by Greg Iles
The jugular veins lie just beneath the skin.
Billy has stopped thrashing. He’s settled into a steady rhythm now, working over me like most men I’ve had sex with, grunting and heaving, eyes blank, breath coming in quick, ragged gasps.
His breath…
The trachea is a hollow tube of cartilaginous rings, held together by the muscle and fibrous tissue that fills the spaces between the rings. Car accident victims frequently die when their tracheas are crushed by steering wheels. Would two hundred pounds of pressure crush a trachea? My instinct and training tell me yes.
Besides, two hundred pounds per square inch is a round number. Eskimos—who feed on a much more robust diet than the rest of us—commonly generate twice that amount of biting force. A woman trying to save her life ought to be able to match that.
Already my gaze has moved from Billy’s bulging jugulars to the exposed semicircle of his windpipe. To get a firm purchase, I’d have to turn my head sideways, so that my bite was perpendicular to the tube. That’s the way a leopard takes down an antelope, by biting the throat with its long canines. And that takes a sideways grip.
Not like a leopard, I think. Like a leopardess. Like Lena…
There’s a mole at the base of Billy’s neck. Dark brown, with black hairs sprouting from it. His neck muscles are flexed so hard that his Adam’s apple is invisible. But I know it’s there. My target is just above it, the smallest and softest stretch of the trachea—
“Unhh,” he grunts. “Oh, yeah…getting close.”
The gun is in his left hand—not his dominant one. He could still shoot me with it, though, no question. But I don’t have time to wait for a miracle. Tilting my head as far to the side as possible, I open my mouth and begin sucking his neck.
“Fuck, yeah,” he gasps. “Oh, yeah…”
I open my mouth wider, exploring the soft geography of his neck with my tongue. There’s the left external jugular…the ridge of the sternothyroid muscle, the buried larynx…
As Billy approaches the pinnacle of his labors, he throws back his head, as some men are wont to do. I open my jaws as wide as they will go and clamp my teeth down on his windpipe with every ounce of strength I can bring to bear.
Cartilage crunches loudly between my teeth.
I feel like I’ve bitten through a chicken breast, bones and all. Billy’s body goes rigid as blood fills my mouth in a hot rush. All I can see in my mind is the gun coming up to my head, blowing my brains all over the car.
But it doesn’t happen.
Billy flails his arms and legs like a man caught in a threshing machine, but the harder he tries to pull away from me, the more room I have to yank back my head with all my strength. For a few moments we’re locked in savage combat, and then my teeth tear free. His hands fly to his throat, and hope surges through me like a bolus of adrenaline.
He’s not holding the gun!
Frothy blood pours from a ragged wound in his throat, but it’s not the blood that shocks me. It’s the wheeze of air escaping from the hole with every respiration. That wheeze is the sound of impending death.
And Billy Neal knows it.
Chapter
62
I’ve never seen panic like that in Billy Neal’s eyes, but I’m not waiting around to enjoy it. With a wild lunge, I throw my body most of the way out of the car. He makes a halfhearted grab for my feet, but by kicking hard, I manage to get clear.
Scrambling to my feet, I fight the urge to look back as I stagger into the trees. One moment of hesitation might be all he needs to pick up the gun and kill me. I’m still stumbling through the trees when I hear the engine start.
Terrified for Pearlie, I turn and race back toward the car. It’s hard to run with your hands cuffed behind you. I fall several times, and by the time I get back to the clearing, the Cadillac is gone. I hear its motor accelerating up the dirt road.
Naked from the waist down, I struggle down to the old river channel and work my way along it toward the bridge. It’s muddy by the water, but there’s a lot of sand in the soil, so the going isn’t too bad. Soon I am trotting herky-jerky across the bridge to the island like some armless woman running for charity.
On the far side of the bridge I see my grandfather’s orange pickup rusting in the weeds. This time it doesn’t faze me, because a hundred yards to the right of it, a white pickup is rolling down the perimeter road, heading for the bridge.
I can’t wave my arms, but I can scream.
