were getting the mail,” she began, “and I saw a suspicious white van drive by, and I thought, what if that was him? Prowling our neighborhood, looking for a new girl. What if Clarissa was next?”

“That would never happen.”

“Why not?”

“For one thing, this guy kills his own ethnic group. Most serial killers do. Clarissa isn’t the right color of sugar. And another thing, she’s too young. Youngest we have so far was that violinist from Boston, and she was twenty-one.”

“But what if this madman decides to branch out a bit?”

“Again, it wouldn’t happen. Serial killers have tunnel vision about their victims—there can only be one type. Anything new would confound them. That’s what the experts say anyway.”

Tabitha leaned down and rested her head on the arc of Lewis’s shoulder. “Still,” she began, “looking for houses wouldn’t be a bad idea. And don’t argue. I know you. I know you haven’t slept in a week, Lew. I hear you pace back and forth downstairs. You’re going crazy over this case.”

“Dad, are you listening?”

Lewis looked away from the spot on the wall where he had been staring and focused his attention on his daughter’s nervous expression.

“What was that, honey?”

“I said, all the books are checked out. Whatever. The white lady at the desk said I should check the periodicals for old newspapers.”

“Why?”

“Because religious events made headlines back then. We have to go downstairs again, Dad.”

As he followed his daughter down the library’s marble steps, Lewis mulled over the perp’s choice in victims. Where did he find these girls? Lewis thought of Stuart Reed, who was in New Orleans somewhere still, under orders that he could not leave the city until further notice. Reed was a miserable bastard, that was for sure. And his sociopathic psychosis suggested that of a garden variety serial killer. But how he could have killed any of the other girls save for Dee Nilsson, Lewis was not sure.

All newspapers and magazines more than a year old were stored on discs. Since Clarissa’s teacher had given her the end of the nineteenth century to work with, the father and daughter team pulled out all New Orleans newspapers from 1890 to 1900 and divided them into five-year sections, one for each researcher. Lewis took his 1890-1895 discs and sat at the nearest computer and began a search to help his daughter’s scholastic future. Lewis inwardly cursed the teacher for giving a fourteen-year-old kid a task as nerve racking and time-consuming as this one.

When he shifted in his chair while browsing through a series of hundred-year-old ads, a pain from his ass shot up through the rest of him, causing him to silently scream a thousand curses into the library’s pleasant atmosphere.

With Lewis’s anxiety and sleep deprivation came a new hemorrhoid. This one Tabitha called Nick, after Nick Nolte, whom she had never cared for as an actor. Nick was as external as a hemorrhoid could get, and was probably the most painfully present one that Lewis had ever had. “Give it some time,” Tabitha had said. “If it doesn’t go away, we’ll go to Dr. Angus and get it removed.”

“Dad, I think I found something.”

Lewis looked up at her daughter—young, pretty Clarissa, who always smiled, even when she was not happy.

She was not smiling now. She pointed to her monitor. “I think you should see this.”

“What is it, Lissa?” His gaze followed the direction of her finger.

The date read November 15, 1889. Under the newspaper’s bold headline, between all the words small and large, a symbol emerged. The Christian Fish Symbol. With an upside down cross stuck right through it.

M
y name is Chloe Applegate and I am dead. I died on November third. I think. November third is the last day I remember living. It was my birthday. The Day of the Long Breath. I once read a birthday book and it said that people born on this day are persistent and triumphant. I don’t know if I am or not. I never really had a chance to be triumphant or persistent. I died when I was twenty-two. Who knew themselves at twenty-two? I didn’t. And now, I will never know
.

Chloe Applegate. Life incomplete
.

Michael Dukakis was born on my birthday. I remember him vaguely
—
a short man with bushy black eyebrows. The governor of some state up north. When he and Bush Sr. debated on TV, my father and mother would sit around and watch them and my father would worry over what kind of man (meaning Dukakis) would be against the death penalty even if a convict came into his house and raped and murdered his wife and children. My mother said it didn’t matter because Bush would win anyway, which he did. I was nine-years-old and did not care. I sat in the back room, what my mother called the Blue Room because of its navy paint accented by topaz-colored upholstery, the same room where she kept her baby grand piano. Under her piano bench I played with my New Kids on the Block dolls, changing them into Ken clothes (which were always too small) and making them dance and sing to their Step by Step album. I was oblivious to current events. Only grown-ups cared about that kind of stuff
.

Roseanne Barr and Charles Bronson were born on my birthday. And Dennis Miller, that comedian who was once on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update and who now has his own show on one of those cable news channels. He makes obscure observations on things I don’t know about but my dad thinks he’s a comic genius
.

These are celebrities I probably would never have met while alive. Celebrities I will definitely never meet because now I am dead
.