Blood on the Bayou

by DJ Donaldson

In the kitchen, as she looked over her collection of micro-wavables, she thought about what the Gleason woman had said about her diet. Probably true. She didn’t eat very sensibly. She looked on the back of the lasagna container in her hand and stopped reading halfway through. Better not to know, she thought, putting it in the microwave.

  While the lasagna heated, Kit searched the refrigerator for something with a little fiber in it and found a few leaves of iceberg lettuce and half a cucumber, which, together with some vinegar and oil, made a fair salad. Topping things off with a cream soda, it was, all in all, not a bad meal. Maybe in the future, though, she would keep more fresh fruit and vegetables in the house.

  While she was cleaning up the few kitchen utensils she’d dirtied, the phone rang. Even before answering it, she knew who it was.

  “Hi, stranger.”

  “David! I’ve been meaning to call you. But I’ve just been so busy.”

  “I saw Fred Danson yesterday and he was getting anxious to hear from you. Says he can’t hold that job open much longer. And he’d really like for you to have it.”

  “I know, but things have been so hectic, I haven’t been able to give it much thought. I guess you’ve heard about the murders here.”

  “Are you involved in that?”

  “Sure, as a consultant.”

  “You’re not putting yourself at risk, I hope.”

  “Of course not. What risk would there be for me?” She was glad he couldn’t see her mental image of Bubba with his gun on that bum’s nose.

  “Probably none if you just tend to your job and don’t overdo it.”

  “Oh, you mean I should have limits on my involvement?”

  “Don’t try to coax me into saying something that’ll get me into trouble. You do that all the time. It makes me feel like every conversation with you is a walk across a tightrope.”

  “If your heart was pure, you wouldn’t have to worry.”

  “The Pope would have to worry talking to you.”

  “I saw Virginia. She thinks the couple that looked at the house today is going to make an offer.”

  “Which if it’s good enough would make it even more important that you come to a decision. Kit, I miss you. I miss holding you—”

  “I miss that, too.”

  “Then join me.”

  “I don’t know… In any event, I can’t make a decision until this killer is caught. It’s occupying so much of my mind there’s no room for anything else.”

  “Well, there’s more to life than work. We’ve invested a lot of time in this relationship and I’d hate to see you throw it away.”

  There’s more to life than work? Kit thought. This from a man she hadn’t seen for days at a time if he had a big case pending. “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said evenly.

  “What? What did I say? I know that tone. You nailed me again for something and I don’t even know what it was. It’s in the Bill of Rights, Kit. The accused must be informed of the charges against him.”

  “It’s nothing… really,” Kit said, consciously putting a convincing warmth in her voice. “I’m simply a little tired.”

  “I understand. By the way, I saw an article the other day that said a woman has about four hundred thousand eggs in her ovaries when she’s born but every year about ten thousand die. That means you’ve already lost about three hundred thousand of them. It’s something to think about.”

  “David, you’d have made a great salesman for driveway coatings.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. I’ll think about everything you’ve said.”

  “Well, I hope so. Meanwhile, take care of yourself.”

  “I’ll call you soon.”

  Later, Kit went to Radio Shack and bought a police scanner, well aware that she stood little chance of picking up any communication between the undercover cops and their command post, but would likely be able to intercept messages from the command post to dispatch. She spent the evening beside the scanner, working on her book, which would eventually be called either Suicide: The Ultimate Act of a Troubled Mind or, more simply, Self Inflicted, with maybe an additional phrase of some sort tacked on the end. While her work was often interrupted by the crackle of the radio as it picked up verbal police traffic, there was nothing that sounded like the trouble for which she was listening. At midnight, she took the radio into her bedroom and listened for as long as she could stay awake. By 1:30, it was playing only to Lucky, whose ears lifted whenever it emitted one of its throaty messages.

  In the morning, she telephoned homicide to see whether anything had happened. It hadn’t.

