Mark Kaddouri liked to drive in the country with the windows down. It was a chilly dawn in January so he had the heat on, but it was coming through just the lower vents. His toes were warm and there was a cool breeze on his cheeks, and that’s just the way he liked it. The bayou had a fresh, green smell to it, a fertile tang in the air that he couldn’t find enough of in the city.
He sipped his coffee and pinched off a chunk from one of the butter milk donuts Mas had laid out on some napkins up on the dashboard. She sat beside him, bundled up in her cashmere pullover, idling putting on her lip balm and nursing a latte. It wasn’t her usual brew; she just felt like a change of pace. Kiddie coffee, he called it at the drive-through. Coffee for people who don’t like coffee. She slugged him on the shoulder, and it was the first time they had ever heard Johnson laugh.
He was riding in the back seat, sucking down a large dose of caffeine through a big straw he jammed through the hole on the rim of the lid. Mas teased him about it, but Johnson explained to her in excruciating detail how a straw radiates just enough heat to cool the coffee down to just the right temperature, and it deposited the coffee on the middle part of your tongue, which kept your lips and the tip of your tongue from getting scorched. Plus, you don’t have to hold the cup to your lips and tip it back to drink, which comes in handy when you’re driving because that way you don’t block your view...
Mas groaned at his non-stop disquisition, but Kaddouri mentally filed it away for future use. He singed his bottom lip something nasty on his first sip, on the way out of the drive-through when they hit the speed bump, and it was just getting back to normal. Maybe Johnson wasn’t quite as nutty as they thought he was.
Her phone rang. She unholstered it from her belt, saw who it was, and answered it. “Hi, Mom... Yeah, tomorrow night will be fine... Okay, I’ll call you... Love you, too. Bye.”
She hung up as they slowed down and turned into a cracked and potholed asphalt driveway. It curved upslope and out of sight between a gauntlet of overgrown vegetation. After more than thirty years, what had once been two rows of neatly pruned ornamental shrubs lining a wide driveway had grown into a pair of fat, towering hedgerows that scraped both sides of the Land Cruiser and obscured their view.
Kaddouri winced as the branches slid over his buffed paint job. His detailer would tease him for it, but what the hell. The man needed the work. And anyway, it was cheaper to fix than bullet holes.
They rounded a gentle curve to the left, and as they did the hedge-row on the right ended, giving way to a meadow of young trees, tangled with clinging kudzu vines and draped with moss, and clogged with a tossed salad of undergrowth. Years ago, it had been a front lawn.
The driveway led into what was once an asphalt parking lot, but wild grasses had pushed through the cracks, widening them, and then some saplings had come through the cracks as well, so that the parking lot was now a slightly less verdant extension of the meadow, with chunks of asphalt mixed into its spongy mulch.
Kaddouri rolled past the end of a concrete wheelchair ramp, overgrown like everything else, and parked before a set of wide concrete steps choked with vegetation. The steps terminated at the front doors of the Bayou Memorial Clinic. The plate glass windows were long gone, and the pair of aluminum-framed doors was sprung open. What Mother Nature hadn’t damaged, vandals had. They got out of the car with their coffees and looked around.
The light poles of the old parking lot were completely smothered in flowering vines. The small parking structure nearby had taken a direct hit from the tornado and was now just a jumble of concrete slabs and rusted cars, overgrown and tangled with vines. A sapling was making a go of it up on the roof, where the surrounding trees had dropped their leaves for over three decades, building a thick bed of mulch on the concrete.
Most of the asphalt shingles were missing from the clinic roof, and the ones that were left had curled up and died in the sun ages ago. The plywood beneath them was delaminated and swollen from years of exposure. The clapboard siding of the old building was fatally compromised by the encroaching vines, which grew back out of the cracks and made the place look like an Ivy League dormitory in desperate need of a gardener. Most of the windows were busted out. Faded, tattered drapes fluttered in the breeze.
Jeez, Mas thought. Turn your back on Mother Nature, and she’ll walk right over you.
Kaddouri’s phone rang, and he answered it. “Detective Kaddouri, NOPD... Yes, sir...”
He listened to the news and hung up, looking at Mas. “The archbishop’s chauffeur is dead. His wife just called it in.”
She nodded, digesting the news, not particularly surprised. “What was the cause of death?”
Kaddouri shrugged. “Osborn’s performing an autopsy. We’ll know soon.”
Johnson was busy writing the clinic’s address – 5040 – in his notepad. As he contemplated the number, his hands began to shake and he became more agitated by the second. He had been studying Bible codes for almost three decades now and knew exactly what the number referred to. It had been right there in the case files for all these years, but somehow it didn’t register on him until this moment. Sweet Jesus, he thought. Sweet Jesus...
They were watching him, and when Mas caught his eye, he shrunk into himself and stuffed the notepad in his jacket pocket.
But it wasn’t something he could share with them. Not yet. She scowled at the retired agent, out of patience.
“Dammit, Peter! SPIT IT OUT!!”
He didn’t respond and glanced at Kaddouri for some guy help, but just like before, he could see that Kaddouri was clearly on her side, and not his. Johnson looked back to her and swallowed. He was on his own.
“Come on!” she fumed. “I’ve been holding onto my sanity for the last five years! No more riddles. No more cryptic crap! I want answers. Give.”
He took a long, deliberate draw of coffee through his straw to buy some time as he collected himself, until the straw slurped at the bottom of his cup. His last prop was gone. He looked at her and took a deep breath before he spoke. “This is all much deeper than you can possibly imagine,” he told her.
“Try me,” she shot back. “I got one hell of an imagination.”
His lips twitched in a ghost of a smile, hearing her choice of words, and he looked at the dilapidated building. “It all leads right back here, to the clinic.”
“Yeah, the twelve Christmas babies,” she said impatiently. “That’s why we’re here, Johnson.”
Fareed Aly was victim number eleven, but Mas said twelve because she strongly suspected that the massacre at the Church of the Rebirth had to do with another Christmas baby who was somewhere, and still unaccounted for. Kaddouri agreed with her on that point, and so did Johnson. But now all of a sudden, Johnson was shaking his head.
“Thirteen,” he told her. “Not twelve. Thirteen.”