Of Flesh and Blood E-Book

Hunter Burke

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 442

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

James Lee Burke's Robicheaux mysteries meet Tender is the Flesh in a chewy, chilling Louisiana-set horror-thriller about cannibalism in the bayou from a Hollywood actor/screenwriter and psychiatrist writing duo The Louisiana parish of St. Landry thought they had seen the end of cannibalistic killings in 2008 with the death of the Cajun Cannibal, a flesh-eating serial killer who consumed eight victims before taking his own life. Ten years later, a forensic psychiatrist's case study into the cannibal's murders twists itself into a terrifying reckoning with monsters both figurative and literal when he discovers the two share the same cursed blood. When identical killings start happening again, questions about what really happened back then resurface, leading the psychiatrist into terrifying and dangerous levels of obsession. Told through the pages of the psychiatrist's case study, the story is part psychological horror, part serial-killer thriller.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Praise for OF FLESH AND BLOOD

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Introduction

Part I: In Another Lifetime . . .

The Road was Full of Mud

Duck Blind

One Cup of Coffee

Henri Elton Judice

“Happiest City in America”

After the Storm

Burning Cane

His Own Words

October 11, 2008

The Hand that Feeds

Lighting the Fuse

Tangled Up in Red, White, and Blue

Lemme Tell Ya . . .

Rougarou

Differential Diagnosis

Part II: Psycho Killer

Qu’Est-Ce Que C’Est?

Pulling Threads

Eyewitness

Evidence

More to the Story

Brittany

La Maison Grande

Haunted House

What Liars do in the Grave

Mitch

Eye of the Storm

Happy Accidents

New Normal

The Edge of the Atchafalaya

Cut Off

“Happiest City in America”

The Night Henri Died

Closure

Henri: Portrait of a Psychotic

Part III: Building Up Inside of me

I Don’t Know Why, But I Keep Thinking . . .

Part of the Story

Zebras

Spinning Plates

Office Hours

C. C. House

Roman Policier

The Wandering Womb

Believe you me

447 Miles

Into the Wild

Unsolid Ground

Campfire Tales

The Morning After

The Leaf

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

Praise for

OF FLESH AND BLOOD

“Of Flesh and Blood transported me to the humid swamps of Louisiana and made me double-check my doors and windows. Genuinely scary and stuffed with surprises, I only hope that the inevitable film is half as good as the novel.”

Richard Chizmar, New York Times bestselling author of Memorial and Chasing the Boogeyman

“A meticulously detailed story of the Cajun Cannibal that will have true crime junkies salivating. A novel so true-crimey I’m still wondering if it really happened!”

J. H. Markert, author of Sleep Tight

“A delightfully chilling debut steeped in southern gothic, with a villain you won’t soon forget, Of Flesh and Blood is a page-turning success. Beautifully rendered atmosphere and a haunting structure pull you in fast and hold you tight.”

Scott Carson, New York Times bestselling author of Lost Man’s Lane and The Chill

“Like the legendary bayou beast, the rougarou, Of Flesh and Blood digs its claws into you within the first few pages and refuses to let go. Rich in setting and characters, this compelling tale has more twists and turns than a rollercoaster. Each time you think you’ve got a handle on what’s happening, the story loop-de-loops, or plunges around another hair-raising bend… I guarantee you’ll stagger away, breathless and reeling.”

Mark Morris, author of the Obsidian Heart trilogy

“A dry-mouthed read that burns slow and steady. True crime lovers will eat this assured psychological debut right up.”

Gemma Amor, Bram Stoker and British Fantasy Award nominated author of Dear Laura, Full Immersion and Itch!

“Gritty, twisty, obsessive ‘true crime’ fiction wrapped around tantalising Louisiana folklore, Of Flesh and Blood will appeal to fans of Matt Wesolowski’s Six Stories and John Darnielle’s Devil House. A confident and deftly-handed debut.”

Ally Wilkes, author of Where the Dead Wait

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Of Flesh and Blood: The Untold Story of the Cajun Cannibal

Print edition ISBN: 9781835413951

E-book edition ISBN: 9781835413968

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: June 2025

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2025 N. L. Lavin & Hunter Burke.

N. L. Lavin & Hunter Burke assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

EU RP (for authorities only)eucomply OÜ, Pärnu mnt. 139b-14, 11317 Tallinn, Estonia

[email protected], [phone]

Typeset in Arno Pro 11/15pt by Richard Mason.

N. L. Lavin

For Meg, Jack, Marion, and Tom Tom.Endless thanks for putting up with me.

*   *   *

Hunter Burke

For Donna and Neal. I guess Darci, too.

INTRODUCTION

I WAS BORN in a bathtub on September 16, 1984, in the sleepy Louisiana town of St. Martinville. It was a clawfoot tub, which I suppose adds a touch of elegance to the proceedings, but a water birth wasn’t the plan. My parents had driven out to St. Martinville to watch the Saints game with my grandmother. When the contractions clutched my mother’s womb a week early, her older (and soon-to-be estranged) brother, Mitch, convinced her she’d never make it all the way back into Lafayette on time. “The goddamn traffic in that city,” he scoffed. The Saints were up three points over their then-division-rival 49ers1 heading into the fourth quarter, and so my dad agreed that yes, they probably should stay. Mitch hacked the umbilical cord with a buck knife and cauterized my end with a branding iron. For most of my childhood, I blamed that branding iron for the rift between him and my mother. Everyone made it through the ordeal okay, but my parents probably should’ve just gone to the hospital. My mother pushed for nearly an hour, and the Saints lost by ten.

