PART II SWAMP COUNTRY
PART II
SWAMP COUNTRY
Trust, but verify.
– Ronald Reagan
Crossing from Texas into Louisiana is like stepping out of a sauna into a steam room.
Texas is wide, flat, empty and dry.
Louisiana is wide, flat, empty and wet: 32 percent of the state is marshlands and an additional 25 percent of it is water, so basically more than half of the state is in some way damp.
The rest is mediocre farmland and massive petrochemical plants.
In Texas, the billboards on the side of the road are mostly about Jesus and personal injury attorneys.
In Louisiana, they’re about Jesus and personal injury attorneys, too, but also adult sex-toy superstores, which sort of sums up Louisiana.
(On the Jesus issue, religion perplexes me. After much thought on the matter, I’ve decided that religion is a Socially Accepted Delusion.
I once met a woman who thought she had little aliens living in her brain and that they spoke to her. She was sent to a mental institution. But if you think Jesus lives inside you and speaks to you, then you’re a person of ‘deep faith’ and apparently that’s okay.
So even though both delusions are equally ridiculous, the first is not socially acceptable but the second one is.
I’m also constantly surprised that no-one notices that the resurrection of Jesus every Easter is an obvious metaphor for nature’s resurrection in the spring after its annual ‘death’ during the -northern winter.)
But I digress.
Back to Louisiana.
If America is a car, then L.A., San Francisco, Boston and New York are the plush leather interior with the digital dashboard and air-conditioning; the Midwest is the engine; Texas is the gas tank; and Louisiana is the exhaust pipe.
I don’t know what Florida is. Florida is weird.
Crossing over the high concrete bridge that spans the Texas–Louisiana border near Orange, I saw the wide Sabine River beneath me and the vast swamps of Louisiana stretching away ahead of me.
I was driving my Winnebago.
It’s the model 22R, commonly known as the ‘Minnie Winnie’.
The Minnie Winnie is the most reliable RV in America. It’s more likely to make it to 250,000 miles than any other recreational vehicle. It has a Ford F-350 cab which opens onto a spacious rear living area.
I like it because I can keep my stuff in it when I travel for work: my second digital whiteboard, spare clothes and underwear, even my kayak which rides on a rack on top. It also has a bed.
I drove at the speed limit.
Even driving two miles an hour over the speed limit makes you three times more likely to have an accident.
I drove with my hands at ten o’clock and two o’clock on the steering wheel, as recommended by both the Texas and the Louisiana State Driver’s Manuals.
In Louisiana, it’s legal to turn right on a red light but unless I have a car behind me, I prefer not to do this. It’s not as safe as waiting for the green.
Statistically, driving a car is the most dangerous thing you can do in the modern world—far more dangerous than flying in an airplane, bungee-jumping or even skydiving—so I’m a very cautious driver.
As I drove along the interstate, I thought about this new development in the LaToya Martyn case.
Obviously, it was disturbing on the face of it: a dead newborn baby being found inside an antique doll.
But it was unsettling for another, very particular reason.
I’d been a professional private detective for eleven years.
In that time, I’d worked on all kinds of cases and encountered many crooked individuals.
Adulterous husbands. Lots of those. They’re my bread and butter.
Unfaithful wives. Not as many, but a growing category.
Scammers who tried to defraud insurance companies for disability payments. (Those cases were easy and the insurance companies always paid promptly.)
Stalkers were pretty common, too, especially with the advent of social media. Guys like Leroy Hertzenberger often started their stalking on Instagram or TikTok.
Killers were rare.
I’d only tracked down three of them.
I once stopped a mass shooter before he carried out an attack on an outdoor rock concert. He’d been a stan of that guy in Vegas who’d opened fire on a music festival from the Mandalay Bay Hotel, killing 58 people and wounding hundreds.
Serial killers were rarer still.
I’d found two of those.
The thing about serial killers, though, is that they’re truly insane. I mean batshit bark-at-the-moon crazy.
They seriously don’t know what they’re doing is wrong.
And then there were the skip traces and missing persons.
There were many reasons why a person disappeared.
Sometimes they did it to flee from crimes they’d committed, like embezzling executives or trust-fund-breaking lawyers. Or someone who owed money to a debt collector.
Sometimes it was a kid running away from home or someone with a mental illness who’d gone off their meds or—and these could be complicated—women fleeing abusive husbands or boyfriends.
But in recent years, a new kind of miscreant had appeared on the skip-trace scene.
The serial kidnapper.