With tears streaming down my face, I shout for help again and again, sucking in great lungfuls of air that Billy Neal only wishes he could inhale right now. I don’t know if it’s my screaming or my nakedness that draws the driver’s attention, but the truck turns onto the bridge and comes straight toward me. For a moment I think he means to run me over, but then the brakes squeal and the truck shudders to a stop. A black man jumps down out of the cab, his eyes wide. His face is a mass of scar tissue.
“Sweet Jesus!” cries Jesse Billups. “What happened to you?”
“Get back in the truck! I’ll tell you on the way!”
“Where are we going?”
“Pearlie Washington’s hurt! She’s locked in the trunk of a car, and the driver’s going to kill her.”
“My aunt Pearlie?”
“Yes!”
Jesse isn’t sure what’s going on, but he gets behind the wheel and throws the truck into gear. When I climb up into the cab beside him, he reaches behind the seat, grabs a dirty Windbreaker, and ties it around my waist.
“Go for the Angola road!” I shout. “I hurt him bad. He’s got to be trying to get to a hospital.”
Jesse steps on the gas and heads for the shore. “Who you talking about? Who did you hurt bad?”
“Billy Neal.”
Jesse wrinkles his lips. “That’s a no-count motherfucker, right there.”
“You know him?”
“Oh, I know him. He the one called me away from the island the night you disappeared. You remember? We was talking at the cabin, and I got that call.”
“I remember.”
“He told me he needed to talk to me down in Baton Rouge. Said it was real important, and for me not to tell you about it. I drove down there to the hotel he said he was at, but he was gone. He never showed.”
“He tried to kill me that night.”
Jesse shakes his scarred head. “Why ain’t you got no pants on?”
“Billy tried to rape me.”
The foreman gives me a quick once-over. “Tried?”
“He was raping me, okay? He was going to kill me. Pearlie, too.”
“How’d you hurt him?”
“You’ll see, if you catch him. Get this damn thing moving!”
When we reach the dirt road, Jesse pushes the truck as fast as it will go in the mud, which is bound to be faster than Pearlie’s Cadillac. I remember the Caddy sliding back and forth on the curves like a heavy boat navigating a bayou.
“Damn,” Jesse mutters. “Ain’t that Aunt Pearlie’s car there?”
Fifty yards ahead of us, a baby blue Cadillac is sitting nose-first against a pecan tree, steam rising from its hood. The driver’s door is open, and a man’s torso and head are lying out of it. The man’s face is covered with bright red blood.
“Hurry!” I shout. “Pearlie’s in the trunk!”
Jesse skids to stop a few yards from the car. Billy Neal isn’t moving, but that doesn’t mean he’s dead. The blood on his face could be from nothing more serious than a broken nose.
“Do you have a gun?” I ask.
Jesse reaches behind the seat and brings up a bolt-action deer rifle.
“Cover Billy while I get the trunk key.”
“How you gonna get the key out the ignition with them handcuffs on?”
“You’re right. You do both.”
Jesse gets out of the truck and chambers a bullet with a reassuring snick of metal. I jump down awkwardly from the cab and walk close behind him as he approaches Billy Neal.
“That fucker moves, I’m wasting him,” Jesse says.
“Fine by me.”
He edges up to the Cadillac with the rifle barrel extended toward Billy, the way he might approach a wounded rattlesnake. As he gets closer, I sense the tension in his body easing. And then I see why.
Both of Billy’s hands are empty, and the graying fingers are covered in blood. In the red flag of blood that is his face, two eyes stare skyward, the life in them all but gone. When I get close enough to touch him, I hear a faint whistle. Tiny red bubbles are frothing from the hole in his throat.
“How the fuck did he do that in a car wreck?” Jesse asks.
“He didn’t. I did it.”
“With what?”
“My teeth.”
Jesse leans down closer. “Mother fucker.”
“Get the keys, Jesse.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
While Jesse retrieves the key from the ignition, I kneel beside Billy. His eyes widen in fear, and then freeze that way.
