Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery (45 page)

Almost at his feet fat shapes exploded in every direction. Quail.

“I see . . . something!” she shouted. “Faster, Nick! Come on, stay with me! It’s still back there!”

He felt off balance, lame like a captive, intentionally hamstrung Quinahoa warrior, his bad arm and shoulder becoming more and more of a painful hindrance. A vicious cramp burrowed below his ribs, spreading, gnawing, making his breaths come shorter and shorter. His body suddenly weighed many tons. He seemed to be walking against an undertow pulling him toward the center of the earth. Panicked, he glanced down to make sure he wasn’t up to his hips in quicksand.

He’d skipped his jogging for a few weeks before his courthouse fall. A teenager could lay off for almost a month and remain in top shape; a forty-five-year-old man couldn’t.

They weren’t heading back the way they’d come. Nick had no idea where they were, where they were going. He thought he could hear footsteps behind him, gaining. Skilled footsteps of a hunter who knew these pine thickets, a hunter whose deadly pursuit made scarcely as much noise as a pine needle falling.

The Golden Trace made a sharp curve.

Nick looked back, grimacing in pain. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he detected in the dark green-and-brown shadows a large animal in pursuit.
A cougar?

He faced forward again, peering through the telltale tunnel vision of oxygen deprivation. Sparks fired in his peripheral vision. Holly had really turned on the speed; Nick struggled to keep up. He couldn’t do this much longer.

The voice of reason upbraided him:
Fool! Coward! Stop, turn, face your enemy
. The more ancient voice of his pre-human ancestors screamed:
Run! One more step, one more step, and another one! Run! Run or die!

Something thwacked into a tree where a moment before Holly’s head had been. Seconds later Nick was even with the tree—an atlatl spear had skewered it. And then the tree was a blur as he pushed his body beyond exhaustion.

Suddenly they broke from the trees into a bright openness. A field? Nick had a vague sense that he knew this place, or had dreamed of it. The world bounced wildly as if through a shaky lens attached to his befuddled consciousness. A meadow, those rounded grassy hillocks so old they looked natural. The ancient Katogoula burial mounds, on Tadbull land!

And there are people over there. Men in uniform. Lots of them. Why? Forget it. Must make it to those men! Must make it to the mounds, must make it! Faster, faster!
. . .

Now everything was upside down and he fell into bluebonnet immensity.

When he opened his eyes, he saw an eclipse.

No, that wasn’t quite it.

A large, round, dark face. Sheriff Big John Higbee, looking down at him. Holly’s smaller face floated beside the sheriff ’s head, in the blue and yellow and white of the afternoon Louisiana sky.

Holly’s head grew larger and blotted out everything else. Nick felt lips on his sweat-streaming forehead. In another moment, he realized he was flat on his back in tall, yellow grass. Something had been burning nearby, possibly the grass, he was thinking.

“We’re safe now, Nick.” Holly’s face was even lovelier from her recent exertion. Half dreaming, half awake, Nick called up a vision of her after their lovemaking.
A week ago? God, it seems like centuries!

“One of you men bring this man some cold Gatorade,” Big John called out. And then to Nick: “Son, you better take up something safer, like alligator wrestling. This genealogy’s getting to be a hazardous line of work.”

Nick sat up.

“Looked like that movie with Cornel Wilde,” Big John said. “What was it,
Naked Prey?
Uh-huh, just like that. I always rooted for the Africans, you know what I’m sayin’. Yep, that’s what you two looked like to me. ’Cept I didn’t see any Africans chasing after you. Fact, I didn’t see
anyone
chasing after you. You two out for a jog?”

Holly explained what they’d been doing, and what had happened.

“Sheriff,” Nick said, “you asked me to tell you if I found anything in my genealogical research pointing to a motive for murder. Today I—”

“We,” Holly said.

“
We
found something important.”

“Well, seeing as how you picked the middle of my crime scene for your siesta, I guess you could say you’re officially part of this investigation. Give the man a hand, Ray Doyle.”

“Crime scene?” Nick said, getting to his feet with the help of Holly and a young plainclothes detective.

