An Evil Shadow - A Val Bosanquet Mystery

  It was clear from the expressions on their faces that the men hadn’t been expecting to find anyone else in the house, much less someone trussed up like a Christmas gift. T-shirt leveled the rifle towards Val, but Gold Tooth spoke to him in rapid Haitian Creole and he lowered it. They carried Jackson over to the couch and threw him down. T-shirt checked the bindings holding Val, then went outside.

  Gold Tooth rested his shotguns barrel against Val’s forehead and smiled broadly. “I’ve seen your face on the TV news, Mister Chiefman.” His English was good, but with a heavy accent. “You’ve been after Donny too?”

  “Which of you killed Trochan?”

  “Trochan?”

  “The man in the cemetery.”

  He pulled the shotgun away. “Was that what he was called? Sure hope he wasn’t a friend of yours, Mister Chiefman.”

  T-shirt came back carrying a small blowtorch. He turned the gas on and ignited it with a disposable lighter. On each of his fingers was a heavy silver ring. It took him a moment to adjust the gas flow until the flame was burning yellow. When he was satisfied, he handed the torch to Gold Tooth.

  “Experience has shown us that our purpose is best served with a cooler flame. A clear flame destroys too many of the nerve endings.” Gold Tooth moved over to the couch and said, “It’s time to wake up our friend. He started to slap Jackson across the face. It took several blows before he stirred. He opened his eyes and groaned.

  T-shirt sat next to Jackson on the couch.

  Gold Tooth glanced at Val. “Seems it’s you we have to thank. We spent the night in a motel and were headed out here when we saw the pick-up cross the bridge. Followed Jackson into town and watched him make a call from the gas station pay-phone. We jumped him, but the stubborn old fool wouldn’t tell us where his son is. I think he’ll talk now.”

  Jackson was starting to make sense of the world again. His eyes flicked from Val to T-shirt to Gold Tooth. He pushed himself upright on the couch and shook his head. Pain made him wince. He caught sight of his wife’s body and tried to launch himself at Gold Tooth in a desperate attempt to tear the shotgun from his grasp. T-shirt pulled him off as easily as a puppy dog.

  “Hold him steady,” Gold Tooth ordered. His fellow-islander pinioned Jackson’s arms high up his back and held them tight. The old man struggled, but he was as helpless as Val was.

  Gold Tooth pulled a stiletto blade from a leather scabbard he had stitched to the lining of his trouser pocket and ran the blued-steel blade down the front of Jackson’s shirt. The old man’s chest was as white as candle wax.

  “Giving up your son won’t save your life. You’re already a dead man. But you could make your dying a little easier.”

  Jackson spat full force in his face.

  Gold Tooth wiped away the spittle, picked up the blowtorch and touched the flame against Jackson’s chest. His screams filled the room. Val gritted his teeth and flexed every muscle and sinew in his body, twisting against the rope bindings. The rope sawed into his wrists, drawing blood. It was to no avail.

  “Where is your son?”

  “Fuck you,” Jackson bellowed.

  That earned him another blast from the blowtorch. Gold Tooth knew exactly what he was doing. Just enough flame to sear the top level of skin, inflicting maximum damage to the greatest number of nerve endings, but not enough to have Jackson lapse into unconsciousness again.

  Val gagged as the nauseating stench of burning flesh reached him. He strained on his bindings again. His wrists were beginning to swell and the rope was tighter than ever, cutting deeper into his flesh. He ignored the pain. It was a trifle compared to what Jackson was enduring. Gold Tooth’s mouth was split in an obscene grin.

  He seemed in no hurry. He lit a cigarette from the flame and drew deeply on it before callously pressing the glowing tip against Jackson’s nipple.

  Val thought it impossible for a man to scream as loudly. Jackson’s mouth opened, the cords in his neck stretched as taut as steel wire, and an animal sound emerged up his throat. Val wanted to clamp his hands over his ears to block off the sound.

