Crusader's Cross (Dave Robicheaux 14)

Talking with Clete Purcel about personal restraint or reasonable behavior was like a meteorologist telling an electrical storm it shouldn't come to town. But I couldn't be mad at Clete. He was the first person to whom I always took my problems, and in I truth his violence, recklessness, and vigilantism were simply the other side of my own personality. I felt his gaze wander over my face and the stitches I had tried to comb my hair over.

"Will you stop that?" I said.

"What's your brother say about all this?" he said.

"Haven't talked with him about it."

He looked at me.

"He's got his own problems," I said.

"Jimmie the Gent is a stand-up guy. Why not treat him like one?" Clete said.

Years ago my brother had taken a bullet for me and lost an eye. I didn't feel like cluttering up his life with any more grief or the detritus of 1958. I started to tell Clete that when my cell phone rang. The caller number was Helen Soileau's.

"We got a floater out by the St. Martin line," she said. "It may be the wife of that DEQ official who's in Seagoville. We've got personal effects, but I don't think we'll get a visual ID."

"That bad?"

"The guy who did this isn't human."

"None of them are," I replied.

&n

bsp; "Better see the vie," she said.

chapter FIVE

The crime scene was only ten minutes from the bar-and-grill on the bayou. But the images there belonged in a medieval painting of a netherworld that should have existed only in the imagination. On a deadend dirt road lined with garbage was a black pond spiked by gum trees. The sky was tormented by birds, the sun a gush of red on the horizon. The victim lay on her back, her torso half in the water. I felt my stomach constrict when Helen shined her flashlight on the woman's face.

"Get this. The sonofabitch hung her purse in a tree," she said. "Money, car keys, driver's license, credit cards, everything was in there."

"Her husband was with the Department of Environmental Quality?"

"Yeah, he was taking juice from a couple of petrochemical guys. So maybe this isn't the Baton Rouge serial killer."

The coroner, Koko Hebert, had just arrived. He was a gelatinous, cynical man, a sweaty, foul-smelling chain smoker, given to baggy clothes, tropical shirts, and a trademark Panama hat. I always suspected a Rotarian lay hidden inside his enormous girth and wheezing breath and jaded manner, but, if so, he hid it well. He leaned over with a penlight and stared down at the body. "Jesus Christ," he said.

"Got any speculations?" Helen said.

"Yeah, her face looks like a flower pot after a truck ran over it," he said.

Helen gave me a look. "Are those ligations around her throat?" she asked.

He made a pained face, as though he were weighing a great decision. "Could be. But those knots could be the nodules associated with bubonic plague. Been a couple of outbreaks in East Texas. Squirrels and pack rats can carry it sometimes. You didn't touch anything here, did you?" he said. He held Helen's eyes somberly, then his mouth broke at the corners and his breath wheezed like air escaping from a ruptured tire. "Ligations, shit. The guy who did this had a boner on he couldn't knock down with a baseball bat."

"The signature on the Baton Rouge serial killings is death by strangulation," Helen said.

But the coroner ignored her and motioned for two paramedics to bag up the body.

"Did you hear me?" she said.

He stared into space, his eyes askance, a manufactured look of pensiveness on his face. "Our killer is not into methodology," he said.

"Say again?" Helen said.

"Our killer is a horny prick who loves beating the shit out of people. He doesn't care how he does it. Are we all better now?" Koko said.