Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery (30 page)

Shaking off his fear, he crawled inside. His whole right side from waist to shoulder was killing him. He scarcely noticed the rusty nails scraping his bare torso. But he’d guessed correctly: the bowl was waiting, almost within reach. The heat was beginning to barbecue his skin. He picked up a piece of smoldering lumber, and broke the glass on the display case. The bowl was his. He stowed it in his sling, where his arm should have been, and wriggled again through the hole in the wall.

Only his feet and calves were inside when that section of the interior exploded.

He crawled quickly in tripod fashion away from the building. The hair on his legs from his knees to his socks was mere foul-smelling stubble. He scraped up handfuls of dirt and smothered the spreading sparks eating away at the fabric of his khakis and shoelaces.

He was lucky—he’d saved the bowl. Without it, what myth of contrarieties would the tribe lean on in this tragic hour?

The enigmatic Katogoula twins of good and evil danced with moody raccoons in a timeless circle, offering no easy answers to mortals’ questions.

Nick lolled back on a gentle upward slope of cool grass and stared at the expanding cloud of smoke. He was only vaguely aware of the diesel growl of emergency vehicles swarming into the parking lot.

CHAPTER 21

T
he crew from the parish coroner’s office loaded body bags containing the remains of Grace and Irton Dusong into a white van dwarfed by fire trucks. Deflated hoses snaked from the small parking lot to the dripping, reeking, charred shell of the Katogoula Museum. As usual with suspicious deaths occurring in this rural part of Louisiana, the autopsies would be performed in Bossier City, adjacent to Shreveport, two hours north.

Watching the van drive slowly away, Nick was sorry the Vulture Cult no longer existed, to give the innocent couple a dignified, if by modern standards grotesque, ritual burial, instead of the further violation of a cold steel table and the prying hands of strangers.

It was late afternoon, three hours after the firemen had extinguished the last flames. Sheriff Higbee and his detectives were certain that the fire had been deliberately set.

“Spalling,” Big John had said to Nick earlier, as he pointed out the pockmarking on the concrete in the utility area behind the museum. “And up here on the wood, we got what they call alligatoring—see these rolling blisters. This kind of char pattern pretty well shouts out somebody used an accelerant. It got mighty hot, mighty fast, before the fire took its normal course. Now who would want to do that, I wonder? It was just poor old Grace and Irton. They never hurt anybody in their
lives.” He let out a gargantuan sigh. “Tell me again what color the smoke was you saw.”

Nick told him that he’d noticed black smoke at first, and later, when he and Holly got nearer, gray and brown smoke.

Higbee nodded his big head. “Gasoline or kerosene, like I said. ’Course gasoline’s common as dirt, and around here lots of folks use kerosene for heating; foresters use it for prescribed burns. Shoot, you can get all you want at Miss Luevie’s store anytime.”

“Doesn’t exactly narrow down our suspects.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Big John agreed. “Well, I best be talking to a few people, and trying to keep my chief of detectives from making any dumb mistakes. I have a bad feeling all he did at that Miami forensics seminar was sit on the beach and drink beer and try to get him some fur, if you know what I mean. Nice sweater, by the way.”

Nick had found a sweater in Holly’s van, a pink cardigan that would have been too small even without the new elastic wrapping that held his right arm immobilized across his stomach.

Now Big John worked with his uniformed deputies and plainclothes detectives, who were methodically scooping samples into evidence bags, taking photos, and dusting for prints. Sooty firemen from Armageddon and every nearby rural volunteer station collected their gear. A utility-company fire investigation team of two men and a woman hovered around the gas meter, hoping, Nick supposed, that the fire wasn’t their company’s fault. A man from the North Louisiana Criminalistics Laboratory in Shreveport removed duffel bags from his Explorer.

Would all this forensic firepower be enough to stop angry tribal spirits?