By ‘serial kidnapper’ I mean a guy—it’s always a guy—who kidnaps a woman or child and locks them in his soundproofed basement and keeps them there, often as a sex slave, for months or even years.
They were worse than the serial killers.
Because while the serial killers were insane, the serial kidnappers weren’t insane at all. They were smart and they were calculating and they knew exactly what they were doing.
I’d found two of these creeps in my life. Both had used the movie The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as an instruction manual for how to build their soundproof cells (the American version not the superior Swedish version; neither had read the novel).
This was why the LaToya Martyn case was extra disturbing.
LaToya had vanished seven years ago. And now a dead newborn baby with her DNA had been found.
The conclusion was as obvious as it was chilling: had she been abducted by a serial kidnapper and kept for years as some kind of sex slave?
A couple of hours later I arrived at Lake Charles.
Lake Charles is a city in the western part of Louisiana.
It’s dominated by petroleum and natural gas refineries, two casino hotels and a singularly massive bridge, the 140-foot-tall Israel LaFleur Bridge. (According to Wikipedia, it is one of the tallest structures in all of Louisiana.)
Pulling into the city morgue, I parked precisely within the lines of an empty bay.
Another car to my right was parked sloppily with its wheels over the lines.
I don’t understand why someone would do this.
It’s not only inconsiderate, it’s inefficient: the parking lot could fit more cars if everyone parked within the lines.
People baffle me sometimes.
I locked my Minnie Winnie and entered the morgue.
The dead baby lay on a roll-out steel tray next to the doll.
She was a girl and she was Black.
She was a tiny thing, soft and fragile.
Her little eyes were squeezed shut.
She still had the placenta attached to her belly: she was literally ‘newborn’.
‘The baby was stillborn,’ the morgue attendant, Rodney, said to me. ‘She was dead when she was tossed in the water.’
Rodney Lowdon was a functioning opioid addict and I’d helped him once when he’d got into debt with his dealer. In return, Rodney granted me privileges like this: an unofficial viewing of the dead child in the morgue.
‘You better be quick, dude,’ he added. ‘The LBI are on their way and will be here soon. Senior agents. They told me to keep everything about this baby hush-hush for now—no media, no nothin’—so you should feel honoured.’
The LBI was the Louisiana Bureau of Investigations: the elite of the state police.
‘Thank you, Rodney. I appreciate this. It’s an old case I never solved. You said the baby was stillborn?’
‘Yup. And then encased in the doll and thrown in the river during the hurricane.’
‘Additional DNA results?’ I asked.
Rodney shrugged. ‘The mother is definitely your lady, LaToya Patrice Martyn.’
‘What about the father?’
‘No results came back for paternity. Whoever he is, that baby’s daddy hasn’t got a criminal record.’
I nodded. This wasn’t unexpected. The police only have your DNA on file if you’ve been convicted of a serious crime, usually a felony.
I turned my attention to the doll, still affixed to its small wooden cross.
The doll was a perfect fit for the baby, almost like a plastic suit of armour.
Filthy and streaked with mud, with unblinking antique eyes, it was objectively creepy.
Adding to this was the fact that it was still attached to the cross.
‘Why crucify it?’ Rodney asked. ‘I mean, is that some kinda Satanic shit?’
I peered at the cross.
It certainly seemed ritualistic. But as I looked at it closely, a more practical reason for affixing the doll to it came to mind.
‘To keep the doll afloat,’ I said.
There was one other striking thing about the mud-stained -crucified doll.
An image had been scrawled in black marker on its chest.
A hand-drawn picture of a three-forked tree with a Christian cross in its centre and nooses hanging off its two side arms:
I frowned.
I’d seen this image before.
Once. Twelve years ago.
In a very unique place.
Tattooed onto the body of a very bad man.
The tree looked like a misshapen trident.
The addition of the cross to its heart added to the overall occult vibe of the doll.
I gazed intently at the curious image, like I had the first time I’d seen it years before.
‘Where exactly was this baby found?’ I asked. ‘Have you got precise coordinates?’
Rodney showed me an official printout of a map with GPS coordinates on it. I snapped a photo of it with my cell phone.
‘Acheron River in Cameron Parish,’ he said, ‘south of Victorville. By a tributary called Dead Man’s Creek. She was found washed up against a whole dang house that had floated down the river in the storm—’
A buzzer rang.
‘Fuck!’ Rodney spat. ‘The Bureau folks are here! Quick, go out the back way, now!’
‘Thanks, Rodney.’
I hurried out the rear loading bay.