Disconnection (19 page)

“Chloe, are you seeing this?” Sela asked.

“Seeing what?”

“You’re no longer there,” Sela whispered, her eyes glued to the image before her.

“Where? In your reflection?”

“No. In Tokyo. Yes, in my reflection.”

“What’s there instead?” Sela described to her what she saw. “Weird,” Chloe mumbled.

“Weird coming from a dead girl talking through a cell phone.”

“You know what I mean. What is he doing now?”

It was the shaggy-bearded man.

(the SNAKE man)

Sela could see him clearer now. Startled, she took a few steps back and closed her eyes.

No no no no not now

“Sela?” Chloe cried on the phone. “What’s happening?”

“Do you see him?” Sela whispered through clenched teeth.
Do you see how old he is? The oldest man in the world. Do you see the snakes
…?

“Huh? I told you, I see nothing.”

Sela opened her eyes. The shaggy bearded man was before her, his face at the very top of the mirror. She could see every wrinkle and hair on his decrepit face. His yellow eyes bored a hole into her, their pupils thinning into tight diamonds. Snakes
(those snakes I hate those snakes)
thumped like veins under his skin.

“Saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaave”
the man whispered menacingly, reaching out his arm to grab Sela.

Sela screamed and dropped the phone as she collapsed to the floor in a heap.

This is not happening this is not
…

“Sela?”

A familiar male voice penetrated the darkness. Sela breathed a sigh of relief. It was Dean. Just Dean. Here to rescue her. “Is he still here?” Sela whimpered from the floor, too afraid to open her eyes.

Dean’s arms reached down and touched Sela gently on her back. “Who?” Dean asked.

“The man with the snakes under his skin.”

“The man with the snakes under his skin? Huh? Sela, what have you been smoking?”

Sela opened her eyes and allowed Dean to lift her to a standing position. Her vision came face to face with the mirror, but this time there was no Chloe, there was no long and narrow road, and there was no shaggy-bearded man. Sela reached her arm out, flexing her hand to touch the glass. “Nothing’s there,” she whispered.

Dean shifted behind her, his hands going to his hips. “You’re there,” he stated, confused by Sela’s odd behavior.

“No, Dean, you don’t understand …” She started to explain to him what had happened, and then stopped herself. The peculiar look in Dean’s eyes, one of impatience and the desire to end this confrontation so that he could get back to sleep, told her to forget about confessing. He would not understand. No one would understand, but one person, and she was dead. “Never mind,” Sela said. “I had a bad dream.”

Dean nodded understandingly. “You want to get back to bed now? We need some shut eye if we’re going fishing tomorrow. Your cell phone is on the floor.”

“Oh.” Sela leaned down and picked it up, pressing the “off” button just in case Chloe was still online. Sela managed to smile softly. “Can you do me a favor?” she asked Dean.

“Sure. Anything.”

Sela sighed. “Please, don’t mention this episode in the morning. Or any other time, for that matter. It’s sort of embarrassing.”

“My lips are sealed,” he promised as he took Sela’s hand and led her back to the bedroom.

L
ewis spent the precious hours of his day off lying naked on the slab of Dr. Angus’s operating room listening to his wife discuss towns they could move to if the crime in New Orleans became any worse. Lewis was not sure how the crime could
get
any worse—there had been ten murders in the last week, two of them by a sociopathic serial killer, a true record not just by the city’s standards but the state’s as well.

“What about Lafayette? The Frankens’ moved there last year, and they seem to like it just fine. They haven’t moved back yet, anyway. Look at the brochure.” From her position on the guest chair, Tabitha held up the tri-folded paper for Lewis to see everything the town had to offer. Which wasn’t much, he noted. But it seemed to make Tabitha happy.

“Doesn’t it look lovely?” she asked. “Plenty of nice areas to live in, and cheaper than New Orleans to boot. The school system is supposed to be top notch. Look at the list of restaurants! Oh, Lew, promise me that we’ll go see it once this washes over.”

Lewis understood her implication. “This” didn’t refer to the hemorrhoid operation. “This” was the Fishhook Murders.

“What about Maringuoin?” she asked, inserting the Lafayette brochure back into the massive stack of other brochures. “No crime in Maringuoin, that’s what they say. And a fairly involved Chamber of Commerce.”