  Gold Tooth had finished the cigarette before he asked once again, “Where is your son?”

  Jackson’s pupils were the size of lead shot. He said nothing.

  This time the soft white flesh of his stomach was the target for the scorching flame. Jackson’s mouth snapped open but no sound came out. His body twitched and his eyes rolled back in his head as life left him.

  Gold Tooth lost it. He brought the flame up into the dead man’s face and watched the hair of the eyebrows and eyelids glow and shrivel. He kept the flame steady until the skin turned black and started to rend. Then, abruptly, he turned off the gas and faced Val.

  “Two down, one to go.”

  Val’s stomach fell through the floor of his abdomen. Was he referring to Donny Jackson, or to him?

  Gold Tooth handed T-shirt the stiletto blade, hilt first. “Cut him loose. Mister Chiefman’s coming with us.”

  “You sure? What about our orders?”

  “Fuck them. I’m through being treated like shit.”

  The stiletto was useless against the thick ropes and T-shirt had to fetch a carving knife from the kitchen. His legs were freed first, then his wrists. T-shirt pressed the kitchen knife to Val’s side and told him to stand up slowly.

  Gold Tooth stood in the kitchen doorway surveying the carnage, resting the shotgun on one shoulder like a hunter.

  “Have Mister Chiefman load them in the back of the pick-up. Find something heavy to attach to them. We’ll give the gators an early lunch.”

  T-shirt prodded Val forward with the kitchen knife. He told him to pick up the woman’s body.

  Val made sure his back obscured T-shirt’s view as he hunkered down beside her lifeless form. He slid a hand under her shoulder blades and raised her torso. She was as light as a sack of groceries. His other hand went into her apron pocket and came out holding the revolver. He let her drop and swung around to put two rounds in T-shirt’s chest. Without taking time to rise, he brought the gun to bear on Gold Tooth.

  For a big man the Haitian moved with surprising speed. He sidestepped out of sight into the kitchen. Val fired but the bullet smacked into the door jamb.

  The barrel of the shotgun poked around the door and Val dived behind the couch as double-ought shot ricochet off the iron-hard cypress boards of the floor. The couch wouldn’t provide much protection, but Gold Tooth needed to show himself if he wanted a clear shot. Val tried to listen for the creak of a floorboard, but his ears were still ringing from the gunfire.

  Three rounds fired, three left in the revolver. He had no idea how many Gold Tooth had in the pump-action. What if he had already left by the back door and was circling around?

  There was one way to find out. Val reached out a hand and grasped the telephone wire. He yanked on it and the telephone slid off its table and clattered onto the floor.

  Gold Tooth burst out of the kitchen at full pelt. His first shot shredded the back of the couch, his second blew the telephone into bits.

  Val fired once and caught Gold Tooth high in the left shoulder. He stumbled and crashed against the dresser, sending the stack of National Geographic magazines sprawling across the floor. Val emerged cautiously from behind the couch. Gold Tooth was already up on his knees, one arm hanging uselessly at his side, staring defiantly at Val and trying to rack the shotgun with his one good hand. Val shot him again. A spurt of blood burst from the right side of Gold Tooth’s chest. His fingers opened and the shotgun dropped to the floor.

  Moving slowly, the revolver held firmly in both hands, Val approached the kneeling man. He bent down, picked up the shotgun and threw it out the door.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  Gold Tooth swayed slightly but said nothing.

  “Tell me who sent you after Jackson and I’ll use my cell phone to call the paramedics? You might make it.”

  “Fuck you!”

  Val cocked the revol
ver and touched it to Gold Tooth’s temple. His knuckle whitened as he applied pressure on the trigger.

  “M’fin mouri,” Gold Tooth whispered and collapsed to the floor.

  Val reluctantly eased off the pressure.

  He checked for a pulse and lifted an eyelid. Gold Tooth’s prediction was wrong; he was still hanging in there. He retrieved his cell phone from the camera case and put a call in to the emergency services.

