David called it in, and not long after, another helicopter arrived, this one carrying the captain, an assistant medical examiner he’d brought from Houston, and a small, two-man forensic team. David did all the talking, leaving me to stare at Buckshot’s body in the road, covered by a white sheet. The assistant M.E. pulled away the sheet and began processing the body, removing Buckshot’s burned clothing, picking up the fragments to be sealed inside airtight paint-type containers. Looking at it as if it were just another crime scene, I understood they wanted to preserve the evidence, to check the fabric for accelerants like gasoline. On another level, it wasn’t just another crime scene, and it was one I’d never forget. After the forensic team finished, Buckshot’s corpse was wrapped in the sheet, zipped into a white body bag, and loaded onto the helicopter.
In the morgue, the M.E.s would compare dental records, but I had little doubt that what they’d determine was that the burned corpse was all that remained of my dear friend.
“Sarah, we need to talk,” the captain said, standing over me. His face sagged, and he looked a decade older than he had that same morning, when I’d dropped the longhorn case in Buckshot’s lap and taken off to try to help find Joey Warner. Now Buckshot was dead, murdered. Perhaps it was my fault. After all, I’d deserted him. And the boy? We suspected Benoit had him, but we were no closer to finding him.
“We don’t have anything on this guy who’s been calling himself Alex Benoit, no photos, nothing to identify him,” the captain said. “And he’s smart. We dispatched a couple of squads to a house the folks at the Heritage Society were letting him camp out in while he was working at the plantation, an old Victorian about half an hour west of here, but by the time our guys got there, there’d been an explosion. The place, like the mansion, was burned to the ground. We don’t have a single fingerprint.”
I nodded, numb. “You didn’t find bodies? Joey wasn’t there?”
“No bodies, at least not yet, nothing to indicate anyone was in the house when it blew up,” he said. “But we need to find this guy and the boy. The only driver’s license photo we have is from Louisiana, and it’s of the real Benoit, an old man. We didn’t find any auto registration in the entire state of Texas to get us a description of a vehicle or a license plate number. We need to know what this guy drives, what he looks like.”
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
David had been standing next to the captain, but now he sat beside me and held my hand. “Draw his face for us, Sarah,” he said. “Show us who we’re looking for.”
I nodded again. It wasn’t such an odd request. Over the years, I’d often drawn composites when there wasn’t time to wait for a forensic artist and I needed to get out a description. This time, however, it would be different. This time I wouldn’t be pulling a face out of someone else’s head. Benoit’s features would be reconstructed purely from of my own memory.
“I need paper and a pencil,” I said.
One of the crime scene guys came up with a pencil and a notebook, unlined, that he used to sketch crime scenes, and I sat on the fire truck drawing while the others worked the scene. I closed my eyes and thought back to the only time I’d talked in person with the man who’d called himself Alex Benoit, not quite twenty-four hours earlier, when I’d shown him the longhorn symbols at the plantation. I opened my eyes and began sketching, but my hands trembled so that I couldn’t. Fighting for control, I put down the pencil and clenched my hands into tight fists as I sucked in one, two, three, four deep breaths, holding each, counting down the seconds, desperate to clear my mind and quell the anger and grief that had invaded every cell of my body.
On the fifth breath, I turned the notebook to a clean page and reclaimed the pencil.
I began by drawing the line of a cheek, a high forehead, a face that was not young but not old, thready wrinkles around the eyes, hair combed back in waves, and handsome, patrician features. I don’t know that I’d ever appreciated how difficult recalling a face could be, remembering the small nuances, the minute features. Did the man I’d met really have a mole on the left, above his upper lip? Or was I manufacturing that bit of information, false memory? If I could have, I would have turned back the clock and taken a closer look, but I’d missed my opportunity. The last time I saw Benoit he wasn’t a suspect, merely a source. When and if I saw him again, there would be no time for taking stock of his physical features, not until I had him handcuffed and in custody.
I finished the drawing, shading the areas under his cheekbones and smudging his hair to give it the look of thickness. “Best I can do,” I told the captain. “He had a little southern drawl, but only a slight one, maybe an affectation, since we know now he isn’t Benoit. We don’t know if he’s really spent any time in Louisiana.”
“Thanks, Sarah,” he said. “Looks like this is all we’ve got. They’re searching the scene at the house, looking for prints, but there’s so much damage, we don’t think we’ll be lucky.”
I thought for a minute, recalling the afternoon before with Benoit at the plantation. “Is the tree still there?” I asked. “Back at the Westover place. Are the slaves quarters and the tree still there?”
“I don’t know. What tree?” David asked.
“The bottle tree,” I said.
Including a forensic guy with supplies, we hitched a ride on a fire truck back to the plantation. The captain’s chopper had taken off with the body, heading to the Texas medical center, where it would land on a helipad atop one of the skyscraper hospitals. Buckshot’s body would then be transferred to a stretcher and taken to an ambulance, to be transported to the medical examiner’s building, which housed the morgue. The captain had already called ahead and made sure the autopsy was scheduled for that same night, before the morgue, like everything else, closed down for the hurricane.
“Someone needs to call Buckshot’s family. I know they’re divorced, but Peggy will want to know,” I said. “Their daughter is at the University of Texas, in Austin. I think he said she’s living in Jester Hall.”