My father’s company relocated us to Fort Wayne, Indiana, a few years later. Thereafter, we visited Louisiana every summer and Christmas. I’d follow my cousins around, rolling three-wheelers off levees and swimming in the Vermilion River, the murky green bayou that snakes through the Cajun heartlands like a varicose vein. We’d emerge, inevitably a few shades darker with a patina of muck, and pitch camp in the “devil worshipper” woods along the bank. We once spotted a raccoon skull lying atop a bundle of twigs and took this, as any self-respecting and terrified Catholic would, for an obvious message from Satan himself. But for all my tagalong misadventures, I was no longer one of them. I knew it, and so did they. By the time I was fourteen, we’d stopped making the yearly trips.

After finishing medical school at Indiana University in May of 2012, I felt sure of nothing but my fascination with the brain, that mysterious, wet, spongy bundle of circuits, and all the things that could go wrong in there. I had my reasons. I was also at what would soon become the end of a two-year relationship. Either oblivious to or in denial of our relationship’s death throes, my girlfriend and I decided to enter the “couple’s match,” where fate and the great gods of medical education would determine our residency programs and ensure that they were in the same city. I wanted psychiatry at BU in Boston; she wanted dermatology at LSU in New Orleans. We sat in the auditorium with our entire class and all our families in attendance. My mom had bought one New England Patriots hat and one for the New Orleans Saints. As I walked onto the stage, the dean of students announced, “Dr. Vincent Blackburn . . . Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans for a residency and fellowship in forensic psychiatry.” After twenty-four years away, under the influence of a fledgling relationship, I was a Louisianan again.

In July of 2012, I packed my things and moved to the Big Easy to begin my residency program. My girlfriend and I were broken up by September.

Four exhausting years of residency passed. And all the while I rarely thought of my family down the road in Cajun country.

That all changed in September of 2016, when, in the beginning of my forensics fellowship, I rotated through the stifling corridors of Angola State Penitentiary’s death row.

I took my seat across the collapsible plastic table from my first patient and steadied my bouncing knee. He had a vacant, slack-jawed stare. A bit of tacky saliva had coagulated in the corner of his chapped lips and hung there, threatening to spring out at me should he pounce too forcefully on a P.

I scanned his chart. Born and raised in South Louisiana. History of paranoid delusions. Auditory and visual hallucinations in his late teens, and again after imprisonment. This was his fifteenth year on death row. I hadn’t read his criminal record; I avoided such information back then, afraid it might hinder my ability to treat my patients with beneficence. I know better now. Sure, if you dig a little, what you find is usually appalling. But if you dig a little deeper, what you find is almost always tragic. And eventually, nearly all of it makes sense.

Before I could even introduce myself, his eyes locked onto mine with a strange sense of recognition. A wild, furious stare. “No,” he mumbled. In an instant, he started slamming his hands on the table, shouting, “No! No no no no!” He shoved the table into my stomach, pinning me in my chair. Then I noticed that the look in his eye wasn’t one of rage. It was terror. “Get me outta here!” he screamed. “It’s him! The Cajun Cannibal! Cajun Cannibal!” When the guards rushed in, he bolted for the door and clung to their arms, hollering incoherently.

I sat there, heart pounding, mouth dry, room tilting and spinning, and glanced down at my pants to make sure I hadn’t wet them.

*   *   *

“First day’s always a little overwhelming. But you, my man, might have set a record.” My attending chuckled at me from across his desk. I sipped from a paper cup of water, still trying to reclaim some moisture for my mouth. “The old Cajun Cannibal. You know, you do kind of look like him.” He grinned and squinted, as if studying my features. “Maybe you really are him, Henri Elton Judice himself, come back after all these years . . .” He chuckled again. I didn’t.

Henri Elton Judice, the infamous game warden, had been a source of local panic nine years prior in South Louisiana. The “Cajun Cannibal” had brutally murdered eight people, per the official record. Unofficially, some say more. Five of his alleged victims were dismembered and, presumably, eaten by Judice. He was never apprehended. On the night of February 9, 2009, just as the authorities were closing in on him, multiple eyewitnesses reported watching Henri Elton Judice take his own life before he could ever see the inside of a jail cell.

“Boy. Henri Elton Judice . . .” My attending luxuriated in the name, like the killer was an old drinking buddy from high school. “You were probably still up in—what was it? Indiana?—during that whole hullabaloo. Did y’all ever hear about it? Do you know the story?”

I could still picture the iconic photo of Judice in his hunter-green game warden rain slicker. It had graced the front page of half a dozen tabloids back in 2009. The vacant eyes. The wide smile. The name echoed and reverberated inside my skull, feeding back on itself into a throbbing drone of nonsense. I took another sip and kept my eyes on the cup.

“Yeah,” I finally muttered. “He’s my cousin.”

*   *   *

My mom is a Judice, one of nine kids. I’ve done my best over the years to keep up with my thirty-seven cousins back home and the names of their spouses and children. But until my parents called with news of the murders during my first year of medical school, I had never once heard of a relative named Henri. My mom’s eldest brother, Elton, had been more or less excommunicated from the family before I was born. Drugs, alcohol—it was never clear what unforgivable sins Elton had perpetuated, but he was rarely mentioned. He’d fallen in with a girl no one liked. “From bad stock,” they said, just as her family probably said of his. Elton died a few months after I was born, and no one ever indicated that there might be any progeny to speak of in his unspeakable line.