  The next night was a replay of the previous one except it rained. Again, nothing happened.

  *

  Floyd Dill came through at two o’clock the following day and provided her with all the data she had asked for, including the current day’s readings up to twelve noon. Eager to begin her analysis, she took them directly to her desk.

  The simplest approach seemed to be to extract for each of the last eight days the highs and lows for each climatological parameter and then determine whether there was any correlation between these values and the murders.

  Turning a yellow legal tablet sideways, she listed the days across the top and put asterisks by those when the killer struck. She then began to work her way down the list of numbers, making no attempt at analysis as she went but simply recording values, being careful to note the time each high and low had occurred. This took about forty-five minutes. Then she began to look for correlations.

  All three murders took place a few hours after midnight. In no case did the hours between midnight and the murder show notable values. Her comparisons, therefore, involved highs and lows for the day before each killing.

  On each of the days leading up to a murder, sky cover was a ten all day: that is, completely overcast. But this also occurred on several days when nothing happened. Maximum visibility at some point during the day before two of the murders was twenty miles, the highest value possible. Kit scratched her head. How could you have maximum visibility on days that were completely overcast? Something to ask Dill. The day before the other murder, maximum visibility was fifteen miles. These maximal values occurred on other days, as well. Nor was there any correlation with minimum visibility. These results were not terribly disappointing, since she hadn’t believed sky cover and visibility were likely candidates, anyway.

  But as she continued to find nothing in the more likely parameters of barometric pressure, temperature, and humidity, her hopes waned. Wind direction and speed, rainfall—which she had already checked in the papers—evaporation rate, and ground temperature were equally unrewarding.

  She tossed her pencil onto the papers in front of her, leaned back in her chair, and spoke to the ceiling. “Nuts.” The office suddenly seemed cramped and hot. She needed a walk.

  While Kit waited for the old elevator to arrive, Broussard came out of his office with a pile of file folders on his hip and joined her.

  “Havin’ a bad day?” he asked.

  “Does it show?”

  “Guess it’s too late to say no. What’s up?”

  “I’ve just spent an hour going over climatologic data for the last eight days that I got from the weather service, trying to find something that would explain why our killer strikes when he does.”

  “No luck, huh?”

  Kit shook her head and idly worked the elevator DOWN button like a telegraph key.

  Broussard shifted the file folders higher on his hip and said, “When I was a kid, an old fellow that knew the swamps better than anybody around told me that the best way to judge distance over water was to bend down and look at whatever object you were interested in, from between your legs. That sounded plausible to me, so I gave it a try. He was real tickled that I’d bought this load of hay and he got quite a laugh at seein’ me all bent over, but I got somethin’, too. I got to see a familiar place in a way that I’d never seen before. And that seemed like
somethin’ worth rememberin’.”

  They heard the old elevator jerk to a stop and its doors clattered open. Broussard motioned for Kit to precede him, but she stepped back.

  “You go on. I’ve got work to do.”

  Buoyed by Broussard’s story, Kit returned to her office and sat down at her desk, where she asked herself how she could look at the data in a new way. Maybe minimum and maximum values were not as important… as… as what? Not as important as… She scanned the numbers for relative humidity, which were not static but fluctuated from hour to hour, going down at some points, up at others.

  She made a list of the amount and direction in which the humidity changed from one hour to the next for each day of the sample period. Finishing with that, she did the same with all the other parameters. When each of them had been converted to this new set of numbers, she took a deep breath and began to look for correlations.

  A few minutes later, she found something. Between 2:00 and 3:00 P.M. the afternoon before the first murder, the barometric pressure had dropped 6.2 millibars. Murder number two had taken place following a 5.8-millibar drop between 8:00 and 9:00 A.M. the previous morning. The afternoon before the third murder, there had been a 6.4-millibar drop between 5:00 and 6:00 P.M. The largest decrease on any of the other days was four millibars.

