Assassination at Bayou Sauvage

by D. J. Donaldson

  When he tasted what she’d brought, his eyes rolled back in his head, which apparently made Connie think he was having another stroke, because she bolted toward the bed. But before she got there, Neuville smiled, shook his head in wonder, and rattled off something in French that included the word, fantastique.

  Grandma O gave him a second spoonful, then wiped his chin. Following another torrent of French from him, Grandma O put everything back on the nightstand and turned to Broussard. “Well, he gonna talk to me, but he say you can stay only if you can prove we’re married.”

  Broussard’s brows lifted in shock, raising his lids so his little eyes apparently doubled in size. He’d come in with a few ideas about how he might gain Neuville’s favor, but this . . . What the hell . . .

  Suddenly, Grandma O let out a cackle that made the windows hum. “He didn’t really say dat. But he want to know what kind a Broussard you are?”

  “Tell him I’m the son of Aubrey Broussard, his old fishin’ buddy.”

  As she translated the message, Neuville nodded, then, for the first time looking at Broussard as he spoke, responded briefly.

  “He say, ‘Dat damn accident should never have happened’.”

  “I’ve thought about that more times than I can tell you,” Broussard replied, speaking now directly to Neuville, but still in English.

  Broussard waited until it sounded like Grandma O had finished translating his comment, then he said, “My father considered you the most honorable man he ever knew.”

  Once more waiting until that had been relayed, Broussard quickly added. “But he also told me your name should have been T.O. Birdsnest, because when you two went fishin’ you fouled your line more than anybody he’d ever seen.”

  It was clear from the look on Grandma O’s face she didn’t think Broussard was helping himself by telling the old sheriff something so uncomplimentary, but she translated it anyway.

  The sheriff actually laughed. Then, seemingly still in a good mood, he said something that Grandma O translated as: “Aubrey used to say dat to me all da time. Wish I was fishin’ with him right now.”

  The old man seemed to retreat for a moment into the past, his eyes focused on nothing anyone else in the room could see. Then he looked at Broussard and spoke again.

  Grandma O grinned at Broussard, showing the gold star inlay in one of her front teeth. “You did it. He say, ‘You came a long way to see me. How can I help’?”

  “I’ve been wonderin’ about the day my sister, Belle, died. What can you tell me about the circumstances?”

  Broussard was concerned the old guy might have at least a few gaps in his memory and that the details of Belle’s death might be one of them. But without even thinking about it, the old fellow responded.

  When he finished answering, Grandma O said, “Belle was hit by a truck haulin’ fill dirt for a new addition to da elementary school. She was on her bike and was kinda wobbly on acounta da road wasn’t in good shape. Da driver honked at her to let her know he was comin’, but she jus’ wobbled out in front a him.”

  “Was the driver cited for anything?” Broussard asked.

  Grandma O passed the question along, and T.O. responded.

  “Considerin’ Belle’s condition, it seemed like it probably wasn’t his fault at all.”

  Puzzled, Broussard said, “What condition?”

  Grandma O relayed and T.O. answered.

  “She was born deaf and her eyesight was gettin’ worse every year.”

  Good God, Broussard thought. Could that be why Uncle Joe and . . .? No . . . it was too outrageous . . . nobody could be that deranged . . . Or could they?

  Chapter 42

  Broussard was a little late arriving at the church where Uncle Joe’s funeral was being held. After getting home from his trip with Grandma O to see T.O. Neuville, he’d stayed up most of the night, looking at the Broussard pedigree chart he’d made and thinking about everything that had happened since Uncle Joe had been killed. Eventually he’d fallen asleep at his desk. Though he’d dozed for only an hour, he woke twenty minutes ago with a clear mind and the belief that he knew who the killer was. Aware that Gatlin and Kit would be at the funeral, he planned to tell them what he knew as soon as the event was over.