After learning about the accusations against Henri early in my medical school training, I briefly tried to leverage my cousin’s infamy for free drinks. I’d invent childhood stories about the cousin I’d never actually met, expound upon the signs we “always knew” were there. The bartenders grew weary of the stories, and the girls were decidedly unimpressed. Being the cousin of a serial killer doesn’t get you many invites back to the house, it turns out. Once his legend was of no use to me, I forgot Henri in much the same way my family had done with his father, quietly sequestering him away to an unlit corner of my mind. But there in Angola, a place as close to hell on Earth as I’ve ever been, Henri’s ghost had become impossible to ignore.

A month after my rotation at Angola, in October of 2016, my attending sent me an email. It was an invitation from the International Journal of Forensic Medicine to produce a long-form case study on sociopathic behavior in serial killers. Well, one serial killer in particular. Such a high-profile assignment was rarely offered to a first-year fellow, but my attending, who was old friends with a few of the editors, had apparently mentioned my personal connection to the case. I was a spectacle by blood. Freak-show adjacent. And I leapt at the chance. Forget the bored bartenders and the uninterested women back in Indiana. For the low price of my family’s secrecy and shame, I could become a published author and a leader in the field of sociopathy. I quickly got to work exhuming our skeletons and dissecting the Cajun Cannibal.

In April of 2017, I published my case study on Henri Elton Judice and his supposed diagnosis of sociopathy, also known as antisocial personality disorder. As defined in the DSM, antisocial personality disorder reflects “a pervasive disregard and violation of the rights of others.” A pathological lack of empathy and remorse. Only a little over half of what I submitted was actually printed; the editors had been unimpressed by my rambling fascination with the minutiae of the case, the people on the periphery, and the pain they’d endured.

I’ve reread the introduction of that case study a hundred times. Analyzed Henri’s words, the very words that opened my case study, the words he recorded himself just minutes before his death. And each time, the picture of my cousin becomes cloudier.

“I used to think I knew what I was. What was wrong with me. But I’m not really sure anymore. Is evil even real? Or is that just an easy word for something harder? I wonder that now. I’ve killed. I’m a hunter. A killer. Am I a monster? Are those things real? Do they all just get passed along? Inherited, maybe. I know what I see. It’s obvious after a while, and you forget how you could’ve been so stupid and not seen it there all along. I know what I see, when I look in the mirror sometimes. Maybe it’s something else. Why won’t anyone . . .

“There’s this thing inside me. A compulsion. I have to put an end to it. All of it. This curse. This rot. This infection. This . . . this won’t be over ’til whatever it is dies. If it has to take me with it, well, what does it matter anyway? How else are you supposed to get rid of a killer?”

There’s something compelling about a case without a verdict, one that forces us to find our own resolutions. Our own truths. My research, and the personal obsession it spawned, led me into a niche world of online investigators and half-baked conspiracy theorists. The Reddit message boards could keep you occupied for months. Some claim Henri only committed some of the murders. Very few are delusional enough to label him innocent of all charges. More than a few believe he was a real-life, hand-to-God monster, a boogeyman embodiment who stalked through the swamps of Louisiana with the moonlight glinting off his fangs. Some claim that the true killer is still out there, biding his time. Others contend that Judice didn’t die out there in the woods that fateful night, that the St. Landry Parish sheriff covered up his escape to save her own ass, and that he’s still at large.

Those of us who find ourselves drawn into the gravity of this case seem seduced by all the loose ends. The whole puzzle, as it’s conventionally accepted, doesn’t quite fit. There are too many missing pieces. The ones we do have feel chewed off at the corners and hammered in. This case is a popcorn kernel in the back molar of an entire subculture, and with all the bizarre, misaligned details, some people can’t help but pick their tongues raw. The more I picked, the more material I found there waiting underneath, all of it obscuring still more.

Several of the chapters in this recounting pull directly from my case study—the unabridged, unpublished version. The bulk of the information was painstakingly compiled in the years following, when I sat to interview witnesses, exchanged emails, pored over medical histories, combed through personal journals, shared afternoon coffees with the family and friends of the people mentioned in this book. When, the more I studied Henri’s words, listened to his copious field recordings, and read his statements to police, the less I felt I knew him. When I began to appreciate the transmissible nature of evil—if there is such a thing.

When the killings started again. When he felt more and more real. When I started to question if he was still out there somewhere, alive.

When my own world became irrevocably entangled with the Cajun Cannibal’s.

PART I

IN ANOTHERLIFETIME . . .

THE ROAD WASFULL OF MUD

(Excerpts originally published in the International Journal of Forensic Medicine)

August 4, 2008

THE FIRST THING Liu Wen noticed was the dirt under his fingernails. Or was it grease? His knuckles were cracked and dry. Rubbed raw. The dirt had also found its way into the dozen little cuts peppering his hands, tattooing crisscrosses along his calloused fingers.

Why won’t his hands stop shaking? she wondered to herself from the driver’s seat of the Toyota Camry.

The passenger in question was a stranger. They had only met about twenty, thirty minutes ago. His silence had initially been a welcome comfort, almost a piece of home. Now, it was beginning to make her skin crawl for some reason she couldn’t quite pin down.

Wen had been in Louisiana for almost a year, attending the University of Louisiana at Lafayette through a student exchange. She’d found the local Cajuns to be a friendly group, at times aggressively so, with their bear hugs and pet names and roaring laughs. In the past year, she hadn’t met anyone as quiet and withdrawn as the stranger sitting beside her now.

She swerved the Camry to avoid a pothole. The tires hiccupped as if surprised and then caught traction again.

