The North Face of the Heart - Dolores Redondo Page 0,149
belief system is so deeply embedded in a culture, it’s going to influence things. You have to accept some rituals you might normally find distasteful or disturbing, like animal sacrifice, midnight meetings, tomb desecration, corpses stolen from their graves—”
“That’ll do.” Johnson held up a hand to stop him.
“Jerome screwed up,” Dupree said. “His sister had been gone for more than a week, and we’d turned up absolutely nothing. No one had seen a thing, or even worse, if they had—as we suspected—they weren’t going to squeal. So, without telling us, Jerome offered a twenty-thousand-dollar reward for information about Samedi. Twenty thousand bucks is a tidy little fortune in those parts. He put out the word he was ready to pay that much, and it spread like wildfire.
“We’d been trying to contact Lirette for hours, with no success. Late that morning, we went to his house. His mother was scared out of her wits, a shotgun in her hands, but she finally opened the door to us. You couldn’t blame the poor woman. She told us her son wasn’t home. Jerome knew the hospital was going to release his mother that morning, but he hadn’t come to pick her up. She was sure something terrible had happened. We thought so too; everybody knew Jerome Lirette was devoted to his family. He wouldn’t have abandoned his mother, especially right after losing his sister and his grandmother. We called the sheriff and were about to send search parties out when an anonymous caller told us where we could find his body.
“At practically the same moment, Jerome’s mother called us in hysterics with a message her son left for us. We thought maybe someone was playing a practical joke on us. Or somebody interested in the reward had called her with a made-up story. We split up. I went with the sheriff, Detective Bull, and some deputies to where the tipster said we’d find Lirette’s body; Carlino went to talk with Jerome’s mother.”
“It was a trap,” Charbou guessed.
“No. No, it wasn’t, and that’s the strangest part of it. Jerome had left us a note at his mother’s house about the reward he’d offered. And we found Lirette’s body exactly where the caller said it would be. He’d been decapitated. They’d nailed his headless torso to a tree trunk in a dreary swamp. He was naked.”
“What about Carlino?” Johnson asked.
Dupree exhaled completely. “When we got there, Agent Carlino was lying full length on Lirette’s porch, a terrible wound in his chest. He was still alive. Six feet away, carefully planted on the top porch step, was Jerome’s head. I leaned close to my partner. He was trying his best to say something. The blood gushing from his mouth choked off his words; I tried to stop him from talking, but he was desperate to tell me something. I pressed my ear to his mouth and finally understood what he was saying: ‘Lirette is alive.’
“He was talking about Jerome, which was insane, considering that the man’s decapitated head was there in full sight. I thought the shock of his injury was making Carlino delusional, so I answered, ‘Sorry I was too late. Lirette is dead.’
“He shook his head and coughed up more blood. ‘No, no, he’s alive,’ he said, waving toward the head over on the top step. The cut through the neck was jagged and messy, as if Jerome’s head had been torn off instead of cut. I could see tendons and tissue spread out from the neck, exactly what I’d expect to see if a head was ripped off a body. The skin was blueish white, gray in some places. His mouth was half-open, a swollen white tongue protruded from between his lips. His eyes were closed, and there was hardly any trace of the handsome Jerome Lirette I’d known. But it was Jerome, there was no doubt about that.
“And right then, that decapitated head opened its eyes and looked at me. The tongue slipped back into the thing’s mouth, and the lips quivered as if it were trying to say something.”
Dupree stopped to watch for Amaia’s reaction; she nodded, accepting his story without question. “I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I was deafened by the mother’s screams inside the house and stunned by that vision. My partner grabbed my hand to attract my attention. I leaned over close to try to make out what Carlino was saying. ‘Samedi ripped my heart out. He took it with him.’