  Because he was late, the parking lot was already crowded with other mourners’ vehicles. As he headed inside, he walked past a black pickup truck that drew him toward it like a magnet for chubby pathologists. Reaching the passenger side, he looked in and saw a sheet of paper lying on the seat. He shaded his eyes and leaned as close to the window as he could. The print on most of the sheet was too small to read from where he stood, but the caption was clear: Bomb At Funeral Kills 16 North of Iraq’s Capital. Oh my God.

  Running as fast as his short legs could carry him, he dashed to the church entrance. Heart thudding in his ears, he ignored the pain mushrooming in his side and stumbled up the steps and into the church. Yanking open the sanctuary doors, he stood for a moment and scanned the scene before him.

  There were about a hundred people already seated, most of them in the pews near the front, a few farther back. Among those toward the rear were Kit and Teddy and Phil Gatlin. Amelia was standing behind a lectern on stage talking about Uncle Joe, whose flower-enshrouded casket sat nearby. Three pews from the front, sitting on the right aisle, was the driver of the pickup.

  Unaware of how much time he had, but knowing that he didn’t dare just shout for everyone to get out, Broussard’s mind raced, trying to come up with a workable plan. Years ago, he’d been called to that building to examine the body of the church secretary, who had been killed during a bungled burglary. Using the knowledge of the church layout he’d seen then, he suddenly had an idea.

  He ran back into the entry, went to the funeral sign-in book, and tore out a blank page. Folding the page like a letter, he returned to the sanctuary and hurried over to Phil Gatlin, where he whispered. “No time to explain. When I go through that door up there by the stage, and only then, get everybody out of here. And keep your voice down. You might have a minute to do that, maybe two. When the place is clear, call me on my phone. Got it?”

  Knowing him well enough not to question his instructions, Gatlin nodded, his face already showing him poised for action.

  Broussard hustled to the driver of the pickup, bent down, and showed him the folded paper while softly speaking into his ear. “I’ve just received a note for you from Joe. He wanted you to read it before his funeral. Let’s go into the hall over there and I’ll give it to you.”

  In the history of great plans, this one wouldn’t even rate a footnote. But he didn’t have time to create anything better.

  The hall Broussard had gestured to was beside the stage and therefore, not far away. Everything depended on the guy doing as Broussard asked. If he balked, there was no backup strategy. He looked up at Broussard, obviously puzzled at how Joe could have sent anybody a letter after death. To help the guy make the right decision, Broussard motioned toward the door with his chin and headed for the hall.

  There was another moment of hesitation from his quarry that made Broussard begin to sweat under his black suit. Then the guy got up and moved in Broussard’s direction.

  Broussard went into the hall first, noting with satisfaction, that the access door was quite heavy, just as he remembered it. Therefore, a moment later, when it shut behind the killer, they could no longer hear Amelia talking. That also meant the guy wouldn’t know when she suddenly stopped talking as Gatlin cleared the sanctuary.

  Facing each other, Broussard could see that the man’s dark suit looked puffy around the waist, most likely because he was wearing a bomb under his jacket. Broussard also believed that there was at least one device in the sanctuary.

  The guy reached out for the fake letter. Instead of giving it to him, Broussard said, “How you doin’? We haven’t had any time to talk and I’m worried about you.”

  This was a horribly dangerous moment. The killer had his left hand in his
pants pocket, so that was likely where the button was. Any attempt by Broussard to grab the man’s arm might cause an immediate detonation. Even if Broussard didn’t make a move, the guy might realize what was going on and decide to end it all right then.

  The two men locked eyes while seconds ticked by in pregnant silence. Then the killer said, “I’m fine. I should get back inside.” He reached again for the fake letter, but Broussard still didn’t offer it.

  “If you ever want to talk about anything, I’m always available,” Broussard said. “Well, not always, but I’ll certainly make time for you.”

  “I appreciate that. Could I have the letter now?”

  “It’s odd how I got it,” Broussard said. “It came by e-mail early this mornin’. I don’t know how Joe arranged that. He must have some program on his computer so he can delay the time e-mails get sent.”