She should have been home, in Changzhi. Surrounded by her family and her cats and her mother’s food on the stove, simmering especially for her. But she was here, stuck at the tail end of a two-month lab assistant job she had reluctantly taken on for a little extra money. As the summer had worn on, she’d grown more and more homesick and regretful of that decision. Tired. Permeated each evening with the sickly sweet smell of Pseudomonas and Petri dishes. Waiting. Crossing the squares off on her calendar every day until finally making it to August 1st, just two days before her departure. Her bags had been packed for a week. But the warm waters of the Gulf had brewed up other plans.

Not quite a hurricane, but as close as you can get without being one, the tropical storm would delay all flights, postponing her departure by two days. Upon learning of the delay, Wen had broken down, biking furiously across ULL’s campus and collecting whatever ingredients she could find that might approximate her mother’s vinegar-stewed carp. The one her mother always made when Wen was sick, though now it was a different kind of sickness that consumed her. Never mind that she didn’t have any pots in her dorm. Or a stove. Or a kitchen for that matter. She would figure it out.

A divot in the road jostled the Camry now, the tires spinning out in a fishtail toward the steep ditch to their left. The stranger didn’t seem to notice. Wen clutched the wheel even tighter and regained control of the car. This storm and its aftermath reminded her of the monsoon season in her hometown. Everything reminded her of Changzhi these days, but especially this. The dull darkness at noon. The heavy, humid air. The deserted streets.

As luck would have it, she had run into her TA, Johnny, at the grocery store, her arms loaded down with fish and vinegar. He’d insisted that she ride out the storm in his two-bedroom rental home, about thirty miles northeast of campus along the rural backroads of Arnaudville. “Better than the dorms,” he said. Johnny and his boyfriend had made plans to evacuate north to stay with family. “Feel free to use the car too,” Johnny had offered, to which she’d shaken her head politely. Not without a license. No way. Still, at least now she’d have a kitchen to cook in.

The stew she’d prepared in Johnny’s house was weak, the fish mushy, the vinegar a sad replacement for the local treasure back home. And still, it had brought tears to her eyes.

By the morning of August 3rd, Tropical Storm Edouard had made landfall and knocked down the power line supplying Johnny’s house with electricity. As the hours crawled by and the temperature inside climbed, Wen had grown more and more sure she could smell the stew spoiling in the fridge, that little taste of home disappearing. Who knew how long it would be before the power returned. The stories from Hurricane Katrina in 2005 were still fresh on everyone’s lips in South Louisiana. And the devastating flooding of the Jiangsu Province had only happened five years ago.

The next morning, she woke to find the house still without power. By four PM, after hours of consternation, she’d finally given in and made the decision to head out for ice. Just a quick drive.

The anxiety dug its claws into her shoulders and her neck a little more tightly with each empty store she passed, boarded up and shut down for the storm. She was ready to turn back, when T-Cups Bar materialized like an oasis. A narrow parking lot, graveled over in patches with broken shells and sea rubble. Two cars, one motorcycle. Busted sign outside. But the bar’s state of disrepair had obviously existed before the storm. These wounds weren’t fresh.

The bartender inside couldn’t run her card on account of the system being down. Without any cash and eager to return home, Wen had nearly given up hope of procuring any ice when a stranger slapped three bills and a handful of coins on the bar top and said, “Two bags.” Having gone there with money for cigarettes, but finding the bar regrettably out, he’d noticed Wen’s predicament, paid for her ice with his cigarette money, and left with barely a word.

On her way back to Johnny’s, Wen had spotted the benevolent stranger walking down the highway alone. What else could she do but offer him a ride?

“Thank you again for the ice,” she said in her effortful but accomplished English, accent thick and sticking to her words like peanut butter.

“Welcome,” he answered, almost managing to compact it into a single syllable. His eyes never left the ditch running along the road. His gray shirt smelled of sweat and stale cigarette smoke. And those hands. She should have been home. Not here, not smelling this guy’s sour sweat and listening to his teeth click together with each edge of nail he chewed off his dirty fingers.

An occasional branch or slick of mud across the old, busted sugarcane road known as LA 31 had Wen trolling along and zigzagging down the highway, doing twenty-five in a fifty-five.

The stranger’s knee hadn’t stopped since he’d climbed in the passenger seat.

“Do you often walk?” she asked now.

“Truck’s busted,” he mumbled, teeth clamped firmly onto a thumbnail. Click.

“Oh.”

No one spoke for another mile. Wen imagined how many steps had passed. How far would some men walk for a pack of cigarettes?

She watched his left hand clench into a fist and release. Clench and release.

She felt the thump of her own pulse in her neck. The speedometer said thirty-five now.

“Is your home not far?”

“Not far.”

She nodded, fully aware that he didn’t see the gesture. He hadn’t turned her way once.

“You can drop me at the corner up ahead, though, if it’s easier,” he said.

“No. I do not mind,” she said, and immediately regretted it. Her incessant politeness would be the death of her one day, she thought.

A gust of wind leaned into the car. She felt as though it had nudged him closer somehow.

Johnny’s house was a left two turns back. She tried to picture a map in her head, plotting the way back like a GPS recalculating the route with each wrong turn.

“Hang a right up ahead.” He pointed to a four-way stop about a hundred meters down. That will be a left on the way back, she thought. The thick woods cornered against the intersection on all sides. “And keep your eyes peeled. There was a dead deer on the side of the road earlier. Or at least what was left of him.”

There was a coldness in the way he spoke of death. A nonchalance that she couldn’t fathom. She had never understood the way people could slaughter and dismember such innocent creatures.

