Artist (16 page)

“We can always head out the Rigolets if we don’t hit anything.” Dupond said, idling away from the dock. “But the tide’s moving so we should catch a few, anyway.”

Thirty minutes later the sun broke through and they were already anchored, working the bottom with live shrimp. Cassie rigged another pole for top fishing, cast out the line, setting the pole itself on a holder. Dupond hooked a small flounder, threw it back.

“You’ll have to do better than that if you want lunch,” Cassie said. She worked her pole, bumping the bait across the bottom. Something hit, she worked the pole, landed a decent size speckled trout. Dupond pulled up an empty hook.

“Bump it,” Cassie said. “Don’t just let it lay on the bottom.”

“I know how to fish. My family’s had this place for years. I just need to get back into the feel of it,” Dupond said. Five minutes later, he was looking at another empty hook while Cassie pulled in another trout.

“Watch me for awhile,” Cassie said, casting out again. “All you’re doing is wasting bait.”

Dupond laughed. “I bought the bait so I’ll waste it if I want to. You think you’re some kind of professor of fishing or something? You’ve had a few lucky casts, that’s all. A half an hour from now I’ll……..what’s the matter?”

“Oh my God,” Cassie said. She reeled in her pole. “Get the anchor. Get the anchor. Now. Oh my God, we’re so stupid. How could we let that get by us?”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“The professors, God damn it, the professors.” Cassie said, thinking of the auditorium in her viewing. The teacher on the stage, the students, all young and all supplicating to their teacher. Why hadn’t she seen it before?  “We’ve been looking at students all along. Not all the professors are old. Some of them could pass for students, or grad students. We haven’t looked at the teachers. Shit.”

“There are fourteen professors listed in the directory for the History Department,” Adan said, l
aying out papers on his desk. “I count twelve in the Art Department.”

Dupond took a marker and began scratching out names. “Eliminate the women first.”

“That leaves….six in History and two in Art,” Cassie said. “That’s just working with obvious names. We need to check out this Francis, that could be a man or a woman. Let’s say three.”

Dupond transferred the remaining names to the chalkboard on the wall, divided by department. “Okay, now we need to get histories on these people. We’re looking for anyone who’s spent time overseas, enough time to pick up the language well, or use foreign phrases like ‘To Let’. That means an English speaking country.”

“I don’t think we can restrict it to English speaking countries,” Cassie said.

“Why?” Dupond asked.

“I don’t know,” Cassie said, scratching her head. “Something tells me English isn’t the key here. Something someone said to me, but I can’t remember what it is. Anyway, I think we need to include all foreign travel. Maybe the phrase translates into English or something.”

“I agree,” Adan cut in. “But first, let’s cut the list down by age and body type. We need background information. We can start by eliminating anyone over the age of fifty I think. That’s a start. Remember, Schumaker said he could be a little older than your average student. A guy in his forties, good shape, hat, sunglasses? He could pass for younger. After fifty I don’t think so.”

“We need to think about this,” Dupond said. “Dean Burke wasn’t too happy about having us on campus. What’s he going to say when we ask him for background on his employees? He’s not going to like it. Worse, he could mention it and tip someone off that we’re looking at staff.”

Adan cut in. “The DMV can give us ages and photographs. We can use that to eliminate a few. The deep background might be a problem after that.”

“No it won’t,” Cassie said. “Once we cut down the list I can give it to my people and let them do the background. We keep it to ourselves, just the three of us. It should only be a handful of names.”

“And if we don’t see anybody that looks promising?” Adan asked.

“We spread out and look at every professor and teaching assistant in the whole school,” Cassie said. “It could be someone on staff who’d dating another staff member. Let’s start with the staff we have listed right here. That’s most likely. We’ve got eight names right now, let’s work them and see what happens.”

Watt moved through his apartment, window to window, rain pouring outside. The weather matched his mood, a wave of darkness and cloudy thought. The rain hemmed him in.
There would be no relaxing ride on the water in his boat, no cruise through the streets. Worse yet, there would be no chance of selecting from the herd. The boy in the Quarter was a waste of time. There was no joy in it. He was happy to have gotten away, frustrated that the boy had given him no chance to create a canvas, or paint a picture. It was a simple murder, hardly worthy of an artist like himself.
The next one must better
, he thought,
it has to be an evolution
. It should have the sweeping imagery of a visionary; ignite a thunderstorm such as the one raging outside. He leaned his head against the glass of the sliding door, watched the wind kick up waves. The storm blew in form the north. He would blow in the same way, from the North. Spread the word. The Artist is coming to your town.

“I like the rain,” Cassie said. Across Lake Ponchartrain she could see the storm moving in, a great rolling ball of black clouds, threatening to black out the world. Adan had worked the DMV, checking the ages and physical descriptions of the eight names on their list. When they were done, there were four names left, all men between the ages of twenty-eight and forty two, two full professors, two teaching assistants.

