DR06 - In The Electric Mist With the Confederate Dead

by James Lee Burke

  Scanned & Semi-Proofed by Cozette

  Edgar Award-winner

  JAMES LEE BURKE

  "No one captures Louisiana culture

  as well as James Lee Burke. . . it is also possible

  that no one writes better detective novels."

  Washington Post Book World

  "BURKE HAS CREATED A SERIES OF

  AWESOME DEPTH AND BREADTH."

  Houston Chronicle

  "BURKES MOST AMBITIOUS AND SUCCESSFUL

  ROBICHEAUX NOVEL . . .

  Extraordinary . . . He has never been a more acute

  observer, a more compelling writer, or told a better

  tale than he has in ELECTRIC MIST."

  New Orleans Times-Picayune

  "HAUNTING . . . GREAT ENTERTAINMENT . . .

  In ELECTRIC MIST, Burke steps beyond genre

  boundaries into new literary territory. The result is

  entertaining, satisfying, and thought-provoking—

  without losing any of the plot, violence, and action

  for which he is justifiably known."

  Baltimore Sun

  "AN OVER-THE-TOP, HYPNOTIC THRILLER . . .

  EVERYTHING THAT A GOOD MYSTERY IS

  SUPPOSED TO BE."

  Washington Post Book World

  IN THE ELECTRIC MIST WITH CONFEDERATE DEAD

  JAMES LEE BURKE

  A movie company has invaded Dave Robicheaux's bayou, mingling its dark Hollywood secrets and scandals with local crimes savage, bloody, and horrific.

  As cameras roll, the young and not-so-innocent are dying for real at the hands of a serial killer. And Robicheaux's investigations are reviving the specters of long-dead warriors and past nightmares that could cut the Cajun cop's haunted life brutally short.

  Other Dave Robicheaux Novels by James Lee Burke

  from Avon Books

  Black Cherry Blues

  A Morning For Flamingos

  A Stained White Radiance

  JAMES LEE

  BURKE

  IN THE ELECTRIC MIST

  WITH CONFEDERATE DEAD

  AVON BOOKS

  An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  AVON BOOKS

  An Imprint ofHarperCollinsPublishers

  10 East 53rd Street

  New York, New York 10022-5299

  Copyright © 1993 by James Lee Burke

  ISBN:0-380-72121-X

  First Avon Books paperback printing: July 1994 Published by arrangement with Hyperion

  Avon Trademark Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. and in Other Countries,

  Marca Registrada, Hecho en U.S.A.

  HarperCollins ® is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Publishers

  Inc.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  20 19 18 17 16 15 14

  For Frank and Tina Kastor

  and Jerry and Maureen Hoag

  IN THE ELECTRIC MIST

  WITH CONFEDERATE DEAD

  Chapter 1

  The sky had gone black at sunset, and the storm had churned inland from the Gulf and drenched New Iberia and littered East Main with leaves and tree branches from the long canopy of oaks that covered the street from the old brick post office to the drawbridge over Bayou Teche at the edge of town. The air was cool now, laced with light rain, heavy with the fecund smell of wet humus, night-blooming jasmine, roses, and new bamboo. I was about to stop my truck at Del's and pick up three crawfish dinners to go when a lavender Cadillac fishtailed out of a side street, caromed off a curb, bounced a hubcap up on a sidewalk, and left long serpentine lines of tire prints through the glazed pools of yellow light from the street lamps.

  I was off duty, tired, used up after a day of searching for a nineteen-year-old girl in the woods, then finding her where she had been left in the bottom of a coulee, her mouth and wrists wrapped with electrician's tape. Already I had tried to stop thinking about the rest of it. The medical examiner was a kind man. He bagged the body before any news people or family members got there.

  I don't like to bust drunk drivers. I don't like to listen to their explanations, watch their pitiful attempts to affect sobriety, or see the sheen of fear break out in their eyes when they realize they're headed for the drunk tank with little to look forward to in the morning except the appearance of their names in the newspaper. Or maybe in truth I just don't like to see myself when I look into their faces.