She eased the car around the corner, preparing her pescatarian stomach for a glimpse of the carcass.

Instead, she found a black truck parked two wheels on the road, two in the ditch. Flashing police lights atop the cab.

“Bèn dàn,” she cursed under her breath. She should’ve been home, not driving without a license. But she hadn’t been caught yet. Just act cool. She started to press down on the gas when she noticed the stranger’s bouncing knee quicken its tempo. He seemed even more anxious about the flashing lights than she did.

Something instinctive forced her foot onto the brake. Hard. The stranger braced himself against the dash as the Camry slid to a stop on the wet, leafy road.

“You alright?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, squinting through the rainy window to better study the writing on the truck. “Wildlife Agent?” she read aloud.

The stranger squirmed. “Looks like nobody’s here.” He cleared his throat. “It’s just a little farther up the road.”

She turned and studied him, his dark brown eyes looking at her for maybe the first time, urging her along from under his shock of wild orange hair.

“C’mon,” he said. “I got an ice chest I could give you. For the ice.” She thought about running, about how silly she would look, about what this guy would think of her as she slipped and slid down the road for probably no reason. Probably nothing at all.

A bang on the driver side window jolted her, a small shriek escaping her lips. She turned to find a dark silhouette standing at her door. She rolled down the window, allowing the misty remnants of the storm to pepper her face. A man stood there in his dark green rain slicker; yellow letters on the right breast read “WARDEN.”

“Officer!” she nearly shouted, surprising herself.

“Ma’am?” He squinted.

“Is everything okay, Officer?” she asked.

“Um.” He studied her. “Yes, ma’am. Everything’s fine. Just cleaning up.”

She smiled and nodded, and she felt tears beginning to sting her eyes.

He stole a quick glance at the stranger in the passenger seat. “Is everything okay with you, ma’am?”

“With me?” she said. “Oh. Yes. I am just giving my friend . . .” She looked at the stranger.

The orange-headed man cleared his throat. “Anders.”

“Anders. Just giving Anders a ride home.”

“Okay . . .” the warden said.

Before he could back away from the window, Wen forced a chuckle. “But, Officer, I am running a little late for . . . something. Would you please be able to help?”

“Help?” The warden peered into her eyes.

“Yes.” She nodded. “Help.”

“I really don’t mind walking,” Anders whispered to her.

“Don’t be silly.” She turned to him. “I would not just leave you to walk.”

“Right,” he said, studying the warden.

The warden studied him right back with bleary, bloodshot eyes. “Well,” he said, licking his chapped lips, “I’m just about finished here. I’d be happy to help.”

“Oh, thank you,” Wen blurted before Anders could protest.

“Well, okay . . .” Anders said. “Thanks, I guess, for the lift.”

He climbed out into the drizzle and shut the door. Wen immediately released a shaky exhale and pounded her finger onto the automatic lock button. He seemed to hear the click, so she flashed an extra smile to remind him how polite she was. Then she threw the Camry in reverse and backed into the intersection.

As she watched Anders and the warden there in the middle of the road, now a comfortable and miniaturizing distance between her and them, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she had just narrowly avoided some terrible fate. But whatever that was, it was over now.

She turned back in the direction of Johnny’s house. Straight through the next intersection, and then a right. She could almost taste the stew. In two days, she would be on her way back home. Far from here.

*   *   *

It seems Anders Barrilleaux never got in the warden’s truck. His history reveals a long and often healthy distrust of law enforcement, dating back to a stint in juvenile detention and five involuntary admissions to a series of behavioral hospitals across Louisiana before the age of eighteen. His mom had called the police on him at least ten times. “That woman’s a heat-seeking missile for misunderstandings,” he’d once told a court-mandated therapist. Flashing red lights had frequently painted the Barrilleaux house, adding to the soundtrack of hollering voices and slamming doors. Twice, he had said the wrong thing to a cop in his living room and ended up on the inpatient unit at Vermilion Behavioral Hospital, where he’d sworn he would never speak to another officer again.

So Anders likely wasn’t interested in hanging around with some game warden staring him down, wondering what he’d done to scare that sweet, innocent girl. Just another misunderstanding.

His house was a fifteen-minute walk from the intersection, down the road as it dog-legged right. Something must have told Anders—either his previous interactions or the warden’s current demeanor—that he didn’t have fifteen minutes. Despite the fallen foliage and the muddy terrain, he took a shortcut through the woods, aiming for a more direct route home.

About seventy yards in, the forest grew thick, branches blocking nearly every clear path. It might have been quicker to turn right, deeper into the woods for just a bit. He could cross the coulee, come out on the Singleton property, and get a clear sprint down the levee. But Anders didn’t know Singleton, and the last thing he probably wanted was some upstanding asshole farmer turning him over to the warden for trespassing. Or worse. So instead, Anders stuck to the woods, climbing over, crawling under, crashing through every impediment, inching closer and closer to the clearing on the other side. And his house.

Just ahead.

Something made him take out his phone and call his mom, an uncharacteristic move to say the least. Turns out the number was disconnected—had been for two years.

Through the tangled branches and limbs ahead, he would’ve just barely been able to make out his carport light illuminating swarms of June bugs.

The place was a shithole. But it was his shithole. He’d left home the day he turned eighteen and started pulling work in the oil field. But the whole industry was in the tank in 2008, and a recent round of layoffs had hit him first, accounting for the shithole. And the broke-down truck. And the two-hour walk for a pack of cigarettes he never even got. And the ride he never even asked for. And the asshole warden staring him down just like every other asshole cop he’d ever met. And his muddy shoes. And his racing heart. And the sweat stinging his eyes.

