“Trying to see if Sophie is wearing a coral ring in this picture. But her left hand isn’t visible.” Landeta looked up, pushing the lamp away.
“She wore a gold band. Diane wears it now,” Louis said. He came over to look over Landeta’s shoulder at the photograph. “I don’t think Frank looks Mexican,” Louis said.
“He doesn’t,” Landeta said. “Spanish, maybe, Castillian Spanish.” He looked up at Louis. “Didn’t you say Frank spoke Spanish to you at the restaurant?”
Louis shook his head. “I think it was Latin.”
“You sure it wasn’t Spanish? Latin is the basis for all the Romance languages.”
“Hell, I don’t know. I ran it by Vince, the ME. He said it sounds like Latin.”
“What exactly did Frank say to you? What’d it sound like?”
“Hicks salute something. I tried to find it in these books, but I can’t figure it out.”
“What books?” Landeta asked.
Louis set the pizza box aside, pulling the stack of books closer. “I found these in Frank’s house. He was self-educated, and into all kinds of weird shit.”
“Self-educated? In what areas?”
“Language, for one. Listen to this.” Louis read off the names of the language books. When he got to Teach Yourself Latin, Landeta held up a hand.
“Let me see that book.”
Louis handed Landeta the Latin book. Landeta pulled his lamp closer and thumbed through the book. But after a few minutes, he straightened and took off his glasses, rubbing his eyes. He rose and headed toward the kitchen.
Louis picked up the Latin book Landeta had been reading and started looking through it again.
A few minutes later, a fresh Heineken appeared by Louis’s elbow. Louis muttered a thanks and watched Landeta settle back at the desk, a different one of Frank’s books in his hand. Louis went back to his own reading, repeating Frank’s expression over and over in his head.
Hicks allude? Hick salude? Salute? What the hell had he said?
For a long time the only sound in the room was Ray Charles singing a soft accompaniment to the hum of the air conditioner. Finally, Landeta broke the quiet.
“This is great,” he murmured, almost to himself.
Louis looked up. “What is?”
“This man-into-wolf stuff.”
“Frank had a thing about werewolves,” Louis said. “He had a bunch of books about it.”
“Lycanthropy’s not really about werewolves.”
“What is it then?”
Landeta pursed his lips. “According to this, it’s a mental disorder where a person believes he has turned into a wolf.”
Louis just stared at him.
Landeta poked a finger at the book spread open beneath the magnifier lamp. “This shrink, Robert Eisler, had a theory that violence, war, especially murder, could be traced back to man’s primal urges as a member of his animal pack. Woods underlined a bunch of shit in here and wrote a couple of things in the margins.”
“Like what?”
“There’s this passage about how modern man is descended from a mutated wolf species that raped and sometimes even cannibalized females.” Landeta looked up. “Woods underlined it twice and wrote next to it ‘see Asturian rite.’”
Louis came over to the desk. “Asturian? There was a book in Frank’s room with that word in the title.”
“You got it with you?”
“Yeah, but I left it down in the car.”
“Bring it in tomorrow. Here’s another passage he underlined,” Landeta said. He started reading out loud. “‘The aggressive pack would, whenever occasion offered, kidnap and carry away the females of the weaker tribes.’”
“Jesus,” Louis said. “Abduction by wolves?”
“Or a man who thought he was,” Landeta said. He went back to his reading.
Louis went back to sit on the sofa, shaking his head slowly. Shit, cannibalization? Is that why they never found the women’s bodies?
“Listen to this,” Landeta said. “Jung had a patient with this disorder. The guy dreamed he was part of a herd that he had to leave. So in the dream he puts on a wolf-head disguise and goes off into the woods, becoming an outlaw from his herd. He dreams he is alone on a desert island.”
“Like Cayo Costa, the place where Frank hid out,” Louis said.
Landeta kept reading. “Then the guy feels the need to go back to the life he broke away from. When he does, he is surrounded by women from his original herd but he doesn’t recognize them.”
“Frank underlined all that?” Louis asked.
Landeta nodded.
“You should have seen him,” Louis said. “Out on that island. It was like he was right at home, like he was...”