The North Face of the Heart - Dolores Redondo Page 0,150

friend’s terrible wound. It looked like they’d blasted him point blank with a shotgun. All I saw was a deep cavity with irregular borders that shivered inward with each breath he tried to take. My partner struggled to speak as I tore off my shirt and stuffed it into the wound. ‘If you follow him, he’ll tear your heart out,’ he said.

“Carlino was alive all the way to the hospital. We drove him to Houma and evacuated him to Baton Rouge by helicopter. I was with him all the way; it took about twenty minutes. He knew he was dying. I kept holding his hand and talking to him; he lost consciousness mere seconds after the helicopter landed. They hooked him up to the emergency room monitors, but it was no use; he was dead. Carlino was a young man, only thirty-three, so the doctor refused to give up. He used the defibrillator several times, but got no result, so he pushed the paddles into the wound to touch the heart muscle. When he did, he couldn’t believe what he found. Agent Carlino had no heart.”

“That’s impossible!” Charbou protested.

Johnson, deeply affected, said, “I don’t think Charbou means that this kind of crime—or sacrifice or ceremony, whatever the hell you want to call it—can’t exist. But the victim couldn’t possibly remain alive for that length of time.”

“That’s not all,” Dupree said unhappily, his failing voice betraying his fatigue. “Agent Carlino’s body continued to show cerebral activity for another forty-eight hours. And four days later, the medical examiner had to stop the autopsy because some of his organs reacted to his scalpel as if they were still alive, just as Jerome Lirette’s severed head had seemed to be. Both bodies were cremated.

“I delivered a detailed report countersigned by the Terrebonne sheriff and by Detective Jason Bull of the Homicide Section of the New Orleans police. Lirette’s mother also made a formal, notarized statement. And for that, they locked her up in a psychiatric ward for a very long time. I saw her just the other day on a balcony in Bourbon Street, but I didn’t recognize her at first. From what she said, I don’t think she ever recovered.” He looked at Bull. “Four hours after I turned in my report, my superior officers summoned me and insisted I rewrite it and omit any detail that couldn’t be explained rationally. I did.”

Amaia looked away. She, too, knew quite enough about giving accounts that omitted the irrational and inexplicable.

52

TRAITEUR

The swamp

The SUV and boat trailer were waiting at the naval dock as promised. During the seventy-mile drive southwest along US 90, they’d left Médora secured in the boat, stiff and unmoving as the menacing figurehead of a pirate ship, because Charbou had said he’d rather tie himself to the hood than have her at his side in such a cramped space. The team left the SUV parked outside a deserted settlement of ramshackle houses somewhere near Houma and continued by Zodiac.

The swamp sucked up the daylight as soon as they moved into it from the open water. Amaia had never been in swampland before, but the sensation was similar to being in the forest of Baztán. Dupree’s account had transported her through time to the forest and a long-ago night she thought she’d managed to forget. She remembered all too clearly the awesome beauty and harrowing terror of that night, and a shiver ran up her spine.

Dupree’s high fever had returned. His forehead was burning hot when they carried him aboard the Zodiac. He had to fight to stay awake, lifting his head from time to time to suggest landmarks to Bull, though knowing they were virtually useless in a vast area where almost all reference points had been swallowed up. The sun, though low in the sky, still burned fiercely. It would set in an hour, and they all began to dread navigating the shaded, overhung domain of the great swamp by night. Amaia felt a chill, and she began to wonder if it was a sign that she too was developing a fever.

Bill Charbou had just suggested returning to civilization when they saw the camp.

It was the strangest place Amaia had ever seen. There were three houses built on pontoons, either anchored to the swamp floor or secured with heavy chains to big trees. Because of the high water, their roofs almost touched the undersides of the high crowns of the trees. Tied up to these improvised floating docks were at least