  Kit quickly scanned the other parameters but discovered nothing of significance. She had found the trigger. Their killer was set off by a decrease in barometric pressure.

  CHAPTER 10

  Kit anxiously looked at her watch: quarter to five. Good. Dill should still be there.

  The weather service had changed the tune they played for callers who had to wait. This time it was “You Ain’t Woman Enough to Take My Man.” Kit couldn’t help but believe that Dill’s sweetie had set it up just for her call.

  The music stopped and Dill came on the line.

  “Floyd, this is Kit… Kit Franklyn.” She had decided to call Dill by his first name to put their relationship on a personal level. That way, he might be more inclined to do what she was about to ask of him.

  “Was that data I gave you any help?” he asked.

  “Immensely. But now I need another favor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Do you have a fax machine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would it be possible for you to send me the hourly barometric pressure readings every day at five o’clock?”

  “You mean the values from midnight that morning until five P.M.?

  “Yes.”

  “For how many days?”

  “A week, maybe two.” Actually, Kit had no idea how long it would be needed. Better to keep his initial commitment relatively short. Otherwise, he might balk.

  Dill hesitated, and Kit wished she had gone out there. While she usually felt a little ashamed afterward, she wasn’t above using her large brown eyes to get men to do things. In this case, it wasn’t necessary.

  “Since it’s only pressure you want, I could do that,” Dill said.

  Now the other shoe, Kit thought. “I’d also like to keep up with the readings through the evening. Would there be any way that someone could call my answering machine at midnight each night and leave the hourly values that come in after five P.M.?”

  Dill hesitated again. “Well… there is a night man….”

  “Would he do it for me? It’s extremely important.”

  “Sure, why not. It’s a little slow at night, anyway.”

  Kit gushed her thanks and gave Dill the number of the office fax machine and her home phone number. Before hanging up, she had Dill give her the most current pressure readings unaccounted for in the material he’d given her earlier, which even as she wrote them down were obviously of no interest.

  The plan she’d devised contained two flaws. If the pressure strayed into dangerous territory shortly after midnight, she wouldn’t be aware of it until it was too late. In addition, she couldn’t be exactly sure what represented dangerous territory. All she knew was that a 4-millibar drop appeared safe, but a drop of 5.8 or more was not. The effect of anything in between those values was unknown. But it was the best she could do.

  For the next three days, Dill and the night man performed reliably, neither one missing his scheduled delivery time by more than a few minutes. During those three days, the barometric pressure remained clearly within safe limits. On the fourth day, Dill sent the readings through at 5:03. As usual, Kit went directly to her office with them and began calculating the hourly fluctuations.

  In the early morning, the pressure had not varied more than one or two millibars from one hour to the next. Between 5:00 and 6:00 A.M., it had gone up one millibar, then up slightly again between 6:00 and 7:00.

  Having spent three days at this already, Kit’s sense of expectation had diminished to where the activity had become almost a rote exercise. That all ended with the entries for 9:00 and 10:00 A.M. When she saw those numbers, it felt as though she’d suddenly been thrust into a frozen-food locker. Her hair danced on the back of her neck and her arms erupted in so much gooseflesh they resembled the pebbled belt she always wore with her best Bleyle knit. Between 9:00 and 10:00 A.M., the barometric pressure had fallen by 6.5 millibars. Snatching up the printout from Dill and her own calculations, she dashed to Broussard’s office and burst in without knocking.

  He was sitting at the microscope on a low bench to the right of his desk. From the stereo on a shelf above the microscope came the relaxing sounds of Swan Lake, which, according to Broussard, was the ideal music for studying tissue sections.

  At the sound of her entrance, he turned from the microscope and ran his hand down the thin black cord at his neck to his glasses, which dangled just under his bow tie.

  “Tonight’s the night,” she blurted out.

  Broussard put on his glasses, stood up, and turned off the stereo.

  “Our killer has to try something tonight. Here, look.”