Before Lewis had a chance to reply that there was no chance in Hell he would move to a town where a black man had been lynched only a short time ago, Dr. Halberd Angus walked into the room with a clipboard in his hand and two nurses at his side. The doctor was a slim, white guy in his late fifties with a graying, receding hairline and perpetual jolly expression on his face. Tabitha had chosen the doctor because he’d had the largest ad in the yellow pages.

With a slowness that bordered on deliberate postponement, the doctor applied his surgical gloves, the rubber thickness popping against his skin as each hole found its partnering finger. “Are we ready, Mr. Kline?” he asked.

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” Lewis replied.

“Great. Just a reminder, the laser will seal off nerves and tiny blood vessels with an invisible light, so you’ll have very little postoperative discomfort.”

Tabitha cleared her throat. “Do I need to leave the room?”

Please, God, tell her to leave the room, if you don’t I promise you’ll know about every damn city in Louisiana by the time this operation is over
.

“I don’t see why you should,” Dr. Angus answered, “unless this sort of thing makes you uncomfortable.”

“I have three children,” Tabitha said. “I’ve seen it all, doc.”

And so the procedure began. Lewis wasn’t worried. Nothing could compare with the discomfort Nick had bestowed on him over the last few days. Or so he thought.

Lewis chose voyeurism as a way to forget the three sets of hands working on his butt. His thoughts concentrated on the prevailing issues at hand—or issue, rather.

He mentally went through the Fishhook case file, which he had looked through so much in the last few days that he was pretty damn sure he could recite if he had to.

The latest victim came to mind. Lisa Hart. She had worked at Johnnie’s Cabaret for the last three years. Lisa was twenty-three. She grew up in Gulf Shores, Alabama, before coming to New Orleans to make her fortune as a stripper. Her friends said she had big ambitions to move out to L.A. and sign her own recording contract, and one day launch her own perfume. Her landlord, an Iranian gangster with a drooping mustache, stated that she was a poor-to-average tenant. He also suggested that Lisa was a heavy cocaine user. Her autopsy proved his suspicions correct.

Lewis remembered interviewing Lisa over Chloe’s whereabouts the night she had died. He had not been too impressed with Lisa as a person. She’d looked just like any other white trash hippy chick, another hooker-dead-in-a-dumpster-to-be. She’d had very little emotion when he had told her of Chloe’s death. If he remembered correctly, she had crushed her Camel in the nearest ashtray and said, “Well, shit. There goes help with the rent in L.A.”

It seemed strange to Lewis that Lisa would be one of the Fishhook murders. To start with, it seemed like the other four girls were respectable members of society—all of them either in college or working at a steady job. The violinist had been a lesbian, but
big deal
, this was
New Orleans
, the San Francisco of the South.

Lisa was the Wild Card, because she was exactly the type of girl one might expect to end up dead in a reckless scandal. A drug user, a stripper who prostituted on the side, a girl from nowhere, with nowhere to return to—for her to be a victim of this particular serial killer did not sit right.

Berkowitz killed all kinds of women. He killed women because he hated women. There was no “type.” Maybe you are not thinking broad enough
.

(But this guy was definitely following a type, up until Lisa Hart.)

Yes. It does not make sense. Shit, white people are crazy. Why do white people
…

(No, now, think. Don’t lose your train of thought.)

None of the women knew each other until Lisa’s death, and then there is a Chloe Applegate/Lisa Hart connection
.

(Which means?)

He knew one of the girls. One of them was personal
.

(And who does not fit his “type”?)

Lisa Hart
.

“You see? That wasn’t so bad,” Tabitha said as they stepped out through the doors of River Oaks Hospital and into the cool afternoon.

“Easy for you to say; you didn’t have to go through it,” Lewis grumbled as he pushed his medicine into his coat pocket.

“Turn on your cell phone, baby. The kids might try to call.”

“What if work calls?”

“They wouldn’t call on your day off.”

“They wouldn’t? That’s news to me,” he said, but he went ahead and reached into his pocket and turned the phone on anyway.

“Let’s just hope Nick is gone for good,” Tabitha admonished as Lewis’s cell phone began chiming.