  After he was finished talking, Val remained rock still for a few moments, letting the final traces of cordite dissipate. A few ounces of pressure on the trigger was all that had stood between him and the fulfillment of the destiny which haunted him. What sort of monster had he become?

  His eyes slowly circled the room. Three people had died in this room within a short space of time. Two of them because they had a parent’s natural desire to protect their only child. He owed them some respect for that, but it wouldn’t stop him searching them or their place before the police arrived.

  The bedrooms were first. He was hoping to find a change of clothes for Donny or something that would tell him that at least he had been on the right track. The closets were crammed with the cast-off clothing. Donny’s parents were frugal people who appreciated the value of a dollar. He found nothing in either bedroom. Next stop was the living room and he spent some time going through the telephone numbers they kept in a pad on the table beside their phone. None of them jumped off the page at him. There was no point pocketing it, because the sheriff would be sure to relieve him of it.

  He discovered a 2x2 photograph in Roy Jackson’s trouser pocket, in the crease of five folded ten-dollar bills held in a silver money clip. The picture had been taken from some distance and without the benefit of a telephoto lens, but even so both the subject and background were discernible: Marie Duval on the sidewalk outside the restaurant where she had worked part-time. He tucked the picture into the wallet that held his shield and replaced the wallet in Mrs Jackson’s apron just as he heard the first siren.

  The parish sheriff was proud to be an elected official. He was a sixty-five-year-old, two hundred and seventy pound, former gas-station franchisee who had known the Jacksons all his life. He had attended the same high school as Rita Jackson, or Rita Kellerman as she had been then.

  He sat on the tailgate of his SUV, a plaited straw hat pushed back high on his head, and listened to Val’s story without interruption. One of his deputies had already ridden off in an ambulance with Gold Tooth.

  It was obvious to Val from the order and perceptiveness of his probing questions that the man didn’t take the responsibilities of his office lightly. It was, he told him right off, the biggest body-count homicide he had had to deal with in his fifteen years as sheriff, and he wasn’t about to take any short-cuts in his investigation.

  He knew all about Donny.

  “The New Orleans PD contacted my office and requested I watch out for him. They didn’t say anything about sending a detective down.”

  “I’m a campus cop, but I used to work homicide. Call Chief of Detectives Paul Larson at First District Homicide. He’ll vouch for me,” Val said, not at all sure that he would. Coming within a hair of blowing away the prime suspect in a New Orleans murder hunt was not the way to ingratiate yourself with Larson.

  “All in good time. I’m not through asking questions. Neither of the Haitians was carrying ID. Don’t suppose you can help me out with a couple of names?”

  “Afraid not. They left their car in town, maybe if you locate it, there’ll be something to help you get a fix on them.”

  “Any idea why they didn’t kill you?”

  “I can’t account for it.”

  To the sheriff’s way of thinking, two elderly, God-fearing people had been murdered in his parish, which was a tragedy but not one that he could reverse. The fact that one of the scumbags responsible was dead and the other in custody was right and proper and went a long way to balance things. But not all the way.

  “Ain’t a campus cop just some sort of glorified security guard? What gives you the right to come snooping around my parish without so much as a by your leave? There’s only one man has jurisdiction around these parts and that’s me!”

  Val tried to appear suitably chastened. “I thought it would be a routine stakeout. There was no point troubling you unless Donny Jackson showed up. I had no way of knowing it was going to explode in my face.”

  “That may be so son, but you’ll be riding back to town with me and cooling your heels in my office until I’m satisfied that your version of events checks out. That could take a while.”

  “How long?” Val asked irritably. “I have a lot of questions I want to put to Gold Tooth.”

  “You can forget all about doing that. If he lives — and the paramedics aren’t taking any bets that he will — the only person doing any talking with him will be me.”

  Val knew it would pointless to argue. There was no way the sheriff was going to bend the rules for him.

  “When will I be free to leave?”