Something heavy slammed into his back, cracking two of his ribs and sending him face-first into the mud. His phone tumbled out of his hand and would later be found about a meter away.

Surely, by this point, Anders knew the drill. Loosen your shoulders. Don’t twist or fight it. Otherwise, you’ll get a dislocation while they throw the cuffs on you.

But the cuffs never came.

What came instead was a searing tear ripping across his back. Blood and tissue splattered all the way to his phone screen.

His empty house, just through the clearing, was so close. No one besides the warden was around to hear his screams.

Something grabbed the back of his scalp and slammed his face down into the muck, fracturing his orbital bone. Ripped a chunk of hair from his head and left it behind.

The next tear down his back wouldn’t have been as excruciating as the first. It would have been dull. Vague.

He’d spilled nearly a liter of blood into the mud around him. With the loss, his fingers would grow cold, and his stomach would start to hurt. For a moment, he’d feel sick, but nothing would come up.

Soon, he would forget where he was.

He would hardly feel the strips of muscle being ripped and gnawed out of his back.

Then, he would close his eyes.

DUCK BLIND

(Excerpts originally published in the International Journal of Forensic Medicine)

August 7, 2008

JUDE SINGLETON RECEIVED a strange call from his neighbor, “High Pocket” Breaux, who lived about a half mile down the two-lane highway.

Jude had been out filling up his truck before going to bed. He had a long drive ahead of him to see about farming up in Oklahoma, and if filling up now meant an extra ten minutes of sipping his coffee in the morning, by God, he’d take it. Jude was the kind of man practiced at postponing gratification. He’d toiled through his twenties so he could buy a farm in his thirties so he could retire in his sixties and enjoy his seventies if his back managed to hold out that long. He attended mass every Sunday. He drank sparingly, shunned most vices, hoping paradise would await as repayment for his sacrifice. Jude backed into any parking spot he ever took.

He had been working soybean farms in Arnaudville since he was twelve, and at forty-three, had built up a respectable spread of his own, but High Pocket’s thriving sugarcane fields were threatening to overtake Jude’s property. With High Pocket’s offer on the table—a decent sum, all told—Jude couldn’t reasonably turn down the hefty payout. So he thought he’d take his skills and his new small fortune to the prairies, where cane wasn’t king.

He was on his way home, bouncing along his gravel drive, with an uncomfortably full bladder, the relief of which his swelling prostate would certainly thwart, when he saw High Pocket pop up on the caller ID. High Pocket never called past suppertime.

Arnaudville was one of the few remaining places in the country that allowed its residents to use nicknames in the official listings of the phone book. Jude didn’t even know High Pocket’s Christian name. No one did. Per one former classmate, “He was the tallest guy in school. So his pockets were higher than everyone else’s. That’s it. High Pocket.”

High Pocket apologized for the late hour but said he thought Jude might want to know that he’d spotted something stalking along the back edge of the property, first toward and then away from Jude’s land. “Prolly a bear, I’m guessing,” High Pocket said. He’d first seen the culprit a few evenings before, not long after noticing a black Wildlife and Fisheries pickup trolling around in the area. And then he’d spotted the “animal” again tonight, trekking down the same stretch of land, toward the Singleton farm and back. High Pocket had fired a couple shots in the air to scare the thing off. He just wanted to let Jude know to be careful out there.

Along the back edge was where Jude kept his dugout duck blind, the homemade four-by-four-by-twelve-foot metal box where he did most of his hunting. It was a magnet for rodents and other critters that would occasionally scurry under the rusty lid during the offseason and find themselves stuck four feet below ground level with no way out. He thought maybe a black bear had caught wind of a subterranean snack and found his way in. Black bears will eat just about anything. Jude decided he’d go have a look in the morning. Maybe he could spray some bear deterrent and hopefully nudge the thing along.

But when he got home, something about the whole thing felt off. Mulling over his rodent hypothesis, he felt the strange sensation that he was forcing a flimsy explanation onto the situation. The barn behind the house was lousy with rodents, a problem Jude would be glad to rid himself of if he did in fact move. Any bear with a working snout would’ve smelled those fat bastards well before it caught the scent of whatever tiny things could’ve squeezed into the blind. A bear problem would’ve been a barn problem, Jude reckoned.

Maybe the bear was just passing through in search of new territory, which is known to happen, especially after a big storm like the one they’d suffered a couple days before. But High Pocket’s description of the thing wandering onto the property and then doubling back felt uncharacteristic. It felt intentional.

Jude recalled hearing a bit of faint hollering coming from the back of his property a couple days prior, right after the storm. He hadn’t thought much of it at the time, but now he wondered if some campers might have been messing around back there. Maybe they’d left a cache of food and garbage. If so, the bear would probably keep returning in the hopes of finding more.

He felt an instinctive urge to talk the situation over with someone, but the Singleton house was empty. His wife, Denise,2had fled the farm three years earlier, leaving Jude to raise both the soybean crop and their teenage son alone. He hadn’t heard from Denise in over a year; she might be in Galveston now, but he wasn’t sure.

The wound of her absence had for the most part scarred over. That of his son’s was still tender. Kipp had moved to Baton Rouge just yesterday to study agricultural business at LSU. Jude had pushed college on the boy, saying of his own livelihood, “This farming life is hard work. And not the good kind of hard work that builds character. This just tears you down. You ache all the time, and you never know what the next year’s gonna be like. I don’t want my boy’s whole future decided by floods and droughts and pestilence and a million other things that can wreck a harvest.”