  But I didn't believe this particular driver could make it another block without ripping the side off a parked car or plowing the Cadillac deep into someone's shrubbery. I plugged my portable bubble into the cigarette lighter, clamped the magnets on the truck's roof, and pulled him to the curb in front of the Shadows, a huge brick, white-columned antebellum home built on Bayou Teche in 1831.

  I had my Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department badge opened in my palm when I walked up to his window.

  "Can I see your driver's license, please?"

  He had rugged good looks, a Roman profile, square shoulders, and broad hands. When he smiled I saw that his teeth were capped. The woman next to him wore her hair in blond ringlets and her body was as lithe, tanned, and supple-looking as an Olympic swimmer's. Her mouth looked as red and vulnerable as a rose. She also looked like she was seasick.

  "You want driver's what?" he said, trying to focus evenly on my face. Inside the car I could smell a drowsy, warm odor, like the smell of smoke risking from a smoldering pile of wet leaves.

  "Your driver's license," I repeated. "Please take it out of your billfold and hand it to me."

  "Oh, yeah, sure, wow," he said. "I was really careless back there. I'm sorry about that. I really am."

  He got his license out of his wallet, dropped it in his lap, found it again, then handed it to me, trying to keep his eyes from drifting off my face. His breath smelled like fermented fruit that had been corked up for a long time in a stone jug.

  I looked at the license under the street lamp.

  "You're Elrod T. Sykes?" I asked.

  "Yes, sir, that's who I am."

  "Would you step out of the car, Mr. Sykes?"

  "Yes, sir, anything you say."

  He was perhaps forty, but in good shape. He wore a light-blue golf shirt, loafers, and gray slacks that hung loosely on his flat stomach and narrow hips. He swayed slightly and propped one hand on the door to steady himself.

  "We have a problem here, Mr. Sykes. I think you've been smoking marijuana in your automobile."

  "Marijuana . . . Boy, that'd be bad, wouldn't it?"

  "I think your lady friend just ate the roach, too."

  "That wouldn't be good, no, sir, not at all." He shook his head profoundly.

  "Well, we're going to let the reefer business slide for now. But I'm afraid you're under arrest for driving while intoxicated."

  "That's very bad news. This definitely was not on my agenda this evening." He widened his eyes and opened and closed his mouth as though he were trying to clear an obstruction in his ear canals. "Say, do you recognize me? What I mean is, there're news people who'd really like to put my ham hocks in the frying pan. Believe me, sir, I don't need this. I cain't say that enough."

  "I'm going to drive you just down the street to the city jail, Mr. Sykes. Then I'll send a car to take Ms. Drummond to wherever she's staying. But your Cadillac will be towed to the pound."

  He let out his breath
in a long sigh. I turned my face away.

  "You go to the movies, huh?" he said.

  "Yeah, I always enjoyed your films. Ms. Drummond's, too. Take your car keys out of the ignition, please."

  "Yeah, sure," he said, despondently.

  He leaned into the window and pulled the keys out of the ignition.

  "El, do something," the woman said.

  He straightened his back and looked at me.

  "I feel real bad about this," he said. "Can I make a contribution to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, or something like that?"

  In the lights from the city park, I could see the rain denting the surface of Bayou Teche.

  "Mr. Sykes, you're under arrest. You can remain silent if you wish, or if you wish to speak, anything you say can be used against you," I said. "As a long-time fan of your work, I recommend that you not say anything else. Particularly about contributions."

  "It doesn't look like you mess around. Were you ever a Texas ranger? They don't mess around, either. You talk back to those boys and they'll hit you upside the head."

  "Well, we don't do that here," I said. I put my hand under his arm and led him to my truck. I opened the door for him and helped him inside. "You're not going to get sick in my truck, are you?"

  "No, sir, I'm just fine."

  "That's good. I'll be right with you."

  I walked back to the Cadillac and tapped on the glass of the passenger's door. The woman, whose name was Kelly Drummond, rolled down the window. Her face was turned up into mine. Her eyes were an intense, deep green. She wet her lips, and I saw a smear of lipstick on her teeth.