  The other man’s benign expression suddenly hardened. “There is no letter is there?”

  Broussard hesitated before answering, trying to buy a few more seconds. Then he said, “Why’d you do it? There was no malice toward you by anyone involved. It was just biology.”

  Up to this point, Broussard had been circling the rattlesnake. Now he’d just grabbed it by the tail. The guy clenched his jaw and Broussard was certain he was about to scatter both of them over the hallway.

  Then the man spoke, his voice loud and angry. “Biology that everybody should have known about . . . biology that never should have happened if people had been careful. Joe knew. He could have taken precautions, then we wouldn’t be here. It would have been better if I’d never been born, or Betty either.”

  At that moment Broussard’s cell phone rang. Sensing that what had just been said was intended as the guy’s epitaph, Broussard rushed forward, put both hands on the guy’s chest and drove him backward through a pair of double doors to another section of the hall.

  As the swinging panels closed between them, Broussard turned and dove for the side door to the outside, aiming both hands for the bar to open it.

  The blast from the bomb the killer was wearing tore both swinging doors off their hinges. Nearly simultaneously, it blew open the outside door and hurled Broussard onto the sidewalk, where he crashed to the pavement, breaking both the radius and ulna in his right arm and partially tearing off his right ear.

  There were four bombs planted under the pews in the sanctuary. Their combined force turned the seating into a hurricane of sharp projectiles that peppered the walls with shards that in some cases were driven completely through the sheetrock. At the same instant, a million dollars worth of stained glass was turned into at least as many pieces of shrapnel that slashed at the parsonage next door. Phil Gatlin had been the last person out of the sanctuary. When the compression wave blew the big front doors off their hinges, one of them nearly fell on him. But he wasn’t hurt. He’d also managed to get Kit and Teddy and all the rest of those in his charge out onto the front sidewalk unharmed.

  “What the hell just happened?” Kit said, brushing the blast dust from her hair. She looked frantically over the crowd. “Where’s Andy. Did he get out?”

  “Not with us,” Gatlin said, stutter stepping around a small bewildered group so he could see if Broussard was somewhere beyond them.

  Teddy had separated himself from Kit and Gatlin and was now standing about fifteen feet away, looking at the side of the church opposite the parsonage. “There’s an exit door over here,” he shouted, pointing.

  Teddy waited for Kit and Gatlin to join him, then they all headed for the door he’d found.

  A moment later, facing away from them, they saw a big body that could only be Broussard, lying motionless on the sidewalk. Gatlin ran up to him, knelt, and felt for a pulse. “He’s still with us.”

  “Ambulance on the way,” Teddy said, putting his phone back in his pocket.

  Forehead so heavily furrowed with worry that his bushy eyebrows met over his nose, Gatlin leaned down and said into Broussard’s intact left ear, “Don’t you even think about dying. I’m not spending the rest of my life remembering you like this.”

  Chapter 43

  “So, how’s the food?” Gatlin asked.

  “I’m puttin’ it on my list of top spots in the city,” Broussard said from his hospital bed, where he was wearing a big gauze pad taped to his injured ear and had a cast on his right forearm.

  “We were going to bring you flowers, but thought you might like these better,” Kit said, producing a glass canister of unwrapped lemon drops. She took the top off and held the canister out to his left side.

  “Where’d you get ‘em?” he asked, fishing a yellow candy out of the container and putting it in his mouth.

  “From the bowl on your desk.”

  “Hope you didn’t scoop ‘em out with your bare hands.”

  “Look who’s talking,” Kit said, setting the canister on the rolling table suspended over Broussard’s lap. “Before I came to work in your office, you used to carry them loose in your pockets.”

  “But I have very clean pockets.”

  “By the way,” Gatlin said to Broussard from the other side of the bed. “You look like crap.”

  “You mean in general or just after what happened?”

  “What did happen?” Kit said.

  “I got hurt in a bomb blast,” Broussard replied, expertly talking around the lemon ball.