Dupond looked up from his desk, tucked into a corner of his family’s fishing camp. “You wouldn’t like it if you were out on the water right now,” he said.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Cassie replied. She had a look in her eye and Dupond couldn’t place it. Thoughtful? Whistful? “There’s something about riding out a storm and coming through it, you know? When it’s done, you know you’ve lived through something.”

“No thanks,” Dupond said. He was working at the kitchen table. When the list was finished, Adan had taken off to attend a family birthday party, Cassie and Dupond took the list and crossed the lake to Dupond’s camp. Tomorrow the list would go to Jennifer Wesling. Today there was nothing left to do but watch the rain.

“You don’t like rain?” Cassie asked. She moved away from the window. She was barefoot, her shoes kicked off in corner, wearing a plain grey t-shirt and cutoff jean shorts. Dupond was still in his suit. For the last hour, he had been agonizing over the list, putting it down, picking it back up again.

“It’s a pain in the ass,” Dupond said. “When you’re on patrol it means a ton of accidents and you have to be out in it, dealing with pissed off people. And injuries. You get soaked to the skin and nobody cares.
I learned not to like it.”

“Back you chair up,” Cassie said. When he did, she sat in his lap, her hands on his shoulders. “It sounds like someone needs a lesson on how to enjoy a summer rain.”

“Fat chance on that.”

“Oh, I think I can change your mind,” Cassie said. She stood up reached behind her, under her shirt. A second later, her bra came out the shirtsleeve. “Come with me.” She took Dupond by the hand, leading him out onto the dock. The first drops were
falling, spattering on the wood, leaving dark spots that grew and joined together as the rain increased in intensity.

“You realize I’m wearing a three hundred dollar suit?” Dupond asked.

“Not for long,” Cassie said. The rain was coming down in buckets now, pounding the dock and the water around. The wind picked up, churning the lake into a white-capped froth. Dupond could see the lights of cars passing on the I-10 in the distance. His shirt was soaked, his tie dripping warm water onto his shoes. The boat bounced against the dock. Dupond heard the automatic bilge pump kick on.

“There are only two things to do when it’s raining,” Cassie said. Her t-shirt was soaked through and through now, clinging to her like skin. Water ran down her bare legs. “The first is sleeping.” She stepped in closer, wet hair, wet shirt.

“And the second?” Dupond asked, feeling himself begin to stir.

“Help me out of these wet clothes and I’ll show you,” Cassie said.

Dupond couldn’t get the boat cabin open fast enough.

Louisiana Highway 11 begins on the southern shore of Lake Ponc
hartrain, connecting with Highway 90 and running North. The road crosses the lake heading north, passes though Slidell, Pearl River, Picayune, and eventually ends in the state of Mississippi, just outside of Meridian. Most of the route is rural countryside, broken up by the occasional stoplight. Pine trees line the way, their bases obscured by scrub and grass. It’s a scenic route, perfect for a leisurely drive on a weekend morning, the view marred by a periodic billboard, the bane of every sightseer in America.

Lydia Guidry was no sightseer. An emergency room nurse, she worked a rotating shift, one week catching days, the next pulling the overnight shift, which was always the worst. Darkness brought out the fool in people she often said. Drivers got drunk, smashed themselves and others up in the worst ways imaginable. Domestic violence reared its head on the weekends when couples found themselves boxed up with each other and no way to escape. Sunday morning was a relief, her shift over, she could climb into her pickup, a cranky remnant left to her by her father, and drive home with more than twenty four hours of no work in front of her.

She left the employee parking lot, hung the left onto Hwy 11, five miles of nothing really much ahead of her before the gravel road that led to her clapboard country home showed up. She was tired, and the sun hadn’t quite broken above the trees just yet. The billboard caught her eye. It has been blank for months. Now there was a dark spot in the center of the white, a red spot underneath. At sixty miles an hour, five miles over the speed limit, the board came up quickly. Guidry reached into her bag for a cigarette, taking her eyes off the road momentarily. I’ve got to quit smoking, she thought for the millionth time. She found her lighter, caught the tip of the cigarette in the flame just as she passed the billboard, the light obscuring her view through the windshield.

Her foot hit the brake fifty yards past the white expanse of advertising. Lightly at first, then with more pressure.
What the hell
, she said to herself.
You’re tired. The light did it. No way
. The foot came off the brake, found the accelerator, wavered. She pulled the car off to the side of the road, easing it onto the narrow muddy strip between the road and the drainage ditch alongside, pulled hard on her cigarette.