The whistling has stopped.
I’ve killed a man. I’ve killed a man, and all I can think is that I’m glad I got my father’s teeth. DeSalle teeth are small and round. Kirkland teeth are large and square but prone to decay. Ferry teeth are hard as stones, the incisors square, the canines sharp. I remember my daddy popping the caps off Coke bottles with his bottom teeth when I was little. He said he learned it from his father. As this memory passes through my mind, an intoxicating current of elation flows through me. I could not have Ferry teeth if Luke Ferry weren’t my father. It’s not as conclusive as a DNA test, but I know teeth like I know nothing else.
Luke Ferry was my father.
“Look at this shit!” Jesse cries. “Get up out of there, Aunt Pearlie!”
I jump up and go to the back of the Cadillac. Having laid his rifle on the ground, Jesse is now lifting his aunt carefully out of the trunk. Pearlie’s face and hands are still bloody, but compared with Billy Neal’s, her eyes are full of life.
“Are you all right, Pearlie?” I ask.
She points at my naked legs beneath the Windbreaker. “Are you?”
“Yes.”
She closes her eyes and shakes her head. “I told you…with the Lord’s help, you’d come through.”
I don’t even try to argue. “Yes, you did.”
Jesse sets her gently on her feet and holds her erect while she tests her legs. Then he leaves us alone. Without her wig, Pearlie looks a hundred years old. But she’s not. She has a lot of life left in her.
“What you gonna do now?” she asks, looking down at Billy Neal’s corpse. “What Dr. Kirkland gonna do?”
“I don’t know. I can’t worry about that now. I have to get to New Orleans.”
She looks shocked. “Now?”
“Right now.”
“How come?”
Because I have a killer to talk to, and I need to beat everyone else to her. “If I don’t, the FBI is going to arrest me.”
Pearlie shakes her head. “Well, you do what you have to do, then. Jesse can take me to the island.”
“You need a hospital, Pearlie.”
She makes a scornful face. “A drink of whiskey is what I need.”
Jesse returns with a small silver key in his hand. “You want those handcuffs off?”
I turn my back to him, and he removes the cuffs. Rubbing my wrists to get the blood flowing, I go to the car and retrieve my jeans from the backseat.
“Aunt Pearlie said you need to get to New Orleans,” Jesse says, walking up to me.
“That’s right.”
“How you plan to get there?”
“I’m going to take one of the island trucks.”
He looks uncomfortable. “Dr. Kirkland know about that?”
“No, he don’t,” Pearlie snaps from behind him. “And he ain’t gonna know.”
Jesse turns toward his aunt. She’s standing with her hands on her hips, arms akimbo, glaring at him as she might at a recalcitrant boy of seven.
“Jesse Ford Billups,” she says, “you gonna serve the man who beat you bloody all them years ago? Or you gonna help this girl do what’s right?”
He sighs heavily. “Shit, Aunt Pearlie. I don’t know what—”
“What you say?” The old woman shakes her finger in Jesse’s face. “You know better than to curse me, boy! If your mama was alive, she’d knock you nekkid. You get your narrow ass in gear. Now.”
Jesse Billups, combat veteran and foreman of DeSalle Island, nods in surrender. “What about that one?” he asks, jerking his thumb toward Billy Neal.
Pearlie turns up her nose. “Leave that trash for the buzzards. They got to eat, too.”
Chapter
63
“Tell me again about the teeth,” says Sean.
We’re sitting at the kitchen table of my house on Lake Pontchartrain, just as we’ve done so many times before. Spread out in a row on the table before us are eleven photographs. The women in the photos vary in age from nineteen to forty-six—the women we believe most likely to constitute Group X. We culled these from a group of thirty-seven women ranging in age from two to seventy-eight—all the female relatives of the victims of the NOMURS killer. We chose them while talking on the phone during my drive down from DeSalle Island. And lying in the middle of the row, with five women on either side of her, is the woman I believe killed the six victims.
“The teeth,” Sean prompts me. “Are you awake, Cat?”