  “You know what she means,” Gatlin said. “Give it up.”

  “Short version or the long one?”

  “Lemme help you,” Gatlin said. “I wasn’t sure at the time who that was you took out of the funeral service with you, but we found what was left of Remy LeBlanc’s body in the hall by that exit door you used. When I checked out his truck, I saw an article about an Afghan funeral bombing on the seat. Is that what tipped you off to his plans?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you obviously knew he was the one who killed all those people before you saw the article.”

  Broussard tucked the lemon ball in his cheek. “I was suspicious of him for a couple reasons. For one, although he did sign Uncle Joe’s Birthday card, I noticed that his signature looked different than everybody else’s. Lookin’ carefully at the reverse side of the card under a dissectin’ scope with some alternate light sources, I saw that all the other signatures had a distinct hollow center to the lines the pen made on the paper, an effect produced by the hard clipboard Amelia used for a backin’ when she had everyone sign the card at the picnic. On Remy’s signature, the lines were all solid, which by experiment, I saw was what happens when the card is signed on a soft surface. That made me think he didn’t sign the card at the picnic, but did it earlier, when he was in Amelia’s kitchen talkin’ to her about a job she had for him. She does all her paperwork on a counter in there. I’m guessin’ he saw the card when he came to her house. Knowin’ he wouldn’t be at the picnic, he signed it right then, on a magazine, maybe. Amelia just didn’t notice what he’d done.”

  Broussard paused, reached for the glass of water on his lap table, and took a sip from the bent straw.

  “Later, when I was talkin’ to him about the shootin’, he said somethin’ about how excited the rangers were when they came runnin’ out of their office. But they weren’t in their office when it happened. They were eatin’ outside at their own picnic table. If he’d been with the rest of us he’d have seen that. The shooter didn’t know it because the ranger station wasn’t visible from where he anchored his boat.”

  “You must have realized early on that you hadn’t actually seen Remy at the picnic,” Gatlin said.

  “I thought of that, but I got there late and didn’t talk to hardly anyone else but Joe before he was killed. Then I had more important things on my mind than checkin’ attendance.”

  “I thought we decided that whoever killed Betty would have scratch marks on him,” Kit said.

  “They must have been under Remy’s hair on the back of his head,” Broussard replied.

  Gatlin looked
at Kit and Teddy. “You two notice how much better his color is now that he’s getting to show off for us?”

  “I’m just followin’ your instructions to ‘give it up’ as you put it,” Broussard said.

  “Yeah, yeah. Keep going.”

  “Remember how we were thinkin’ that Betty Bergeron and Joe might have discussed my sister, Belle, but we didn’t know why . . . Well, last night Grandma O and I drove back to my home town and talked to the guy who was sheriff when my sister was killed.”

  “Jesus, what’s it like being in the same vehicle with her for a couple hours,” Gatlin said, quickly making the sign of the cross on his chest for saying, ‘Jesus.’

  “If you want to hear this, you’re gonna have to focus,” Broussard said.

  “Yeah, okay, I’m with you. What did you find out?”

  “Belle was born deaf and was progressively goin’ blind. So she had the Acadian version of Usher’s Syndrome. It’s caused by a gene mutation that makes an abnormal version of a protein important for function in the inner ear and the visual cells of the retina. The mutation apparently happened to one man back in the days before what became the Cajuns migrated from Nova Scotia to Louisiana. They were such an isolated group for so long, there was a lot of intermarriage, which means the gene got passed around. I’m convinced that Betty Bergeron and Remy both had it.”

  “So they were secretly seeing each other,” Kit said.

  “Secretly, because I think Betty was uncomfortable with the fact Remy was her third cousin. But I believe they were plannin’ on gettin’ married. Kit, you told me Betty was studyin’ molecular biology and wanted to be a genetic counselor. I’m sure she knew about Usher’s syndrome. That’s why she went to see Uncle Joe, to find out if he knew about any history of the mutation in the family.”