The North Face of the Heart - Dolores Redondo Page 0,148
waited patiently, her eyes on Dupree. At last, he answered. “Some think it’s nonsense, a meaningless expression like ‘abracadabra.’”
“And the others?”
“That it’s a curse. An invocation of the devil. Bazagrá, Bazagré, Bazagreá—from Beelzebub, Ba’al Zebub, or Baal, the ancient god of the Canaanites and Philistines.”
Amaia continued in a prosecutorial tone, “What are those marks on your chest? They are just like the ones on Jacob’s grandfather.”
“They’re from the man who abducted my sister and cousin that night during Betsy. I grabbed his leg and wouldn’t let go. Nana has the same scars.”
“All right,” she accepted that odd account. “But there’s one thing I need you to explain, because it’s vital for me to understand. I see how an investigation might be shelved without finding out who murdered a drug trafficker. What I can’t get my head around is the fact that the FBI stopped investigating the murder of one of its own.”
Dupree straightened up a bit, supporting himself on his right forearm. His features contracted in a grimace of intense pain. He gasped. “It has less to do with the murder than with the way Carlino died.”
“I considered that,” she admitted. “And I concluded he might have been doing something illegal. Maybe, just maybe, shutting down the investigation was a way to draw a curtain over something scandalous.”
Bull couldn’t contain himself. “Nothing could be further from the truth! Agent Carlino died in the line of duty. And in a way, so did Jerome Lirette. He died carrying out his duty to his family.”
Dupree raised a hand to hold Bull back. “When I joined the investigation, I immediately saw how the account from Lirette and his mother matched my memories of when they took my sister, my cousin, and the other girls. Jerome was getting frantic because the police insisted on treating Médora’s abduction as a drug-related kidnapping. But knowing what we were confronting and where to look wasn’t enough. Then we found Médora’s brooch in that shantytown in the swamp.” Dupree took a moment to catch his breath.
Bull took over. “They say the swamp has eyes, and they’re not referring only to the animals out there. Lots of Cajuns live there in settlements, in houseboats, or aboard their own boats. But nobody knew anything. We could hardly believe it. The folks in the swamp have a kind of sixth sense; they’re always letting the sheriff’s department know about outsiders. And they also report things that can’t be explained.”
Charbou was intrigued. “How’s that?”
“Before I joined the homicide squad in New Orleans, I was a deputy sheriff in Terrebonne. Folks there are superstitious, and farther out in the swamps, they’re even more so. Living in the swamp gives you a whole different idea of the universe, and it wasn’t exceptional for the sheriff’s department to have to look into a report that somebody saw a rougarou or that lutins were active. But in the Lirette family’s case, nobody’d heard or seen anything at all. We were surprised.”
Johnson spoke. “Rougarou? Lutin?”
“The rougarou or loup-garou is a swamp monster, sort of like a wolf-man. The lutins are a little harder to explain. Folks think they’re mischievous spirits, kind of like goblins. And then there’s also fifolets, the ghost lights over the swamp. Saint Elmo’s fire probably, but Cajuns see them as evil spirits, ghosts of the drowned who’re drifting in the currents down in the bayous.”
Johnson was astonished. “The Terrebonne police responded to those kinds of reports? When I was looking into criminal religious sects, we usually found local authorities more skeptical than not.”
“I guarantee you that if you’d been living here for a while, none of it would seem ridiculous. The swamp is alive. If, as a law officer, you work in cooperation with an ethnic group like the Roma or Cajuns or Native Americans, you have to understand their customs, or you’ll be completely lost. And besides, it’s no secret that south Louisiana is a land of voodoo.”
“‘Voodoo’?” Amaia echoed him, skeptical. “You mean witchcraft?”
Bull grimaced, uncomfortable, but answered her with great seriousness. “Voodoo is the major religion in countries like Togo and Benin. The Caribbean version is the official religion of Haiti, because the slaves brought it with them from Africa hundreds of years ago. It got mixed up with Christianity and spawned cults. Santería, for example, or candomblé and Umbanda. And, yes,” he said, looking at Johnson, “you can bet your life the local police are going to accept calls and reports of any kind of suspicious activity. When a