  She rushed to him with her papers, then realized she’d never shown him the earlier supporting material. She lifted a finger. “Be right back.”

  Dashing to her office, she gathered up the rest of what she needed and hurried back to Broussard, where she spread everything out on his desk. She told her story and waited for his reaction.

  He continued to stroke his beard and look over the sheets of paper for a few seconds, then began to nod, a little more slowly than she would have liked.

  “Keepin’ in mind that the sample period is rather small, what with your whole case restin’ on three murders in twelve days… I’ll admit it looks like you’re on to somethin’.”

  It certainly wasn’t effusive and it wasn’t even praise, but considering the source, it was enough. For the first time since she’d met Broussard nearly a year ago, she’d begun to feel like a colleague instead of a green kid.

  Broussard reached for the phone and put in a call to homicide. This time, Gatlin was there to take it.

  “Phillip?… Andy. Kit has just shown me somethin’ you should know about. Here she is.”

  Kit took the phone from his chubby hand, grateful that he hadn’t told Gatlin what she had discovered.

  “Lieutenant, that environmental cue we talked about… the one that triggers our killer… it’s barometric pressure. Whenever the pressure drops a certain amount in an hour, it kicks him off. But he doesn’t react immediately. He waits. Each time he has killed, the pressure drop occurred long before the killing. It’s like… setting a bear trap. Once it’s set, it’s dangerous until it’s sprung. He waits until the time is right… until he can catch a victim alone… when his risk is minimal. And Lieutenant, the pressure readings for today say he was set off between nine and ten A.M. Tonight’s the night to catch him.”

  Broussard helped himself to two lemon balls, slipped them into his mouth, and sat on the edge of the microscope table.

  “Tonight?” Gatlin said. “You sure? Because I haven’t seen my bed in so long, I wouldn’t know what it was. For the last week
and a half, I’ve spent my days asking people who don’t know what planet they’re on where they were on the night of each murder, trying to figure out if we’re dealing with a domestic or imported fruit. Nights, I’ve covered more sidewalk than I ever did as a beat cop, wearing clothes that by comparison’d make the sheets in a home for the incontinent smell like cinnamon rolls. I was planning to let somebody else wear those clothes tonight while I got some sleep. But not if the party’s on. I’ve got too much time invested to miss the fun. So you’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  That night, to make certain she wouldn’t fall asleep while listening to her scanner, Kit took a NoDoz at 7:00 P.M. and began on page one of Lonesome Dove, a paperback she’d bought on the way home. Four hundred pages, two pots of tea, and three trips to the bathroom later, she hadn’t heard a single promising squawk from the scanner.

  Hoping that the communication regarding apprehension of the lycanthrope had somehow gotten by her, Kit called homicide as soon as the thin light of dawn struggled through the windows, only to hear what she already knew. There had been no arrest and no attack. The decoys had gone through the entire night without seeing anything unusual.

  As she hung up the phone, Kit could feel her face stinging with humiliation. “You sure?” Gatlin had said. “I’m sure,” she had replied. She should have hedged. But how would that have sounded? I’m pretty sure. I think it’ll be tonight. Maybe. But she had been sure. And now she looked like a jerk.

  Always having found solace in the lakefront, she went to her car and pointed it in that direction. When she arrived, she pulled into a parking bay and sat staring out over the choppy gray water that dashed against the cement steps lining the shore. Overhead, the sun was completely shut out by a leaden sky.

  Eventually, she got out and walked to the steps through dew-laden grass that left her canvas shoes nearly as wet as if she’d been wading in the lake. Ignoring the benches scattered along the lakefront, she sat instead on the first step leading to the water. With her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands, her thoughts drifted to Shreveport and the job that waited there for her, a job where Broussard wouldn’t be looking over her shoulder every time she screwed up. She thought about David, hundreds of miles away when she really needed him. Having Lucky around helped a lot, but sometimes you need more than a dog.