That question, Nick was certain, haunted the minds of the assembled Katogoula. Faces grim, they listening intently to Luevenia Silsby. There seemed to be much somber agreement with what Luevenia was
saying; her voice didn’t carry to Nick’s ears. More tribe members drove up each minute.

Nick walked to one of the ambulances in the parking lot, beside a car from the state Fire Marshal’s Office. The paramedics had determined that Holly was all right, nothing a few butterfly bandages wouldn’t fix. He’d aggravated his injuries in the rescue attempt; the preliminary word was that he would be fitted with even more restrictive implements of medical torture at the hospital.

Holly was sitting up on a bed inside the cluttered treatment compartment of the ambulance, a blanket draped over her shoulders, her legs dangling over the side. She swatted away an EMT’s hands when he tried to put the oxygen mask back on her. She continued cutting her hair with surgical scissors, using a mirror mounted on the opposite wall. Her singed hair fell on white bedding paper spread on the floor. Not as much as Nick had feared would be necessary.

Even with brown antiseptic painted on her face, she made something flutter in his solar plexus. A cork seemed to have come off the bottle of his emotions. Probably the tragedy, he thought. He wished he could put the cork back in. Caring this much for someone distressed him.

“It was murder,” Holly said, snipping too much from one side of her new shorter hairdo. Suppressed fury made her hands shake as she corrected her error and handed the scissors to the EMT. He smiled and winked reassuringly at Nick. “Jason here heard the investigators talking. The office door was tied shut with rope, probably from one of the exhibits. Grace and Irton didn’t have time to . . .”—tears slid down the brown antiseptic—“Nick, they were my friends.”

Jason the EMT offered a box of tissues and climbed down from the truck, allowing them a measure of privacy.

Nick sat on the ledge of the compartment. “I’m really sorry, kid. We almost didn’t make it ourselves.”

“Who’s doing this? What a
monster
!”

Nick hoped that only her emotions were speaking, and not a crisis-born clairvoyance.

Holly wiped away the last vestiges of outward sorrow. “Why them and not us? We were an easy target all day—especially at a certain moment.” She managed a naughty half-smile.

Nick was relieved to see anger and humor returning. “The killer wasn’t after us,” he said.
Not today, at any rate
. “Carl was a unique repository of tribal knowledge. Now the museum’s gone, too. Do you see an MO emerging?”

“Yeah, it’s like the killer’s chipping away at the history and spirit of the tribe, one bit at a time. Why are you still alive?”

“You sound disappointed,” Nick said, sulking for effect.

“Oh, give me a break.” She kissed him.

It hurt to turn his head, but he didn’t mind. Her warm, vital mouth was an antidote to the taste of death on Grace’s lips.

“That’s not what I mean,” she said. “Did the killer screw up, or don’t you fit the pattern?”

“This killer doesn’t make mistakes, I’m afraid. The events leading up to the murders were perfectly stage-managed. And the victims were all Katogoula. That’s the common element. I’m just the schmo helping them get their family trees organized.”

“Schmoes have to be careful, too.”

He reached for her hand. “The attack on me meant something, I just don’t know what. But we’re both still in danger, that I do know. The killer may decide to expand the menu.”

“So, if someone’s hunting tribe members, does that rule out the Katogoula as suspects?”

Nick studied the Katogoula gathered near the museum, still listening to Luevenia holding forth. “Otherwise it’s a strange form of suicide.”

“‘Strange’ is right.” Doors slammed and Holly looked beyond Nick to a newly arrived car. “There’s the Channel 6 news crew from Armageddon. The reporter’s one of my old newsroom buddies. He’s handling the tape I dropped off.”

The tape showing the suspicious flashing on the shore of Lake Katogoula the morning of Carl Shawe’s murder.

She hopped out of the ambulance. “I’ll go see if there’s any progress.” She jogged over to the Channel 6 car.

