Every Dead Thing

Angel looked unhappy with the thrust of Rachel’s words. “But what about the way most of us react to death?” he began. “It makes us want to live. It even makes us want to screw.”

Rachel glanced at me, then returned to her notes.

“I mean,” continued Angel, “what does this guy want us to do? Stop eating, stop loving, because he’s got a thing about death and he thinks the next world is going to be something better?”

I picked up the illustration of the Pietà again and examined the detail of the bodies, the carefully labeled interiors, and the placid expressions on the faces of the woman and the man. The faces of the Traveling Man’s victims had looked nothing like this. They were contorted in their final agonies.

“He doesn’t give a damn about the next world,” I said. “He’s only concerned with the damage he can do in this one.”

I stood and joined Angel at the window. Beneath us, the dogs scampered and sniffed in the courtyard. I could smell cooking and beer and imagined that, beneath it all, I could smell the mass of humanity itself, passing us by.

“Why hasn’t he come after us? Or you?” It was Angel. His words were directed at me, but it was Rachel who answered.

“Because he wants us to understand,” she said. “Everything he’s done is an attempt to lead us to something. All of this is an effort to communicate, and we’re the audience. He doesn’t want to kill us.”

“Yet,” said Louis softly.

Rachel nodded once, her eyes locked on mine. “Yet,” she agreed quietly.

I arranged to meet Rachel and the others later in Vaughan ’s. Back in my room, I called Woolrich and left a message on his machine. He returned the call within five minutes and told me he’d meet me at the Napoleon House within the hour.

He was as good as his word. Shortly before ten he appeared, dressed in off-white chinos and carrying a matching jacket over his arm, which he put on as soon as he entered the bar.

“Is it chilly in here, or is it just the reception?” There was sleep caked at the corners of his eyes and he smelled sour and unwashed. He was no longer the assured figure I recalled from Je

He ordered an Abita for himself and another mineral water for me.

“You want to tell me why you seized materials from the hotel?”

“Don’t look on it as a seizure, Bird. Consider it as borrowing.” He sipped at his beer and looked at himself in the mirror. He didn’t seem to like what he saw.

“You could just have asked,” I said.

“Would you have given it to me?”

“No, but I’d have discussed what was there.”

“I don’t think that Durand would have been too impressed with that. Frankly, I wouldn’t have been too impressed either.”

“Durand called it? Why? You have your own profilers, your own agents on it. Why were you so sure that we could add something?”

He spun around on his stool and leaned close to me, close enough that I could smell his breath. “Bird, I know you want this guy. I know you want him for what he did to Susan and Je

“I need to know what you know,” I said. “What are you holding back about this guy?”

We were almost head to head now. Then Woolrich grimaced and leaned back.

“Holding back? Jesus, Bird, you’re unbelievable. Here’s something: Byron’s wife? You want to know what she majored in when she was at college? Art. Her thesis was on Renaissance art and depictions of the body. You think that might have included medical representations, that maybe that was where her ex got some of his ideas?”

He took a deep breath and a long swig of beer. “You’re bait, Bird. You know it, and I know it. And I know something else too.” His voice was cold and hard. “I know you were at Metairie. There’s a guy in the morgue with a bullet hole in his head and the cops have the remains of a ten millimeter Smith & Wesson bullet that was dug out of the marble behind him. You want to tell me about that, Bird? You want to tell me if you were alone in Metairie when the killing started?”

I didn’t reply.

Then: “You screwing her, Bird?”

I looked at him. There was no mirth in his eyes and he wasn’t smiling. Instead, there was hostility and distrust. Whatever I needed to know about Edward Byron and his ex-wife, I would have to find out myself. If I had hit him then, we would have hurt each other badly. I didn’t waste any more words on him and I didn’t look back as I left the bar.

I took a cab to Bywater and stopped off right outside Vaughan ’s Lounge on the corner of Dauphine and Lesseps. I paid the five-dollar cover at the door. Inside, Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Swingers were lost in a rhapsody of New Orleans brass and there were plates of red beans scattered on the tables. Rachel and Angel were dancing around chairs and tables while Louis looked on with a long-suffering expression. As I approached, the tempo of the music slowed a little and Rachel made a grab for me. I moved with her for a while as she stroked my face, and I closed my eyes and let her. Then I sipped a soda and thought my own thoughts until Louis moved from his seat and sat beside me.

“You didn’t have much to say back in Rachel’s room,” I said.

He nodded. “It’s bullshit. All this stuff, the religion, the medical drawings, they’re all just trappings. And maybe he believes them and maybe he don’t. Sometimes it’s nothing to do with mortality, it’s to do with the beauty of the color of meat.”

He took a sip of beer.

“And this guy just likes red.”

Back at the Flaisance, I lay beside Rachel and listened to her breathing in the dark.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “About our killer.”

“And?”

“I think the killer may not be male.”

I raised myself up on my elbows and looked at her. I could see the whites of her eyes, wide and bright.

“Why?”

“I’m not sure, exactly. There just seems to be something almost feminine about the sensibility of whoever is committing these crimes, a… sensitivity to the interco

She shook her head and then was silent again.

“Are we becoming a couple?” she asked at last.

“I don’t know. Are we?”

“You’re avoiding the question.”

“No, not really. It’s not one that I’m used to answering, or that I ever thought that I’d have to answer again. If you’re asking if I want us to stay together, then the answer is yes, I do. It worries me a little, and I’m bringing in more baggage than the handlers at JFK, but I want to be with you.”

She kissed me softly.

“Why did you stop drinking?” she asked, adding: “Since we’re having this heart-to-heart.”

I started at the question. “Because if I took one drink now, I’d wake up in Singapore with a beard a week later,” I replied.