“We’ll take care of it,” the captain said as we turned back down the long gravel driveway onto the plantation. “That’s not yours to do.”
He leaned closer to me, whispering, “Buckshot’s death isn’t your fault, Sarah.”
My response caught in my throat, the words refusing to leave. How do you know? I’d wanted to ask. How can we ever know?
The chopper that had transported David and me to the scene still sat parked in the field behind the smoldering ruins of the mansion, and I instructed the fire truck driver to take a side road past the stables. When the road ended, we got out and walked a short distance to the slaves quarters, or rather, where they used to be. As with the mansion, only fire-scarred ruins remained.
“So much for his love of preserving history,” I muttered. David looked at me quizzically. “Never mind,” I said.
“Where’s this bottle tree?” the captain asked.
“It’s gone,” I said. Where it had been, the end of a thin, burned tree trunk protruded a few inches out of the scorched earth. Yet it seemed that it shouldn’t all have disappeared. Scanning the ground, I pushed with the toe of my gray lizard-skin boot at something green, the edge of a long thin jagged piece of glass protruding from the soil, and the broken neck of a soda bottle popped out. “Here,” I said. “Here’s something.”
“Over here,” the captain shouted at one of the forensic officers. Soon we were all searching, uncovering broken glass, scattered on the blackened earth, evidence that was slipped into bags, to be transported to the lab in hopes of finding a fingerprint.
“Will you be able to get any prints off these?” I asked the CSI officer. “Would the heat destroy them?”
“It could, if they got hot enough. And, of course, if he left prints in the first place.”
I thought about that. “Yeah, sure, of course. All I can tell you is that Benoit said he made the bottle tree himself, so my guess is that he touched all that glass,” I said. Yet I felt less than hopeful, less than certain any of it would matter. “It’s all I’ve got for you, all I can think of to help figure out who he really is.”
As we prepared to leave, I looked around the plantation, and I thought about my first visit there, recalling how I’d knelt at the graves from a forgotten era, reading the inscriptions. On that afternoon, I’d been listening for Benoit, but he still surprised me, crept up on me so silently, I didn’t know he was there until I sensed him standing over me. I wondered if he’d done the same thing to Buckshot, if Benoit had eased up directly behind my friend, holding a gun to his head before Buckshot even realized he was in danger. I found myself praying it happened that way, that my fellow ranger died before he confronted his fate.
“Let’s get out of here, Sarah,” the captain said gently. “It’s time to go.”
As we walked slowly to the helicopter, David slipped his arm over my shoulder. “Where will he take him?” I asked.
Looking at me as if I should have known that, he explained patiently, “Buckshot’s remains are on their way to the morgue, Sarah.”
I closed my eyes for just a moment, overcome with sadness. As much as I wanted to give in and grieve, I couldn’t. Somewhere the man responsible was still out there, free, and if we were right, he held an innocent child hostage. “No,” I said. I didn’t have another name for him, so I continued to use the only one I knew. “Where will Benoit take Joey? This man, whoever he is, doesn’t have a home anymore, a safe place to hide the boy. Where will they go?”
David drew in his lips, appearing weary and almost resigned that all might be lost. I couldn’t accept that. The possibility that Benoit had escaped with the boy and that he’d never be brought to justice for murdering Buckshot was more than I could bear. “There are other questions here,” David said. When I looked at him, questioning, he said, “Is the mother involved? What’s Benoit planning to do with the boy? If we can answer those questions, maybe we can figure out where he’ll take him.”
The first question, I couldn’t shed any light on. Crystal Warner’s involvement, if there was any, was still a mystery. So far, she wasn’t talking. When it came to what Benoit had planned, no one wanted to speculate, but I couldn’t help thinking about what he’d said on the telephone, that the killer wouldn’t be satisfied slaying longhorns.
“If we only had a clue where to look, anything that pointed to a location. There has to be something we can do,” the captain said. He grew quiet, as if searching for options. Then, resigned, he said, “We’ll circulate your sketch, get it on television, but with the hurricane coming, people are distracted. The timing is bad, really bad.”
Like the captain, I needed something, anything, to hang on to, any shred of hope we would find this monster. I thought about Benoit walking out into the cow pastures, shotgun in hand. Three mornings. Three dead longhorns. When Gabby Barlow looked at the insect evidence, she said the first bull died the night before it was discovered. “When is sunset?” I asked, and then realized that it was late, that the sun was already low in the sky.
“Less than an hour,” David said. “Why?”
“He kills the longhorns at night, one every night for the past three nights,” I said. “The first one north of Houston. The second south. The third west.”
“You think he’ll kill another one tonight?” the captain asked.
“Could be. I don’t know,” I admitted. “But it’s all I’ve got that I can think of right now that might help.”
“So the next one is east,” David said.
“That’s my guess,” I said. “I don’t know why, but he appears to be keeping to some kind of a pattern.”
“But there have to be a hundred cattle ranches east of Houston, small ones hidden in the countryside. How do we find the right one?” the captain asked. “How do we figure out which one?”
“Well, there’s this thing about the longhorns,” I said. “There’s something I’ve noticed about the bulls.”