Nick didn’t try to stop her. She wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t rest. He shared her sense of urgency. Someone was systematically attacking the body and the soul of the tribe. Holly’s work of chronicling Katogoula cultural identity and his own efforts to establish the genealogical record were more important than ever now. He had saved the Twins-Raccoon Bowl from the fire; now the two of them had a new, vitally important responsibility: building a new museum of memories before a stealthy, rampant malice targeted more of their raw material, and perhaps them.

Sheriff Higbee couldn’t have chosen a better time to conduct interviews among the Katogoula. Almost everyone was here, to mourn the loss of two friends and of so much tangible history. Nick made special note of a few faces he hadn’t seen at the Three Sisters Pantry meeting. He’d always heard that some killers needed to feast on the pain they created, to reinforce their sense of power by silently taunting law enforcement and victims. Nick had a feeling that the sheriff would be similarly observant.

The assembled Katogoula stood in a tight circle around the bowl Nick had rescued; a few other shattered relics had been thrown out in the fire-fighting action, and they too had been reverently placed within
the tribal circle. Tommy and Brianne were absent; the news that the twins had been injured—one seriously—cast a further pall on the mood of the gathering.

Nooj Chenerie wasn’t there, either; he’d driven the twins to the hospital in Armageddon. After Sam had captured his horse, he rode to Nooj’s fire tower, broke a window to get in, and used a recharging two-way radio to summon the absent game warden for help.

The sheriff wouldn’t let anyone venture into the still-smoldering museum, but Nick understood from the hushed talk and anxious expressions that there was an ardent desire to collect what was left. And something else was going on, too.

Holly joined him. She held up two black tape cases: the original tape and the digital enhancement. “There’s someone walking in the woods, all right,” she said in a lowered voice. “But you can’t tell who it is. Just a gray human form. Looks human, anyway. The flash comes from the chest area.”

“Male or female?”

“Can’t tell,” she answered. “They showed me the enhanced section in the car. Not much to go on, I’m afraid. You want some coffee?”

Indeed he did. She went off in search of some, as he moved closer to the Katogoula.

In the parking lot beyond the emergency vehicles, Nooj Chenerie got out of his official green GMC pickup and strode to the ruins of the museum. He spoke briefly with the sheriff and the chief detective, and soon walked over to stand slightly apart from the circle of fellow tribe members. All heads turned toward him.

“The twins’ll be fine,” he said.

Relief rippled through the group.

“Sam believes he saw something. Swears up and down the Sacred Cougar attacked them.”

The Katogoula let out a collective murmur of shock.

“Now hold on,” Nooj said. “He’s just a scared boy, so it’s hard to say what really happened. But one thing’s for sure: them two Tadbull mares been gentle all their lives. Must have been something bad to spook ’em like that.”

Holly returned and handed Nick a plastic cup of steaming black coffee. He wanted to hug her in thanks for that gift to his nervous system.

With head held high, Luevenia Silsby marched the few feet over to Nick and Holly. The little woman had just won some sort of victory. Nick could see confirmed in her dark eyes the truth of his belief that strength of personality is often inversely related to physical size.

She thrust up a thick stack of small-denomination bills at him. “Two thousand dollars. Count it if you want. Now go. You, too, Holly. We don’t owe you nothing. Just go and let us alone.”

“Shouldn’t you discuss this with Tommy first?” Nick said. “After all, you elected him tribal leader.”

“He’s just been un-elected. I’m in charge now.”

“Let me talk to them,” Holly said. “They’ve known me for a long time.” She waded into the assembly of tribe members, trying to engage several in conversation; they shied away from her as if they were of different polarity.

“Take the money, Nick,” Luevenia insisted. “We don’t need a genealogist to tell us what we already know: we are the tribe. The spirits of our ancestors have always been with us; now we’re straying and they’re sending us a sign. The gambling and the casino and that shopping mall and stuff are all wrong. We don’t want new members or outsiders here. Been some hard times for my people; we made it through those, with no help. We got to do what we believe in, stick together, just like we always done, or we won’t make it through this.” She directed a stern gaze at the
wildlife agent, who still remained a few feet from the main tribal body. “Well, Nooj?”