  "You'll have to wait here about ten minutes, then someone will drive you home," I said.

  "Officer, I'm responsible for this," she said. "We were having an argument. Elrod's a good driver. I don't think he should be punished because I got him upset. Can I get out of the car? My neck hurts."

  "I suggest you lock your automobile and stay where you are, Ms. Drummond. I also suggest you do some research into the laws governing the possession of narcotics in the state of Louisiana."

  "Wow, I mean, it's not like we hurt anybody. This is going to get Elrod in a lot of trouble with Mikey. Why don't you show a little compassion?"

  "Mikey?"

  "Our director, the guy who's bringing about ten million dollars into your little town. Can I get out of the car now? I really don't want a neck like Quasimodo."

  "You can go anywhere you want. There's a pay phone in the poolroom you can use to call a bondsman. If I were you, I wouldn't go down to the station to help Mr. Sykes, not until you shampoo the Mexican laughing grass out of your hair."

  "Boy, talk about wearing your genitalia outside your pants. Where'd they come up with you?"

  I walked back to my truck and got in.

  "Look, maybe I can be a friend of the court," Elrod Sykes said.

  "What?"

  "Isn't that what they call it? There's nothing wrong with that, is there? Man, I can really do without this bust."

  "Few people standing before a judge ever expected to be there," I said, and started the engine.

  He was quiet while I made a U-turn and headed for the city police station. He seemed to be thinking hard about something. Then he said: "Listen, I know where there's a body. I saw it. Nobody'd pay me any mind, but I saw the dadburn thing. That's a fact."

  "You saw what?"

  "A colored, I mean a black person, it looked like. Just a big dry web of skin, with bones inside it. Like a big rat's nest."

  "Where was this?"

  "Out in the Atchafalaya swamp, about four days ago. We were shooting some scenes by an Indian reservation or something. I wandered back in these willows to take a leak and saw it sticking out of a sandbar."

  "And you didn't bother to report it until now?"

  "I told Mikey. He said it was probably bones that had washed out of an Indian burial mound or something. Mikey's kind of hard-nosed. He said the last thing we needed was trouble with either cops or university archaeologists."

  "We'll talk about it tomorrow, Mr. Sykes."

  "You don't pay me much mind, either. But that's all right. I told you what I saw. Y'all can do what you want to with it."

  He looked straight ahead through the beads of water on the window. His handsome face was wan, tired, more sober now, resigned perhaps to a booking room, drunk-tank scenario he knew all too well. I remembered two or three wire-service stories about him over the last few years—a brawl with a couple of cops in Dallas or Fort Worth, a violent ejection from a yacht club in Los Angeles, and a plea on a cocaine-possession bust. I had heard that bean sprouts, mineral water, and the sober life had become fashionable in Hollywood. It looked like Elrod Sykes had arrived late at the depot.

  "I'm sorry, I didn't get your name," he said.

  "Dave Robicheaux."

  "Well, you see, Mr. Robicheaux, a lot of people don't believe me when I tell them I see things. But the truth is, I see things all the time, like shadows moving around behind a veil. In my family we call it 'touched.' When I was a little boy, my grandpa told me, 'Son, the Lord done touched you. He give you a third eye to see things that other people cain't. But it's a gift from the Lord, and you mustn't never use it otherwise.' I haven't ever misused the gift, either, Mr. Robicheaux, even though I've done a lot of other things I'm not proud of. So I don't care if people think I lasered my head with too many recreational chemicals or not."

  "I see."

  He was quiet again. We were almost to the jail now. The wind blew raindrops out of the oak trees, and the moon edged the storm clouds with a metallic silver light. He rolled down his window halfway and breathed in the cool smell of the night.

  "But if that was an Indian washed out of a burial mound instead of a colored man, I wonder what he was doing with a chain wrapped around him," he said.

  I slowed the truck and pulled it to the curb.

  "Say that again," I said.

  "There was a rusted chain, I mean with links as big as my fist, crisscrossed around his rib cage."

  I studied his face. It was innocuous, devoid of intention, pale in the moonlight, already growing puffy with hangover.