Nick had collapsed on top of the final two letters of the puzzling protest burned into the grass. “‘Casi-NO,’” he read aloud. “What does it mean?”

“He’d like to know,” Big John said, pointing to the corpse being lowered from the tree. “And so would I.”

“Oh, damn!” Holly said, slapping her back.

“You hurt, miss?” asked Ray Doyle, with flirtatious eagerness.

“I’m all right, Lieutenant Sprague. Thanks. It’s just that I dropped my stupid camera back there in the woods.”

Nick gave a drunk’s loud laugh that turned into a lurching cough. When he could stand up straight again he unclenched his right hand and showed Holly the sweat-soaked ball of yellow paper he’d clutched during their flight through the forest.

Nick grinned. “See. Nothing beats good written notes.” He was too weak and nauseated to gloat any more.

Holly snatched the ball of limp paper and carefully opened it. She read the inscription from the headstone Nick had transcribed just before the attack:

Amalie Chenerie Madeul
Wife of Vincent, Sr.
Born 1835
Died Feb. 5, 1893

Sadly Do We Bid Goodbye
But Know Her Spirit
To Heaven Will Fly
No More A Slave Submit.

“I really hate it when he’s right,” Holly said to Big John.

CHAPTER 32

T
wo mugs of coffee in his huge hands, Sheriff Higbee shut his office door with a shoe, muting the tumult of his busy staff outside. He handed Nick a mug and walked to a window.

Outside, protesters marched in antagonistic counter circles at the foot of the broad, gently rising front steps of the Sangfleuve Parish Courthouse. A live-remote truck from one of the local television stations had arrived and now the crew was setting up for a report in the six
P
.
M
. news. A sectioned aluminum pole topped by an antenna rose in slow jerks as a young technician scurried around the truck.

Otherwise, the late Friday afternoon was calm in downtown Armageddon; traffic lights changed over deserted streets.

“Yep, nothing like a few murders and the smell of cash to get the wheels of democratic dissent rolling,” Big John said. He pointed to a corner of the newer combined parking garage and jail annex attached to the rear of the courthouse. “At least it’ll give the prisoners something to watch besides
Duck Dynasty
and
Real Housewives of Atlanta
.”

From where he sat, Nick could see prisoners’ faces behind tinted glass and bars in the jail atop the garage.

“That marcher there, the one pumping the sign about moneychangers in the temple,” Big John continued, “he’s the prime mover of our anti-gambling group—former gambling addict and convicted
embezzler. The pro-gambling group giving him dirty looks is headed by a pawnshop owner; now, he expects to get rich from hocked family microwaves. The black man there leading his little flock is a fire-brand preacher who once marched with Dr. King—so he claims; says a casino’ll victimize us poor, powerless black folk, and incidentally take money out of the church till, which buys his fancy cars and clothes. And over on the side, well, that’s our local white supremacist loudmouth; throws his hood into most elections. Wants a reservation for the white people. Gets about twenty votes, mostly his in-laws and cousins—far as I can tell, there’s not a frog hair’s difference between those two groups.”

Murder was the topic of their meeting. Nick felt a bit guilty enjoying Big John’s cutting analysis of the protesters. But the sheriff seemed to appreciate the cathartic value of humor, and Nick, unwinding for the first time after his wild day, didn’t hesitate to laugh along. He suspected, in fact, that putting him at ease was the sheriff ’s intention.

Big John lowered the great bulk of his body into the oversize high-back executive chair behind his desk—the desk of an important man who each day presided over a non-stop assembly line of thick files affecting many lives. “Where were we? Oh, yeah. You were dishing out some pretty powerful accusations. You say you found possible motives—and I stress
possible
—in the family histories of two upstanding citizens in my jurisdiction: Luevenia Silsby and Nugent Chenerie.”

“They’re both hiding something,” Nick stated with assurance. “I believe I know what it is in each case.”

