The detective read the name off my tow sheet in the glare of the yard lights, and then he took off his hat. It was a thing I had not seen in twenty two years of police work around that gate. “Mr. Batiste,” said Detective Laurent, “the deputy who signed this is named Wade Hebert. He served the parish for thirty one years. He retired in March.” He looked at the paper, and then at the open lockbox on the seat of the old Chevy, and his voice dropped. “And on the fourteenth license in that stack, the name is Annette Hebert.”
I stood very still. The night was hot and heavy with the smell of diesel, and in the far corner of the yard the dogs had begun to bark. Detective Laurent said, “Annette was his wife. She disappeared on the way home from a church supper in August of 1998. They found her car on the shoulder of Highway 71. They never found her.” He pressed his lips together. “Wade was on the search for eleven years. He kept hunting after the case went cold. He is a man who never stopped looking.”
I asked, because I had to, whether the deputy had put the box in the truck himself. Laurent shook his head slowly. “No. I think I know what happened, though. I think he found it.” He nodded toward the old pickup. “The registration was to a man named Floyd Gaspard. He died two years ago, in an assisted living home in Minden. A retired long haul trucker. A quiet fellow. Never married.” He tapped the sheet. “Wade must have connected the vehicle somehow. He found it parked on a levee road, with the keys inside, and he towed it to your yard.”
A man who never stops looking for his wife has done what the law never could, and has left it to a stranger to open the box.
I thought of the strange calm of that deputy on the day he brought the truck in, a tall, gray, soft spoken man who stood in my office and sipped coffee and asked me, almost idly, whether I always inventoried a vehicle before selling it. I said I did. He said, “That is good practice.” And he signed his name on the sheet with a steady hand and left. I realized now what he had done. He had not wanted to break into it himself. He knew the only honest way for the truth to come out was for a stranger to open the box.
Detective Laurent said, “Evidence found by a lawman without a warrant can be thrown out. Evidence found by a tow yard operator, in the course of lawful business, cannot.” He shook his head in wonder. “He gave it to you, Mr. Batiste, so that no lawyer could ever say he planted it.” He reached for the radio at his shoulder. He did not call for backup. He asked dispatch for a number, and spoke to someone in a low voice, and I knew without being told that he was calling Wade Hebert at home.
Wade came to the yard at one in the morning, in a pressed shirt and a pair of old cowboy boots. He was sixty one. He walked through the gate, past the idling patrol cars, with his hands where everyone could see them. He looked at me. He said, “Mr. Batiste, I owe you an apology for not telling you.” I told him he owed me nothing. He nodded. Then he walked to the old truck and stood at the open door and looked into the box for a long time, and his shoulders began to shake.
Laurent handed him the license, the fourteenth in the stack. It was faded, and the plastic was cracked, and the photograph was of a smiling woman of thirty three with short brown hair and a gap between her teeth. Wade held it in both hands. He did not weep aloud. He lifted it to the light and said, “Hello, Annie.” He said it softly. He said it as one says good morning in a kitchen. I turned away, and walked to the gate, and stood there with my back to them, because it did not seem right to watch.
It took fourteen months to identify the rest. The notebook from the box was a record of twenty three women. Laurent and a team of agents spent a year matching dates and mile markers to missing person files, and a dozen families who had waited decades were finally told what had become of their daughters and sisters. Floyd Gaspard was found in the notebook. Wade Hebert had known it, in the end, all along. He had followed that truck for twenty six years, until the man died, and then he found it.
On the day the last of the families was notified, Wade came to my office with a pie his sister had baked. He sat in the chair he had sat in on the day of the tow. He said, “I never thought I would see an end to it.” I said I was sorry for his wife. He said, “Do not be. You gave her back.” He set the pie on my desk, and a card beside it. On the card was a short note in an the handwriting of an old policeman. It said, Thank you for doing it the right way.
I did not sell that truck. It sits in the back corner of my yard, under a cottonwood, with its doors open and the weeds growing through the floorboards. The state will take it for evidence in time. But on the anniversary of the day it came in, Wade drives out with a thermos of coffee and sits in the front seat for an hour. I leave him alone. I understand now that some trucks carry nothing in them but the long search of a man, and his hope, and the quiet gift of being found.