Jude dropped his keys in the ceramic bowl (one of Kipp’s kindergarten arts and crafts projects) and studied his small kitchen. The surroundings used to feel so familiar but now were nearly unrecognizable in their emptiness. Four years ago—hell, four months ago—leaving Louisiana would have been unthinkable. Not anymore.

A simple chandelier above the tiny breakfast table was the home’s only illumination at the moment. No lights or televisions or any other distractions were on outside the kitchen. He’d yet to develop the habit of keeping a few things running around the house to instill in himself the comforting impression that his was not the only room being used at any given time. That trick of self-delusion would come later. The darkness of the adjacent living room and the hallway beyond felt cavernous and eerie all of a sudden, ready to swallow him whole.

He stood there, contemplating all these recent changes, withering in the face of his shifting world and grappling with the sudden amorphous dread of isolation. Then he thought about the bear and felt fortified by the concreteness of this newfound conflict laid in his lap.

The simplicity and the understandability of man versus nature.

He hopped into his Mule 4x4 and sped out toward the duck blind with a loaded rifle.

The headlights of the Mule shone down the small levee that marked the edge of his soybean field. The duck blind sat about fifty yards out, growing closer every second but approaching more slowly than he’d expected. He realized he’d subconsciously eased off the throttle.

The headlights caught a glint of something. Up ahead, in the grass, lay the discarded sheet metal lid to his duck blind.

The 4×4 had stopped moving. Jude clutched his rifle and flashed the Q-Beam a full 360 degrees around.

Nothing.

He climbed down from the Mule. The twenty-foot walk to the duck blind stretched out before him. Eventually, he arrived at the big metal hole in the ground.

As his beam of light angled down into the pit, it landed on what Jude thought was a pile of old gray tarping. Probably had blown in after the storm, he figured. He climbed down the four-foot drop into the blind to retrieve it.

But as his foot landed on the floor of the blind, he realized that the gray mass before him was no tarp. There in the corner, his light illuminated a heap of pale, bloody nakedness. Curled up like a pile of discarded flesh.

A man.

A shock of curly orange hair atop his head.

Face down in a puddle of what Jude hoped was muddy water.

But the thick, metallic stench was too familiar for the experienced hunter to ignore.

Blood. Pooling there in the bottom of his blind, soaking into the suede of his hiking boots.

The man’s back was flayed in spots. Craters peppered his flank where chunks of flesh had been gouged out like driving range divots.

The metal walls around him had been clawed at. Blood and chunks of fingernail stuck in the vertical scrapes.

Jude stood and stared for he wasn’t sure how long. Finally, he came to his senses and called 911 on his cell to inform them of the dead body. “A bear attack, I think,” he told the operator. But as he leaned in to confirm his assessment, the mass of flesh trembled.

Just the tiniest jerk of his neck muscle. Jude craned his own neck forward and heard the faint whispers of quick, sharp breaths echoing inside the chamber. “Then I noticed his belly was, like, twitching with this sort of panting,” Jude recounted later. “Almost like an old dog’s does when he’s out in the sun too long.”

Jude felt a flash of warmth on the front of his jeans. There were some reactions even his prostate couldn’t hold back. He put the phone back up to his ear and informed the operator that he had not, in fact, found a dead body.

*   *   *

Anders Barrilleaux’s ICU room was a quiet, sterile symphony of beeps and ventilations. No one came or went besides the hospital staff. There were no visitors to speak of.

The EMS first responders had done their best, racing against time through the muddy field to retrieve Barrilleaux and rush him to the nearest hospital. In the process, they had trampled what would later, in hindsight, be ruled an active crime scene.

The St. Landry Parish sheriff had made a quick scan of the area, finding Barrilleaux’s clothes discarded in a heap about twenty yards from the duck blind. Authorities may have never identified him if not for the wallet in his jeans.

At the hospital, the medical team scrambled to identify a source of the infection that Barrilleaux’s unstable condition insisted must be present. His lungs panted, his heart raced, his temperature climbed . . . and still nothing.

Mr. Barrilleaux had lost an estimated ten pounds of flesh and three liters of blood before being discovered in Jude Singleton’s duck blind. Some of the wounds were fresh, only hours old and still bleeding. Others appeared older, inflamed and angry where the fiery pink skin met open tissue.

Dr. Edward Harper’s progress notes on Mr. Barrilleaux would later be collected for evidence. The first reads as follows:

*   *   *

PATIENT PROGRESS NOTE

Subjective: Patient is a 23 yo White M, brought in by ambulance and admitted on 8/7/08 for severe blood loss following multiple lacerations to back and lower extremities. Pt still unable to answer any questions as of the time of rounds this morning.

Objective:

Temp: 102.5° F

BP: 165/102

Pulse: 160 bpm

Respirations: 44 [breaths per minute]

General appearance: Pt. appears to be hyperventilating/ panting, diaphoretic/clammy. Eyes are open, occasionally tracking movement, but otherwise unresponsive to stimuli.

Head/neck: Both pupils fully dilated to 9 mm, almost no iris visible; significant conjunctival injection—eye sclera are bloodshot red around black pupils. Slight bleeding from gums—no identifiable cause. Poor dentition.

Chest/lungs: Clear breath sounds. No evidence of respiratory infection.

Abdomen: Non-distended. Hyperactive bowel sounds.