Lewis threw his wife an I-Told-You-So look before answering, “Hello?”

Pamela Creek was on the other line. “Detective Kline?”

“Speaking.”

“I have a man on hold; I think you might be interested in what he has to say. Can I transfer the call to your cell phone?”

“By all means,” Lewis replied, a hint of sarcasm edged within the kindness of his voice.

A series of beeps was heard, followed by a loud click. Lewis answered, “This is Detective Lewis Kline.”

“Detective?” It was a man’s voice, old and shrill.

“This is Detective Kline.”

“My name is Gunter Davis. I have a complaint, sir.”

Lewis withheld a large sigh. Why would Pamela send a complaint to him on his day off? Had the peroxide finally gone to her head? Lewis answered, “Well, sir, we have police officers at the station who will be happy to take a complaint for you.” Lewis was not sure “happy” was the right word.

The caller ignored his snub. “It’s about my pigs, detective.”

“Okay. I’m listening.”

“Someone’s been stealin’ my pigs. This is the best bunch I got, and I keep wakin’ up every morning to find them missin’.”

“Do you know why anyone would want your pigs, sir?”

“Best I can tell, them being English Black, they’re kinda one of them fancy schmancy style pigs, you hear what I’m sayin’?”

“Yes sir, you said they were English Black?”

In the back of Lewis’s mind, he remembered something from the day before:

Came back pig’s blood. Black English pig’s blood, the same we found on the mirror at the Monteleone, and at the violinist’s house.

Gunter Davis said, “Yes sir, that’s the kind. And like I said before, I don’t mean to be tootin’ my horn or nothin’, but them pigs are expensive, you see.”

“Mr. Davis, please give me your address.”

“Sir?”

“Your address, please.”

“You gonna come ’round here and investigate?”

“Yes sir, I am.”

“Well, hell, this is a first, ain’t no one volunteered to come ’round here and look at my pig farm. Cops be sayin’ it’s too far out of the way.”

“Is it in Orleans Parish, sir?”

“Yes sir, it is.”

“Well then, Mr. Davis, you give me your address and I can be there in the next half hour.” He took a pen and pad out of his pocket and proceeded to write down Davis’s address.

A possible break. Finally, a break in this fucking case
.

“This is your day off, Lewis,” Tabitha said after he closed the cell phone. She shook her head. “Why would you want to go visit a pig farmer out in the country on your day off? Here, let me drive.” She took the keys from Lewis’ hands and walked to the driver’s side of the Tahoe.

“He’s not just a pig farmer,” Lewis said, opening the passenger door and gradually sliding in, grimacing as the car’s leather seat made contact with his butt.

“Then what is he?” Tabitha asked as she started the engine and pulled out of the parking lot.

“He just may be the closest thing yet to cracking the Fishhook murders, Tabitha.”

Tabitha snorted. “That’s what you said about the redneck from Mississippi.”

Lewis reached over and touched Tabitha’s arm. She looked over at him, her large doe eyes reflecting what he sensed was defeat. His hand touched her face. “Don’t give up on me, Tabitha. Please. I need support right now.”

His wife’s face softened in regret. “I’m sorry,” she said, one tear trickling down her cheek. “It just seems like he’s always been here, this
murderer
. I can’t remember a time without him.” Her face dissolved with soft tears, and Lewis reached around her back and they embraced in a hug of devotion and reassurance.

When Tabitha rolled into their driveway a short time later, Lewis switched seats to the driver’s side and waved goodbye as she stood at the end of their driveway, watching her husband drive away with defeat drawn in the brown velvet of her eyes.

Lewis made a mental note that he would not come home until he had made a breakthrough in the Fishhook case—it didn’t matter how long it took, for he could not stand to see Tabitha in emotional upheaval. It was not like her to grow hysterical. She had watched her brother’s murder, after all. She had stood only a few feet away while the perpetrator lifted his gun. She knew what pain was. And death. And she had grown strong from it. Before, she had never been afraid. To see her falling apart now troubled Lewis.

He would find the Fishhook murderer. He would find him and in doing so, he would somehow save his brother-in-law’s life as it was never saved before, and in that, save Tabitha. Failure was not an option. He would prevail.