Room Three was quiet. A breeze wandered in through the cracked window, but it made no sound. The morning sun hadn’t yet climbed above the bayou’s canopy, and the light in the room was muted. Still, every ghastly detail could clearly be seen.
Mas, Kaddouri and Johnson stood in the middle of the cracked linoleum floor, layered now with years of dust, mold, and moss. The entry door was missing, its hinges torn out by the tornado when the door was ripped from Zamba’s hand some thirty odd years before.
The closet door was open. The floor and the baseboards inside were still smeared with a large dark smudge of Father Vicente’s blood. The bed frame was still there, but the mattress was gone. It had been removed by NOPD’s Crime Lab, as the CSI unit was called at the time, during their initial investigation of the massacre.
The bloodstains on the wall over the bed were dark brown, almost black, but the splash patterns were starkly evident. The clinic was so underfunded that they painted the rooms with flat paint rather than enamel. The blood had permanently stained the off-white latex, soaking in like a fresco and becoming a permanent part of the wall.
While Mas and Kaddouri were taking in the room, Johnson stood between them, gazing with a thousand-yard stare at the bed, and then at the dent in the blood-splashed wall.
“Lisa,” he whispered.
Mas glanced at him, puzzled. He was silently weeping, but only his right eye was shedding tears.
“Who’s Lisa?” she asked him.
Johnson took a moment to answer, his eyes resting once again on the empty bed frame. “My wife,” he finally said. “The pregnant woman who was murdered in this room.”
Mas and Kaddouri exchanged uneasy glances. They were floored by the revelation and had no clue what to say, but Mas knew that one of them had to say something. She gently touched Johnson’s arm.
“Peter, I had no idea...”
He continued in a halting, hollow voice. “Lisa grew up on the bayou, so this was her clinic. She went into labor late Christmas Eve.”
He looked outside at the mangled parking structure, nearly swallowed by thirty years of encroaching mangrove forest. “The place was in a panic, and so was I.”
He let out a ragged sigh and let his eyes drift to the floor. “I was maybe three minutes late. Not that I could have done anything to stop him.”
“Who?” Mas asked him.
At first Johnson turned away, unable to say anything. Then he swiveled back to Mas and looked her in the eyes.
“The Devil himself.”
The desert tan 1976 Toyota Land Cruiser had a growling 4-liter powerplant and rode high on its all-terrain tires, which made it a little hinky in the turns, but the thing was pure hell on the straightaways. Special Agent Peter Johnson scooped it off the lot the same day it came in on the train from Los Angeles. It was the sexiest thing he had ever seen, other than his wife.
He was barreling down a two-lane blacktop deep in the Bayou, his off-road lights and high beams and a fitful moon the only illumination for the road ahead. There weren’t any side markers on the parish roads out here in the sticks, and the center stripe badly needed a fresh coat of paint. The road was a wet black ribbon hemmed in by an equally black swamp, and he was pushing to get to the clinic before the brunt of the storm came roaring in from the Gulf. Only the good Lord knew how bad it would be. Things were bad enough as it was, and getting worse by the second, almost drowning out the stereo. But if any vehicle could survive a hurricane in the swamp, his Land Cruiser could. He even had winches on the front and back, and he was quite prepared to use them. Part of him was even looking forward to it. But after the kid was born.
He saw the dim yellow lights of the clinic ahead and downshifted. The twin pipe growled and the all-terrain radials gripped the asphalt as he popped the clutch. Engine compression braked the vehicle and he gripped the top of the wheel. He was about to whip into the long, curved driveway of the clinic, lined with a low pair of neatly trimmed hedges, when he suddenly slammed on the brakes and stared through the windshield in a panic.
The Land Cruiser lurched to a nimble stop and sat rumbling beneath his feet, awaiting his next move, but Johnson wasn’t sure what to do next. He could just make out a thin finger of a tornado backlit by the moon, dropping out of the clouds that were roiling over a patch of bayou directly behind the clinic.
The howling wind suddenly ramped up to a deafening roar, buffeting the heavy vehicle as the tornado touched down and tore up the lawn alongside the maternity wing.
Johnson shifted into first and laid rubber all the way up the driveway to the main parking lot. He stopped at the base of the concrete stairs and leapt down from the driver’s seat, just as the people in the lobby came flooding outside. Among the throng of panicking people, the Guadalcanal vet was helping Lucien, who was clutching at his chest and gasping for air.
Johnson dodged his way around the fleeing horde and raced through the lobby, heading for the main stairwell across from the elevators. Outside, the roaring wind pitched into a deafening scream. He’d been there several times before and although he didn’t know what room his wife was in, it was a small place and he’d find her soon enough, but he didn’t know if the room, or his wife, would still be there by the time he got to the second floor. He made it to the foot of the stairs the moment all the lights went out.
In less than a minute, the tornado had done its work and continued on into the bayou, where it blew itself out almost as suddenly as it sprung to life.
Johnson picked his way over the splintered remains of the stairwell’s big French window that littered the terrazzo stairs. He stepped onto the maternity wing and looked around at the disaster, scarcely daring to breathe. Sheets of paper still fluttered in the air, the handwritten records of a thousand maladies and more, but that was the only thing on the floor that was moving. The only sound was the wind and rain. He was alone.
Emergency lights burned in the stairwell at the far end of the hall, and a narrow shaft of light streamed through the safety window of the exit door. Halfway down the hall, between Johnson and the exit door, a dim red bulb glowed above the nurses’ station. The exterior lights were blown out and the full moon was obscured by clouds, so the windows were of little use. Other than the faint red glow and the narrow shaft of light coming through the stairwell door, the entire wing was in darkness.
As Johnson made his way down the hall toward Room Three, the clouds outside parted and a cold glow of moonlight streamed through the wing’s shattered windows and the open doors of the eastern rooms. He saw that the door to Room Three had been ripped off its hinges.
He took a moment to steady himself, not quite knowing what to expect, and then looked in his wife’s room.