Goddamn kids, she thought. The local high school was getting ready to take on their archrival from down the road. It’s got to be a prank. Guidry eased the car back on to the road, accelerated, hit the brake again, finally hooked a u-turn and drove back a hundred yards. A car passed as she pulled even with the billboard, headed in the opposite direction, south toward New Orleans.

A mannequin, it’s got to be a mannequin. Without thinking, Lynn Guidry opened her door and stepped out. The billboard was fourteen feet high and forty eight feet long. Over the course of the five years that Guidry had been driving this route, it had changed maybe every six months. A lawyer held it last she remembered, his smiling face informing clients that they needed to get tough with insurance companies. Before that it was hawking the burger franchise down the road, and before that a mattress company advised people that they could “sleep easy” with no money down. Now the billboard was blank, six hundred and seventy two square feet of white. Except it wasn’t.

Lydia Guidry leaned against the door of her pickup truck. She could feel the engine idling through her hipbones. The sun was up now, over the trees enough to send a beam across the top bar of the board. Tied to the top bar was a rope, a yellow nylon rope, knotted, she could see the loops. The yellow cord, precisely center on the board, hung down in front. On the other end hung the body of a young girl, the eyes black, the neck cocked at an angle. The expression on the face was one of surprise, a “How did this happen?” look that Guidry would never forget. She was naked. Guidry stepped into the middle of the road. Inside her head she could hear a voice,
mannequin, mannequin, mannequin
, her temples pounded with it. By the time she reached the opposite side of the road, she could see the black eyes moving, and realized what it was. Flies, a swarming mass of flies, feeding on the soft tissue. Lydia Guidry, veteran of five years in the Emergency Room, who had once peeled burned flesh off a fireman without flinching, cleaned pus and blood and body parts off the floor on more than one night, almost passed out. When she looked up again, she saw the red letters stenciled neatly underneath the dangling feet: CLV.

“Chris Decker, thirty-two years old, just under six feet, one hundred eighty pounds. Blu
e eyes, blonde hair,” Adan said, “Teaches history.” Dupond and Cassie were paying attention, or trying to pay attention. Cassie still had half of her mind back on the side of the road, watching the medical examiner cut a dangling body down off a billboard. It was a Sunday morning wakeup call she wouldn’t forget. Three hours before their return to the office, Wesling had a report on all four suspects sent over by courier. Adan had gone over it by the time they arrived, shaken and frustrated.

“There’s not much there other than a bunch of normal stuff,” Wesling told Cassie by phone.
She sent complete files, including passport photos. “Nothing stands out. There are no arrests of any consequence, some traffic tickets and the like. One guy caught up in a bankruptcy. We culled reports from overseas, the Europeans are pretty good about sharing information, and none of these guys have ever been in big trouble over there.”

“Here’s the interesting thing about Decker,” Adan said. “The University has a summer study program in Germany. He kind of acts as the nominal lead, arranges the dorms and schedules, and he takes groups of students on tours of the area.”

“Just Germany or do they go anywhere else? Like England?” Dupond asked.

“Germany only, from what I can see, although his passport shows he’s been to England for…..three weeks about five years ago,” Adan said.

“Not really long enough to pick up language habits,” Cassie said, flipping through the report on Decker. “He’s married, too. I don’t know why but I don’t see our guy as married.”

“Why’s that?” said Adan.

“He puts too much time into this, and it always seems to happen at night. Would a married guy have that much freedom to run around all night?”

“Not likely, but we can’t eliminate him because he’s married.”

“Okay, who else?” Dupond said.

“Timothy Morris, 42 years old, teaches French and Spanish History. Single, lives in the East, off Downman Road.”

“That’s close enough, hell, that’s right by the University. He could get to any of the sites in fifteen minutes,” Cassie said.

“Physical description?” Dupond asked.

“That’s the thing. He’s a short guy, five foot four, according to his license. But, he spent three summers in London studying, and he goes back there every year. He has a sister married a London attorney. Plenty of money, they buy him a ticket every summer.”

“Okay, keep him active,” Dupond said. “Who else?”

“Viktor Watt, teaches European History, specializes in French History. You met him at the meeting with the Dean.”

“Yeah, you remember him?
Dupond asked Cassie. “He wasn’t real happy at the meeting, but when we went by to see Slade when they got set up, he told me Watt gave them a coffee maker.”

“Here’s the thing,” Adan said. “The guy grew up over there. His Dad was some kind of bigshot
in business. Watt spent time in Belgium, Austria, England, and France. Mostly England when he was high school age, then he went to Paris and stayed several years. After he got his degree he ended up over here.”

“Okay, he’s definitely on the list.” Dupond said.

“Wait, wait. The last guy is interesting. Allen Keyes, thirty years old, teaches Art, another professor. He spent time in Europe, his passports shows six different countries over two summers. And, here’s the kicker. He got in some kind of altercation in a bar in Amstrdam. They hauled him in, but he was never charged.”