I turn from the table to the dark blue square of my picture window. Night is falling fast. “We all have large numbers of bacteria in our mouths,” I murmur. The primary one is Streptococcus mutans, which produces the acid that causes cavities.”
Sean taps a yellow highlighter against the tabletop. “And the culture of the saliva from the bite marks on Quentin Baptiste had none of this bacteria?”
“Right. At twenty-four hours, no growth. Very unusual.”
“Could someone have made a mistake taking the saliva sample?”
“It wasn’t some flatfoot who swabbed those wounds, Sean. It was the FBI’s forensic expert. We have to assume he did his job right.”
“I don’t like assuming anything.”
I look back at Sean and try to keep my voice even. “Me, either. It was an assumption that kept me from figuring out who the killer was yesterday. When Kaiser first showed me that lab report, the strep thing was a flag. A couple of possibilities hit me—like someone on antibiotics—but I was totally distracted at the time. I’d just learned that my aunt had committed suicide, and I was trying to escape the FBI building. I knew the saliva might have come from someone without teeth, but the possibility of it being a baby…I just automatically ruled it out. I mean, we’re dealing with serial murders here. The image of a six-month-old just doesn’t go with that. I feel like an idiot now. I’ve just been so out of it for the past few days. Alcohol withdrawal, off my meds, Valium—” Pregnant, I add silently. “It took me seeing that drooling baby at the funeral home to put it together.”
“And this is what you came up with?” Sean says, tapping the photo at the center of the row. It shows a dark-haired girl of twenty-two. “Evangeline Pitre?”
“It’s her, Sean.” Evangeline Pitre is the daughter of Quentin Baptiste, the murdered homicide detective—victim number six. “That random meeting at the funeral home associated saliva and babies in my mind. After that it was simple elimination. I knew that none of the victims’ female relatives had sons younger than eighteen months old. But Kaiser had told me one of Baptiste’s daughters worked at a day-care center. The only question was whether that day care handled any male children under six months old, the age at which teeth erupt. I confirmed it by phone after I left the island, but I knew, Sean. I just knew.
“You can’t convince me that this girl committed all six murders on her own,” Sean says.
I study the photo, searching for signs of homicidal ability—as if such things were visible. Evangeline Pitre’s eyes are dee
p set and dark, contrasting sharply with her pasty skin. She has a certain prettiness, but also a guardedness in her face, like the look on a stray cat that expects a kick before a scrap of food.
“Her father was a homicide cop,” I point out. “There’s no telling what kind of skills and knowledge she might have.”
“And you think this girl is killing everyone’s abusers for them? Punishing them?”
“It might be just that simple. Or it might not. Pitre could be killing them without anyone else in the group knowing what she’s doing. But that’s not what my gut tells me.”
Sean makes a wry face. “My gut tells me that Nathan Malik developed the whole fucking plan. Pitre may have got the saliva to put into the bite marks. She might even have pulled the trigger, if she knows how to shoot. But where did she get the idea to use a human skull to make the marks? No, this chick didn’t come up with the crime signature we’ve been seeing. Hell, she didn’t even finish high school.”
“I agree, okay? But that doesn’t mean Malik was behind it. It could be any one of the other women in the group. One or all.”
“You’re forgetting Margaret Lavigne’s suicide note,” Sean reminds me. “‘May God forgive me. An innocent man is dead. Please tell Dr. Malik to stop it.’ Malik was controlling those women, Cat. Running them like robots, using their emotions to drive them.”
“He probably knew what was happening,” I concede. “That doesn’t mean he planned it or helped carry it out.”
Frustration tightens Sean’s face. “Why are you so hell-bent on defending him?”
“Because Malik was doing all he could to help women in severe pain. Women that nobody else knows how to save.”
Sean sighs. “We can debate this all night. What are we going to do?”
“I told you. I want to talk to Pitre.”
“You want to go see this woman alone and—”
“Not alone. With you.”
“Without backup.”
“You’re my backup.”