  "You want some slack on the DWI for your knowledge about this body, Mr. Sykes?"

  "No, sir, I just wanted to tell you what I saw. I shouldn't have been driving. Maybe you kept me from having an accident."

  "Some people might call that jailhouse humility. What do you think?"

  "I think you might make a tough film director."

  "Can you find that sandbar again?"

  "Yes, sir, I believe I can."

  "Where are you and Ms. Drummond staying?"

  "The studio rented us a house out on Spanish Lake."

  "I'm going to make a confession to you, Mr. Sykes. DWIs are a pain in the butt. Also I'm on city turf and doing their work. If I take y'all home, can I have your word you'll remain there until tomorrow morning?"

  "Yes, sir, you sure can."

  "But I want you in my office by nine a.m."

  "Nine a.m. You got it. Absolutely. I really appreciate this."

  The transformation in his face was immediate, as though liquified ambrosia had been infused in the veins of a starving man. Then as I turned the truck around in the middle of the street to pick up the actress whose name was Kelly Drummond, he said something that gave me pause about his level of sanity.

  "Does anybody around here ever talk about Confederate soldiers out on that lake?"

  "I don't understand."

  "Just what I said. Does anybody ever talk about guys in gray or butternut-brown uniforms out there? A bunch of them, at night, out there in the mist."

  "Aren't y'all making a film about the War Between the States? Are you talking about actors?" I looked sideways at him. His eyes were straight forward, focused on some private thought right outside the windshield.

  "No, these guys weren't actors," he said. "They'd been shot up real bad. They looked hungry, too. It happened right around here, did
n't it?"

  "What?"

  "The battle."

  "I'm afraid I'm not following you, Mr. Sykes."

  Up ahead I saw Kelly Drummond walking in her spiked heels and Levi's toward Tee Neg's poolroom.

  "Yeah, you do," he said. "You believe when most people don't, Mr. Robicheaux. You surely do. And when I say you believe, you know exactly what I'm talking about."

  He looked confidently, serenely, into my face and winked with one blood-flecked eye.

  Chapter 1

  My dreams took me many places: sometimes back to a windswept firebase on the top of an orange hill gouged with shell holes; a soft, mist-streaked morning with ducks rising against a pink sun while my father and I crouched in the blind and waited for that heart-beating moment when their shadows would race across the cattails and reeds toward us; a lighted American Legion baseball diamond, where at age seventeen I pitched a perfect game against a team from Abbeville and a beautiful woman I didn't know, perhaps ten years my senior, kissed me so hard on the mouth that my ears rang.

  But tonight I was back in the summer of my freshman year in college, July of 1957, deep in the Atchafalaya marsh, right after Hurricane Audrey had swept through southern Louisiana and killed over five hundred people in Cameron Parish alone. I worked offshore seismograph then, and the portable drill barge had just slid its iron pilings into the floor of a long, flat yellow bay, and the jugboat crew had dropped me off by a chain of willow islands to roll up a long spool of recording cable that was strung through the trees and across the sand spits and sloughs. The sun was white in the sky, and the humidity was like the steam that rises from a pot of boiled vegetables. Once I was inside the shade of the trees, the mosquitoes swarmed around my ears and eyes in a gray fog as dense as a helmet.

  The spool and crank hung off my chest by canvas straps, and after I had wound up several feet of cable, I would have to stop and submerge myself in the water to get the mosquitoes off my skin or smear more mud on my face and shoulders. It was our fifth day out on a ten-day hitch, which meant that tonight the party chief would allow a crew boat to take a bunch of us to the levee at Charenton, and from there we'd drive to a movie in some little town down by Morgan City. As I slapped mosquitoes into a bloody paste on my arms and waded across sand bogs that sucked over my knees, I kept thinking about the cold shower that I was going to take back on the quarter-boat, the fried-chicken dinner that I was going to eat in the dining room, the ride to town between the sugarcane fields in the cooling evening. Then I popped out of the woods on the edge of another bay, into the breeze, the sunlight, the hint of rain in the south.