“Okay, why’s that interesting?” Cassie asked.

“According to what they’ve got here,” Adan said, “It was a fruit bar.”

“A fruit bar? You mean like….guys with guys?” Dupond said.

“Yep. It figures because he lists the same address as another guy, a….Philip Cruise…and that carries back through three address changes over the last five years. And get this, Cruise is a bartender, works in the French Quarter at Houlihans.”

“Hello, Mr. Keyes,” said Dupond, and took the report out of Adan’s hands. “You just went to the head of the class.”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Adan said. “Look at the description. Five foot ten, hundred and sixty pounds, brown hair, brown eyes. Pretty average.”

“Okay,” Dupond said. “First things first. We need pictures. Get Hebert from the lab, he’s good at this stuff. We need headshots and full body shots. We show them to Schumaker, she’s the only one that’s seen the guy close up. Maybe seeing his picture will spark something.”

“What about surveillance?” Cassie asked.

“We can’t right now. To keep an eye on a guy without him knowing, you need at least three cars, and you can’t have them work twenty four hours so you need at least two and probably three shifts. Especially with this guy. He moves at night and that’s even tougher. So, we try and narrow it down first.”

The rope came from a hardware store in Bucktown, a neighborhood place that smelled of cut wood and machine oil. Watt rolled sixty feet out, cut it with the knife hanging by a shoestring for convenience, and paid for it with cash. The spray paint was off the shelf at a K&B’s on Elysian Fields, another cash purchase. The stencils he picked up at an office supply store in Metairie. It was all anonymous, all routine, and the clerks waiting on him would never think twice.

The girl was the most beautiful acquisition of his thriving career. An hour north of New Orleans was countryside, where the living was much less stressful than the city. The problems of urban life were left at the foot of the Causeway, 27 miles between hell and heaven. Here, streetlights signaled time to come home for younger children. Older children, their parents secure they had moved far enough away to ensure the safety of their offspring, stayed out later.

So it was that 15-year old Denise Burge, sometimes called “Burger” by her friends, felt safe enough to keep walking toward her home and past the car stopped on the side of the road. It was tilted up on one end, and the man working by the tire in a suit and tie seemed ill suited for the work. A spare tire leaned against the middle of the back bumper. Denise had other things to worry about. Bobby Carneigh had come sniffing around. Carneigh, a 17-year old basketball player with plenty of height, curly brown hair to his shoulders, and a shot at a scholarship to LSU, just happened to show up when Denise and her friend Sue were hanging out in Sue’s driveway. The radio was blaring something by Boston when Bobby appeared in his father’s car, a nifty Ford Mustang with a custom plate and a bottle of vodka in the glove compartment.

Burge was still feeling the effect of the three shots of vodka Bobby had convinced her to try after she’d driven off with him, leaving Sue in alone in her driveway. She was also still flush from the time they’d spent parked behind the old drive in theater, where Bobby had managed to get his hand inside her shirt before she knew what was happening. A sneaky guy, but God he was cute and maybe, just maybe, she’d let him get his hands back in there if he played his cards right. He’d let her off at the highway. She didn’t want to get caught riding around with him. Her mother would throw a fit. Now it was time to get home, head straight for the bathroom and a toothbrush so her mother wouldn’t smell the vodka. The man in the business suit looked up as she drew even with the car.

“Hello,” he said. He had a nice even smile, with white teeth. His suit jacket was off, folded neatly on the trunk. He straightened his tie as he spoke. “You wouldn’t know of a good mechanic close by, would you?” He pointed with the lug wrench in his hand. “These damn lug nuts don’t want to come off.”

“There’s a garage down the highway, that way,” she said, indicating a left. “But it’s closed now. Go the other way and there’s a store with a phone about a half mile down.”

“Thanks, I guess I’ll have to hoof it, then.”

She was three steps closer to home, and the rest of her life, when Watt stepped across the road and slammed the tire iron into the back of Denise Burge’s head. She dropped like a rock. Watt moved quickly, grabbing her legs, and lifted her into the back seat. He threw his coat over here, dropped the jack, tossed it and the spare into the trunk. It took less than a minute. Nothing stirred on the street. No cars passed.  Denis
e Burge, 15 years old, another blank canvas for the Artist.

Keyes had an office on the second floor of the Art building, overlooking the common ground. Framed prints lined the walls. Cassie recognized a Degas, a pastel rendering of a dance studio, girls in pink dresses set against a garden background in the window. She had seen it somewhere but couldn’t remember exactly where.  Next to it was a more familiar piece, waves of lines depicting an alien looking figure on a bridge, hands clenched to an open mouthed face.