Read Pegasus Descending: A Dave Robicheaux Novel for Free Online Page B

it in four-four time.”
    “What do you get out of it, Koko?”
    “Out of what?”
    “Offending people, testing them.”
    He scratched the inside of his thigh, as though a mosquito bite were itching him beyond any level of tolerance. “If I go to meetings, can I learn how to use psychobabble like that?” he said.
    I let out my breath and rubbed my temples. “What’s the rest?” I asked.
    “There is no ‘rest.’ She was drunk and stoned and she balled a bunch of guys who didn’t bother to use rubbers,” he said. “You’re wondering why a kid like that would kill herself?”
     
    R IGHT AFTER K OKO left the office, our forensic chemist, Mack Bertrand, called from the Acadiana Crime Lab. Mack was a decent, cheerful, pipe-smoking family man and one of the best crime scene investigators I had ever known. “We ran the weapon in the Darbonne shooting,” he said. “It was reported stolen out of a fraternity house at Ole Miss in 1999.”
    “Any other prints besides the DOA’s?”
    “It was oiled and cleaned recently. There were a couple of smears, but not enough to run through AFIS. Where you going with this, Dave?”
    “Probably nowhere.”
    “It’s a suicide, podna. Her thumb pulled the trigger. Her fingerprints were on the back of the frame. I think she turned the pistol around and squeezed off one right into her face.”
    “What’d you get out of her cell phone?”
    “Mostly numbers of kids at New Iberia High. Nothing unusual. Except…”
    “Go ahead, Mack.”
    “She made two calls during the week to the home of Bello Lujan.”
    In my mind’s eye I saw a sun-browned man wearing white jodhpurs, with swirls of black hair on his arms. At least that was Bello’s image today, although I had known him in an earlier and much different incarnation. “Why would she be calling a guy like that?” I said.
    “He’s got a kid at UL. Maybe Bello’s kid and the vic knew each other.” Then Mack paused. “Dave?”
    “Yeah?”
    “The girl took her life. Nothing will undo that. Bello wasn’t born. He was poured out of a colostomy bag. Leave him alone.”
    “That’s strong for you, Mack.”
    “Not when it comes to Bello Lujan,” he replied.
     
    H AVE YOU EVER SEEN SOMEONE cause a disastrous accident by driving so slowly that others are forced to pass him on a hill or curve? Or perhaps a driver running a yellow light, trapping a turning vehicle in the intersection so that it is exposed to high-speed traffic on its flank? The person responsible for the accident rarely looks in his rearview mirror and is seldom brought to justice. I wondered if that would prove to be the case with Yvonne Darbonne.
    I looked at my watch. It was 11:05 and I still hadn’t pursued the matter of the dye-marked bills in the possession of Dallas Klein’s daughter. I also had a hit-and-run homicide case on my desk, three cold cases involving disappearances from ten years back, and a gangbanger shooting that had left two dope dealers on Ann Street peppered with rounds from a .25 auto.
    Welcome to small-town America in the spring of 2005.
    Yvonne Darbonne’s diary lay on my desk. It had a sky-blue vinyl cover with a sprinkle of sunflowers emblazoned on one corner. The first entry was dated three months earlier. It read:
Went with him to City Park and threw bread to the ducks and fox squirrels. He put his windbreaker on my shoulders when it got cold. His cheeks were red as apples.
    She had written on perhaps thirty pages of the book. She had used few names of people and no family names. The last entries seemed filled with happiness and romance and did not indicate any sense of emotional conflict that I could see. In fact, her handwriting and sentence structure and her general grasp of the world appeared to be those of a sensible and mature person. I looked at my watch and all the case files stacked on my desk and all the work sitting in my intake basket. Yvonne Darbonne’s death was going down as a suicide. My function was over, I