“Let me see if I got this straight. Miss Luevie is a descendant of the Vulture Cult, the ancient caste in charge of rites for the dead, to see them on to the next world, and so forth. The Vulture Cult wasn’t even originally Katogoula, you’ve discovered, but some tribe called Yaknelousa.”

“Correct,” Nick said.

“But Miss Luevie’s all hung up about this, right? Doesn’t want anyone to know, ’cause she thinks it might bring dishonor on her, her husband, her business, what have you. And she thinks if she scares everybody enough with all these supposedly supernatural doings that the tribe will just pull down the blinds and tell all these meddling outsiders—like you—to skedaddle. That about sum it up for dear Miss Luevie?”

“Perfectly. I have convincing documentary evidence of her family connection to the cult. We found the crucial link in the Tchekalaya Forest cemetery, just before we were attacked. And I have reason to believe she was the one who ambushed me on the stairs.”

“It’s a big leap from throwing a trash can to killing someone. All right, let’s move on to subject number two. Nooj Chenerie.” Big John leaned back, cocking his massive arms behind his head. Nick thought of some huge crossbow shooting the sheriff ’s keen mind across the centuries of the wildlife agent’s heritage. “Nooj holds some twisted allegiance to another tribe altogether. Help me out here.”

“The Quinahoa,” Nick said. “Around two hundred and fifty years ago, the Katogoula, allied with the Yaknelousa, defeated and enslaved the Quinahoa.”

“Nooj is still pissed off about that, is he? So much so that he could be the one running around dressed up like a cougar, taking revenge for the disgrace his extinct people suffered at the hands of the other two tribes, lo those many years back. And his family has a tradition of using poisons to hunt, you say?”

Nick agreed enthusiastically, impressed that the sheriff hadn’t missed a word. “Most of the Quinahoa died in the battle, along with lots of Yaknelousa. Some Quinahoa escaped into the woods, where they plotted a counterattack for a while. The captive Quinahoa were made slaves, but over time they assimilated with the other two tribes to form what the Europeans called the Katogoula Tribe.

“Nooj has Quinahoa and Katogoula ancestors on his paternal and maternal sides,” Nick continued. “We found compelling evidence at the Quinahoa cemetery in the forest. A woman with the last name Madeul is buried there; she was born a Chenerie. There were other Cheneries and a few Bellarmines—his mother’s family—but I didn’t have time to record them. There’s little question both lines of his family had Quinahoa roots; this was a source of pride as well as festering resentment for generations.”

“That’s sure a lot to infer from a poem on a headstone,” Big John observed skeptically.

“A rare public moment of emotional sincerity from Nooj’s family.”

Big John rubbed the back of his neck. “I got to hand it to you, Nick, you make the improbable sound almost convincing. Nooj sure could handle a forestry fire can without incinerating himself; and he and Miss Luevie both know the forest better than most. But here’s where I get a little lost. Why’d either one of them pick Carl Shawe and the Dusongs to kill? And why is Travis Corbett part of this?—he’s not even Katogoula. He was the poor bastard we found speared to a tree at the Indian mounds. You might not remember that, considering the state you were in. The spear didn’t kill him, but it was a different design altogether. Authentic in every detail, but newly made, bigger, like the ones aimed at you and your pretty redhead in the woods. Tommy says these spears were probably flung from a more serious atlatl than the one stolen from his garage closet. Again, Miss Luevie or Nooj could’ve managed that just fine . . . if you’re not just barking at the moon.”

“This is where my facts end and speculation begins,” Nick said. “As a genealogist, I’ve learned to keep those ideas to myself, until I can prove them. A murder investigation has different rules. It’s more than just filling in some empty spaces on a pedigree chart.”

“‘Speculation,’ huh? And here I thought you been makin’ up the whole thing! . . . Just kiddin’ you, man. I have great respect for what you do, this family-tree business. So go ahead, climb out on that limb.”

“I keep coming back to the idea we talked about at Three Sisters Pantry a few weeks ago,” Nick said. “Carl was a black sheep, a loner. The Dusongs were childless. This murderer feels part of the tribe and is making careful decisions about his victims. The Shawe Twins survived their attack, as did their father, Tommy.”