Crusader's Cross (Dave Robicheaux 14)

chapter TWENTY-FIVE

The 911 call from a fisherman out by Lake Dautrieve came in at 5:43 Monday morning. "She don't have no clothes on. I t'ought maybe it was some kind of accident. Like maybe she fallen out of a tree or somet'ing," he said.

"Sir, calm down. Is the person injured?" the female dispatcher said.

"Injured? What you talkin' about?" the caller replied.

Helen picked me up in my front yard. The sun was just striking the brick buildings on Main as we crossed the drawbridge and headed up Loreauville Road to

ward the lake.

"I thought I was on the desk," I said.

"This cruiser is your desk, so shut up," she said.

We arrived at the crime scene just behind the coroner's van. Uniformed sheriff's deputies from both Iberia and St. Martin parishes were already there, stringing yellow tape through scrub oaks and gum and willow trees on the edge of the lake.

The shallows were carpeted with hyacinths, and I could see the black heads of moccasins between the lily pads, barely breaking the water. High up on the windstream, turkey buzzards circled like ragged-edged oriental kites. I watched Koko Hebert stoop under the tape and walk toward a forked oak tree with the plodding ennui of a man who has long given up on the world.

Helen took a call on a hand-held radio, then tossed it on the seat of the cruiser. "The boys from Baton Rouge are on their way," she said.

"They think it's the Baton Rouge guy?" I said.

"A tattoo on the vie is the same as on a woman who was abducted by LSU Sunday afternoon," she replied.

The abduction had taken place in a middle-income neighborhood a few blocks off Highland Road. The victim, Barbara Trajan, was the mother of two children, an aerobics instructor at a health club, and the wife of a high school football coach. She had a tattoo of an orange and purple butterfly on her abdomen, just below her navel. The previous afternoon, she had been working in her flower bed, one that paralleled the driveway. Her husband had taken the children to a church softball game. When they returned home, Barbara Trajan had disappeared. Her gardening trowel and one cotton glove lay on the concrete.

I looked across the lake at the sun. It was molten and watery, wrapped in vapor, just above the tree line. The previous night had been hot and dry, the clouds crackling with thunder that gave no rain. Now, a breeze suddenly sprang up in the south and riffled across the lake. A gray, salty odor that had been trapped inside the woods struck my face. Helen cleared her throat and spit to the side. "Oh boy," she said.

We pulled on latex gloves and went inside the tape. The ground was leaf strewn and soft, torn with drag marks, gouged by boots or heavy shoes, as though a man had been pulling a weight that resisted his grasp. The victim was nude, her chin fitted at an upward angle in the fork of a tree. Her wrists were bound behind her with plastic cuffs, her eyes open, as though they had been poached by a vision of human behavior she had never imagined. A white cotton work glove protruded from her mouth.

Koko Hebert stood behind the dead woman, wiping mosquitoes out of his face. I saw him stoop over, reach out with his latex-gloved hand, then rise up again and jot something on a notepad. A moment later he walked past me, without speaking, his shoulders humped, his face flushed and oily in the heat. He ducked under the crime scene tape and went out by the lake, by himself, into the breeze. I followed him down by the lakeside. He was still writing on his notepad.

"Wait for the postmortem and I'll be able to speak with more specificity," he said.

"I'm on a short tether. I'm not sure how much time I have left with the department," I said.

"Entrance through the rear. Bite marks on the shoulders. Death by strangulation. With a chain of some kind. With tiny links in it." He looked at me.

"Like the little piece of chain Fontaine Belloc hid on her person before she died?"

"That'd be my bet," he said.

"How do you read this guy? Don't give me your cynical runaround, either, Koko. You're an intelligent man."

"He's a classic psychopath, which means we don't have a clue about what goes on inside his head. But if you ask me, I think he's trying to lead the hunt away from Baton Rouge. I don't think he's from around here."

"Why not?"

"He's transported two vies eighty miles into Iberia Parish. Both were alive during the trip. That means he incurred risks he didn't have to. It was for a reason. My guess is he lives not far from Baton Rouge, maybe around Port Allen or Denham Springs. He's squeezing his big-boy every time he sees us scratching our heads on TV."

"Maybe he had another reason," I said.

Koko lit a cigarette and studied the lake, either lost in his own thoughts or out of indifference to anything I had to say. Twenty feet out from the bank, I saw the gnarled, green-black tail of a gator roil the lily pads. Koko exhaled his cigarette smoke into the wind. "Yeah?" he said.

"What if dropping the vie here is a 'fuck-you' card for people he knows?" I said.

Koko continued to puff on his cigarette, his eyes veiled. I walked back toward the cruiser, then heard him laboring his way up the slope behind me.