Crusader's Cross (Dave Robicheaux 14)

The phone on my kitchen counter rang early Monday morning. "Is this Mr. David Robicheaux?" a voice said.

I looked at the caller ID. The number was blocked. "What can I help you with?" I said.

"That one-eyed brother of yours cain't let the past rest. Looks like you cain't, either. Time to stop messing in other people's berry patch."

"What are you talking about?" I said.

"I knew this was a mistake."

Where had I heard the voice? Nowhere and everywhere, I thought. The speech pattern and accent were generic, the kind you hear in carnival people — laconic, faintly peckerwood with hard urban edges, the cynicism and private frame of reference always veiled. "I know you?" I asked.

"Did you lose your cherry in a cathouse? Bet you did. Bet I can tell you the thoughts you had the night you done it. Fantasies about a big-titty girl with a soft ass an ax handle wide. Except she turned out to be a sack of flab that smelled bad and yawned in your face when you got off her. Tell me I'm wrong."

"Still haven't figured out what you're selling, partner, so I'd better ring off now. Thanks for your call."

"Ring off?"

I hung up, then punched in 911 on my cell. Wally, our wheezing dispatcher, answered. "Call the phone company and open up my home line," I said.

"You got it, Dave," he said.

The phone on the counter rang again just as I clicked off the cell. "Hey, man, I ain't your enemy," the voice said. "Let Ida go. She don't —"

The transmission broke up and the connection went dead. Fifteen minutes later, Wally called. "It was from a cell phone, somewhere down in the Keys. What's going on?" he said.

"Some guy with too much time on his hands having dirty thoughts," I said.

"Anyt'ing I can get in on?" he replied.

I walked to work that morning and decided not to tell Helen about the caller. She was sick of hearing the name Ida Durbin and also sick of hearing the kind of vague, uncentered information I had been offering her. In this instance, I had asked an anonymous caller if I knew him. He had answered my question with a reference to brothels. It wasn't a complimentary response. Also it made little sense and hardly seemed worth passing on to anyone else.

But in truth the caller had made one slip which I suspected he sorely regretted. He had spoken of Ida in the present tense. I also had a feeling I would hear from him again.

Much is written about contract killers. Much of it is accurate. If they're Mobbed-up, they tend to be ethnic, with tribal loyalties. But in the final analysis their race or nationality is coincidental. A button man is a sociopath first and an Italian, Jew, Latino, or Irishman second.

Jericho Johnny Wineburger was a Jew who graduated from a Catholic high school and did hits for a Neapolitan crime family.

The common denominators among professional assassins, at least in my experience, are greed, sometimes desperation, and total indifference to the fate of their victims and the pain visited upon their families. They possess neither anger nor curiosity and struggle with no problems of conscience whatsoever.

Years ago, when Clete Purcel and I were at NOPD, we had to fly to New York and interview a man being held in the West Street Jail. He had admitted to murdering over thirty people for one of the major crime families, one based in both Queens and Hallandale, Florida. The only emotion he showed was concern about his own situation. He maintained he had cut a deal that should have allowed him to enter the federal Witness Protection Program but the United States Attorney had betrayed him.

He droned on about governmental treachery and a life sentence without possibility of parole that had just been dropped on his head. I finally reached the point where I had to ask the question that lingers in the mind of every homicide cop who finds himself in a small room with a man whose handiwork he has seen up close, before the odors and the body fluids have been scrubbed out of the environment. "Did you ever have any regrets about the families of the guys you popped?" I said.

"Who?" he said.

"The families — their parents, their wives and kids."

"I didn't know them," he said. He shook his head and thought hard to make sure he was being honest. "No, I'm certain I didn't know none of them. Why?"

When I didn't reply, he snuffed down in his nose, complained about the coolness of the room, and asked if I could get the screw to bring him a box of Kleenex.

The week passed and I made no progress on the case of Fontaine Belloc, the woman the Baton Rouge serial killer had raped, bludgeoned, strangled, and dumped in a pond inside the Iberia Parish line. Sometimes in my dreams I thought I saw her ruined face speak to me. I had long ago learned the dead have their ways, and I was sure that a lady who was so brave that she would swallow her own wedding ring to keep it from the hands of her killer would find a way to tell me who he was.

But on Friday night I decided to put away my cares and go fishing with Clete for two days out on the salt. At false dawn on Saturday morning, just as the trees were turning gray inside the fog, I hitched my boat to my truck, loaded my tackle and an ice chest in the bed, and was about to pull out of the backyard onto the street when I heard the phone ring inside.

Ignore it, I told myself.

But my daughter, Alafair, was attending the summer session at Reed College in Portland, and no father who loves his daughter ever ignores a call that might be related to her welfare. I cut the engine and went back inside the house.