  The sheriff mopped his forehead with a white handkerchief. “What’s your goddamn hurry? The buddies of those two Haitian goons will find you soon enough”

  The nearest crime scene team that the sheriff could call on was based in Morgan City. They made it to St Francis at midday and started work on the Jackson house soon after. The sheriff went with them and left Val in the supervision of a deputy for most of the afternoon. Val typed and signed a statement setting out the sequence of events. It must have tallied with the crime scene officer’s preliminary report, because shortly before six o’clock he was free to leave.

  “You’ll be notified about the date of the inquest,” the sheriff said as he walked him to his car, still parked in the boarding house lot. He handed over the binoculars and the camera case with Val’s shield and cell phone. “One of the crime scene officers mentioned that the revolver was cocked when he examined it, but that the last chamber was empty.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Rita was like the rest of her family. They all knew how to handle a gun. She would have kept the hammer down on an empty chamber.”

  “Guess I was pretty lucky then that two rounds were enough to stop him.”

  The sheriff turned his head around and fixed his knowing gaze on Val. “I reckon you was.”

  Val shook hands with him and said, “Will you answer one question for me before I leave? What work did Roy Jackson do?”

  The sheriff hesitated, then said, “He retired twelve months ago. Before that he worked for the power company.”

  “As what?”

  “He was a line man. Why do you ask?”

  “There was a picture of him and a bunch of guys I took for fellow workers on a table in the house. It had been shot in front of a Port-au-Prince hotel and it made me wonder what they were doing there. Haiti isn’t what you’d describe as a popular destination for conventions.”

  “You thinking there’s some connection with what happened this morning?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “I doubt it. Too long ago.” The sheriff tilted back his straw hat and grinned. “It was no convention he was on. The picture would have been taken the time Roy and a crowd of other Gulf States Power Company employees were sent to Haiti to lend a hand with repairs after Hurricane Diana hit. I remember it was all Roy talked about after he came back. It was his first time out of the States and he and the boys had a ball when they went down there. Put up in a hotel, living on expenses, cheap booze, and no wives to rag on them for six months. It was sometime before I was elected sheriff. Sixteen, seventeen years ago.”

  Closer to twenty-one, Val thought.

  CHAPTER TEN

  It took a motorist in a BMW flashing his lights and leaning on his car’s horn to snap Val out of his reverie just as he reached the outskirts of New Orleans. Lost in thought, he hadn’t noticed how dark it had grown. He switched on his headlights and paid attention to the road. For a while at least.

&nbs
p; Why would a man keep hidden in his pocket the picture of a young girl he had never met? More to the point: did that man have his son kill the girl’s mother? Short of running a DNA test, there was no way Val could prove that Roy Jackson was Marie Duval’s father, but he knew he was on the right track. What better explanation could there be for the child’s life being spared? Having a woman with whom you once had a brief affair killed was one thing; it was a different matter when it came to your own flesh and blood.

  Ten years later Roy Jackson may have learnt of his daughter’s academic achievements and asked his son, her half-brother, to snap a photograph of her. Maybe at last, Jackson may have thought, he had a child he could be proud of.

  Val had some of the answers, but not all. According to Marie Duval, her mother had been running on fear before she was killed. If she had been turning the screws on Jackson for money, then it was inconceivable she would have let her guard drop when Donny turned up. No, when Valerie Duval opened her door to Donny, she welcomed him as her savior, not her executioner. Who or what had been behind his about-face? Val’s money was on Arena Victory. But what problems could one lone and frightened woman pose that had left them no option but to have her killed?

  His phone was ringing when he reached home. It was Angie.

  “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to contact you since yesterday.”

  “Out of town.”

  “If you’re going to switch your cell phone off, couldn’t you at least let the station house know where you’re going? And what’s happened to the answering machine I gave you?”

  “What is it, Angie? I’m tired and I want to go to bed.”

  “I’m leaving Marcus.”

  If Angie thought he would be ecstatic at her revelation, she was mistaken. “Why? I thought the two of you were getting along great.”