Crusader's Cross (Dave Robicheaux 14)

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p; "I don't know what it is. My guess is Honoria was an incest victim."

"Where in the name of God do you get these ideas?"

"Koko Hebert says Honoria had intercourse in the twenty-four-hour period before she died. She was about to shower in the guesthouse, where Val Chalons lives, not in the main house, where she lived. She had every behavioral characteristic of someone who has been the long-term victim of a sexual predator."

"Dave, APIS came back with only one match that didn't belong in that guesthouse — yours."

"Except I had no motive to murder her. There was DNA in her genital area. I'll bet the lab will show it was left there by a relative. My guess is it belongs either to the father or the brother."

But I had already lost her attention. "I must have had two dozen calls this morning," she said. "They want you skinned, salted, and hung in a gibbet."

"Am I suspended?"

"Suspension might be the least of it."

"What do you want me to do, Helen?"

"Lose the nun."

"Can't do it."

"Then please go somewhere else for a while."

And that's what I did. As far as the water cooler, my face burning as though I had been slapped. Then I went back into her office, the door hanging open behind me.

"You want my shield, just say it."

"You're always psychoanalyzing other people. Why don't you look inside your own head for a change?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Bootsie died on you and it made you madder than hell. Your daughter is gone and every day you wake up, you're scared you'll drink again. So you figured out a way to climb on a cross, a place where it's safe and people can't do anything else to you. I don't think you're going to like it up there, bwana."

The week was not going well. Worse, Clete had called early the previous morning and, without thinking, I told him Jimmie had gotten a lead on Lou Kale and that Kale might be running an escort service out of Miami. That was a mistake.

chapter NINETEEN

By Tuesday afternoon Clete was standing at the registration desk in the lobby of an old ten-story stucco hotel on the beach in Hollywood, Florida, decked out in shades, his pale blue porkpie hat, a tropical shirt printed with bare-breasted hula girls, white polyester Bermuda shorts, and blue tennis shoes threaded with brand-new white laces. He carried a set of golf clubs on one shoulder, a flight bag on the other, registered as C. T. Perkins from Gulfport, Mississippi, and paid cash for his room.

The walls of the hotel were spiderwebbed with cracks, the patio in the center of the building spiked with weeds, the potted jacaranda dying from lack of water. But the view of the ocean from his open window on the top floor was magnificent, the overhead fan adequate to cool the room, the salt air wonderful. Clete propped his feet on the windowsill and punched in the telephone number of the Sea Breeze Escort Service. Down below, the tide was sliding high up on the sand and children were running into the waves, leaping in the froth that sucked back over their tanned bodies. On the third ring Clete found himself talking to a man who called himself Lou Coyne.

"You got the referral where?" Coyne said.

"Stevie Giacano, in New Orleans," Clete replied.

"Oh yeah, Stevie Gee. In the Teamsters, right? How's ole Stevie doin'?"

"Not too good. He's dead. But he always said your service was tops."

"We like to think so. So you're hosting a convention, that's what you're saying?"

"I'm about three blocks away from your office. What if I come on down there and maybe we work out a group rate? You give finder fees? I'll take mine in trade."

"Tell you what, I'll meet you in a half hour at that little outdoor joint by your hotel, the one looks like a straw hut."

"How will I know you?"