Skin: Extremely pale, nearly to the point of translucency at rib cage, wrists, popliteal fossa, etc. Vessels clearly visible beneath surface. No significant telangiectasia. Posterior lacerations bandaged per wound care. Laceration on neck is surrounded by bright red tissue, highly inflamed. Black along the lacerated edges.

Labs reviewed—White blood cell count below normal range. Low iron, low zinc, elevated TIBC. Elevated bili-rubin, low LDH. Extreme elevation of porphyrins in blood and urine samples (see attached values).3

Assessment: 23 yo M with confounding presentation: multiple lacerations with altered mental status and hyperactive autonomic nervous system functions, yet no lab evidence of offending agent infectious process.

Plan:

Cont. current regimen of IV fluids and antibiotic prophylaxis for staph, strep, leptospira, and other potential organisms typically involved in bite wounds.Immunization for tetanus and rabies administered.Cont. vital checks every 4 hours.[Infectious disease] and plastics following. Appreciate their recs.Awaiting neurology consult for possible head trauma/ concussion. Likely to see pt this a.m.Rule out delirium vs. unspecified psychosis. Will consult psychiatry.

Dr. Edward Harper

Internal Medicine, St. Martin Hospital, Lafayette General

St. Landry Parish Coroner

08/08/2008

Reading between the lines of the following progress notes, it appears psychiatry never evaluated the patient, despite Dr. Harper’s consult. They likely cited his unresponsiveness as an impenetrable obstacle, and furthermore they undoubtedly caught a whiff of the usual stink that accompanies a psychiatry consult, that nebulous request that pleads with hands in the air, “What the fuck is going on here? I’m not even sure what I’m asking, but can you shrinks just come sort it out?” Nevertheless, Dr. Harper continued to write for the consult, and psychiatry continued to ignore it, in an all-too-common pissing contest between departments.

One in desperation, demanding answers.

The other in defiance, demanding an actual question.

ONE CUPOF COFFEE

August 21, 1791

ON A BALMY Sunday night in 1791, a vicious tropical storm struck the French colony of Haiti. Catastrophic winds and cacophonous thunder would crash down on a vodou ceremony in Saint Domingue, where thousands of enslaved Africans had gathered in secret. Those men and women took Mother Nature’s wrath as an omen, a rallying cry to revolution. They rose up, dragging their enslavers from the soft tranquility of their beds and into the furious night. They murdered their owners and paraded the heads of their children on stakes. The storm and the revolt it incited plunged the entire colony into civil war.

The Haitian Revolution would eventually birth the first Black republic in the Western Hemisphere. Over the ensuing two decades, a great many Haitians of African descent, those self-emancipated people made free by the revolution, would migrate across the Gulf of Mexico, finding a new home in the fertile lands of South Louisiana.

*   *   *

August 9, 2008

Sheriff Yvette Lemonia Fuselier woke up to the sound of a ringing telephone—never a good sign. She’d probably snuck in three hours of sleep.

The past week had been a hectic one for the sheriff. Tropical Storm Edouard had ravaged her parish, leaving Yvette and her department scrambling to pick up the pieces. It was a familiar ritual and one she’d been anticipating. Even before Edouard’s landfall, before the meteorologist’s giddy warnings and the long lines at the pump, she knew that damn storm was coming. She’d always had that sensitivity about her, something in her marrow that seemed to connect her to those subtle barometric shifts. She’d feel a change in the angle of the wind and suddenly find herself mumbling the old Haitian folk song her grandmother used to sing:

“Fèy yo gade mwen nan branch mwem,yon move tan pase li voye’m jete.Jou ou wè’m tonbe a, se pa jou a m’mouri,Men jou ou wè’m tonbe a, se pa jou a m’mouri.”

I’m a leaf. Look at me on my branch, she’d think to herself, translating without even realizing it.

A terrible storm came along and knocked me off.

But the day you see me fall is not the day I die.

And she’d think of those enslaved ancestors who, two centuries ago, had coupled themselves to the power of nature and won their freedom.

The day you see me fall is not the day I die.

But Yvette, of all people, knew that Mother Nature’s allegiances were fickle. Hurricanes and the like only brought devastation and change. What might mean salvation for some would surely mean suffering for others, and the floodwaters didn’t care. Noah’s Ark was just a story told by the survivors, who convinced themselves they had been chosen. She’d seen her share of storms, had stood out there and felt the brutality, and it all somehow seemed a part of her. The tragedy and violence and anger and power that echoed through her DNA seemed to manifest itself each year in the seasonal barrage, in the cracked limbs and the wet blankets of leaves ripped from their branches and strewn on the ground. The turbulence was all too common around here.

And yet she stayed.

Those who’ve lived long enough on the Gulf Coast know that volatility. They know the howl of the wind. The flicker of the lights. That eerie and familiar feeling of sifting through all that fallen greenery, none of it autumnal or crisp or appropriately dead and crackly dry. All of it was supposed to be alive somewhere else.

And now it was in a hundred thousand wet garbage bags.

She wearily answered the phone. It was Deputy Nick Roger with news from St. Martin Hospital.

Anders Barrilleaux, the poor soul pulled out of that Arnaudville duck blind, was dead.

Sheriff Fuselier untied her hair wrap, releasing her short, natural curls. The new silk scarf had recently been gifted by her daughter-in-law, Celeste. The fit of it would take some getting used to. The fabric often loosened up in the middle of the night, forcing her to overcompensate by securing it too tight and waking with a headache. She preferred her old wrap, but even she had to admit it had seen better days. She could relate—sixty-two felt more like seventy-two lately.