Pegasus Descending

But the ones who do it with high-powered firearms in the mouth or razors high up on the forearms, not on the wrists, are often filled with unrelieved rage at themselves. Female suicides are seldom if ever found in the last category.

Was Cesaire Darbo

THE NEXT DAY our coroner, Koko Hebert, lumbered into my office. Koko was one of the saddest-looking human beings I had ever known. His body was shaped like a soft-sided pyramid. His breath wheezed in his chest. He stank of nicotine and beer sweat, and sometimes trailed an odor that was worse, one that made me think of a mortuary in Vietnam after the power had failed.

Koko’s cynicism and anger were palpable. But his son had been killed in Iraq, and I had come to believe that his daily assault on the sensibilities of others was his own strange way of asking for help.

The grass was green and the sun was shining outside my window, but when Koko spread his buttocks on a chair in front of my desk, the sun might just as well have gone into eclipse. He took a huge drag off his cigarette, his brow furrowing as though his inhalation of cancer-causing chemicals were a moment of metaphysical importance.

“Would you not smoke in here?” I said.

He took a coffee cup off my desk and ground out his cigarette in it. “You want the post on the Darbo

“I’m happy you came by.”

“Right. The lab call you yet?”

“Nope.”

“We swabbed both her hands. She was the shooter. It’s down as a suicide.”

“You’re sure?”

“You don’t have confidence in the atomic absorption test?”

“Let’s get something straight on this one, Koko. I appreciate the work you do. But I want the abrasive rhetoric out of my face.”

I could hear the hum of the air conditioner in the silence. “There is no false positive here. She had powder residue on both hands. She inverted the pistol and fired it straight into her forehead. It’s a suicide, plain and simple.”

“Her father said she didn’t drink or use. She was pla

“Maybe I was looking at the wrong tox screen. The one that had Yvo

“What do you get out of it, Koko?”

“Out of what?”

“Offending people, testing them.”

He scratched the inside of his thigh, as though a mosquito bite were itching him beyond any level of tolerance. “If I go to meetings, can I learn how to use psychobabble like that?” he said.

I let out my breath and rubbed my temples. “What’s the rest?” I asked.

“There is no ‘rest.’ She was drunk and stoned and she balled a bunch of guys who didn’t bother to use rubbers,” he said. “You’re wondering why a kid like that would kill herself?”

RIGHT AFTER KOKO left the office, our forensic chemist, Mack Bertrand, called from the Acadiana Crime Lab. Mack was a decent, cheerful, pipe-smoking family man and one of the best crime scene investigators I had ever known. “We ran the weapon in the Darbo

“Any other prints besides the DOA’s?”

“It was oiled and cleaned recently. There were a couple of smears, but not enough to run through AFIS. Where you going with this, Dave?”

“Probably nowhere.”

“It’s a suicide, podna. Her thumb pulled the trigger. Her fingerprints were on the back of the frame. I think she turned the pistol around and squeezed off one right into her face.”

“What’d you get out of her cell phone?”

“Mostly numbers of kids at New Iberia High. Nothing unusual. Except…”

“Go ahead, Mack.”

“She made two calls during the week to the home of Bello Lujan.”

In my mind’s eye I saw a sun-browned man wearing white jodhpurs, with swirls of black hair on his arms. At least that was Bello ’s image today, although I had known him in an earlier and much different incarnation. “Why would she be calling a guy like that?” I said.

“He’s got a kid at UL. Maybe Bello ’s kid and the vic knew each other.” Then Mack paused. “Dave?”

“Yeah?”

“The girl took her life. Nothing will undo that. Bello wasn’t born. He was poured out of a colostomy bag. Leave him alone.”

“That’s strong for you, Mack.”

“Not when it comes to Bello Lujan,” he replied.

HAVE YOU EVER SEEN SOMEONE cause a disastrous accident by driving so slowly that others are forced to pass him on a hill or curve? Or perhaps a driver ru

I looked at my watch. It was 11:05 and I still hadn’t pursued the matter of the dye-marked bills in the possession of Dallas Klein’s daughter. I also had a hit-and-run homicide case on my desk, three cold cases involving disappearances from ten years back, and a gangbanger shooting that had left two dope dealers on A

Welcome to small-town America in the spring of 2005.

Yvo

Went with him to City Park and threw bread to the ducks and fox squirrels. He put his windbreaker on my shoulders when it got cold. His cheeks were red as apples.

She had written on perhaps thirty pages of the book. She had used few names of people and no family names. The last entries seemed filled with happiness and romance and did not indicate any sense of emotional conflict that I could see. In fact, her handwriting and sentence structure and her general grasp of the world appeared to be those of a sensible and mature person. I looked at my watch and all the case files stacked on my desk and all the work sitting in my intake basket. Yvo