Crusader's Cross (Dave Robicheaux 14)

"Know anything about anthropology, primitive man's behavior, that kind of crap?" he said.

"No," I replied.

"Sometimes serial killers mark their territory, particularly when it has some kind of personal meaning to them. It looks like there're piss stripes on a tree back there. There were also piss stripes on a tree by the pond where we found the Belloc woman. I didn't pay much attention to it at the time because we had the semen on the vie."

"I've read through all the forensics on the Baton Rouge crime scenes. None of them makes mention of the perpetrator marking the area with urine. I think our guy is telling us something."

"Why didn't he disfigure this one?" I asked.

"He did. Inside. I told you to wait on the post, but you don't listen. If you ever get this demented fuck in your sights, ask God to look the other way."

It was not a morning to think about what I had seen.

Any inner-city street cop., homicide investigator, or member of a sex crimes unit carries images in his head that never go away, not unless he wants to burn them out of his skull with booze or yellow jackets or black speed. But what if the problem is not him or even the job? What if the problem is the simple fact that there is something bestial and cruel at work in the human race? What if his perception as a police officer is not a jaded but an accurate one?

When I was on loan to Miami P.D. I saw a black mob in Liberty City drag three Cuban kids from a car and crush their heads into pulp with curbstones. I also saw five uniformed cops in Opa Locka beat a black motorcyclist to death with batons. Clete and I cut a corpse dancing with maggots out of a brick wall and had our unmarked car Molotoved in the same night. I've worked child abuse cases I will never discuss with anyone.

But the expression on the face of the Trajan woman, her neck and head trapped helplessly in the fork of a tree, contained a suggestion about the human condition I couldn't get out of my mind. I suspected she was a brave woman and fought her attacker to the end. I also suspected she was not undone by either her fear or the pain and sexual humiliation he visited upon her. But what I had seen in her eyes was worse. "Loss" is not the right word for it. It was a realization that she was alone and powerless, and that beyond the perimeter of her vision a sadist was about to steal everything of value she owned — her dignity, her self-respect, her husband, her children, her career as an aerobics instructor, the quiet home she returned to daily, and finally her life. All to satisfy the libidinous pleasure of a deviate to whom she had as much importance as a stick of chewing gum.

What sociological factors could produce a man like this?

I felt almost as though I could see his face, like a figure moving around on the edge of a dream. Maybe I had seen him the night Honoria Chalons was murdered. Maybe I had processed him into jail, held each of his fingers in mine and rolled them on an ink pad, pressing the whorls in his skin onto paper, as though I were creating a dermatological artwork. Maybe the oil in his skin was transferred to mine.

But I knew with certainty that he was not far away, and that he would strike again soon, perhaps much closer to home, and that his intention was to deliver as much injury as possible to our community. I knew this in a way that was not demonstrable, not even to myself. But I knew it just the same, perhaps because I could not deny the cathartic, hard-pounding rush that violence had always brought me, one that was as pure and bright as a glass of ninety-proof whiskey flung onto a fire.

I went into Helen's office. She was gazing out the window at the cemetery, her hands in her back pockets, her breasts as firm as grapefruit against her shirt. "How's it rockin', Pops?" she said.

"The serial guy is somebody we know."

"Like down at the Kiwanis?"

"He broke his pattern when he murdered the teenage street hooker in New Orleans. It's not coincidence she talked to Clete and me a few hours before she died."

"I know all this, Dave. It's not helpful."

"Answer me this: With all the power and influence that Val Chalons has, why would he waste his time trying to ruin my reputation instead of finding his sister's killer?"

"He thinks you did it?"

"No, he doesn't. He's covering his own butt."

I could see the fatigue in her eyes and I felt like a fool. What was she supposed to do? Take me off the desk because I had an unprovable intuition? Then I realized she wasn't thinking about our conversation at all.

"Raphael Chalons just got the paddles at Iberia General. He may not make it," she said.

"What happened?" I said.

"He was visiting his son and had a stroke."

I collected my mail from my box and went back to my office, dazed, unable to explain my feelings to myself about a man I had always thought of as corrupt and vaguely sinister. I found myself staring at the envelopes and memos in my hand without the words on them registering. I sat down at my desk and called the hospital. An intern in the intensive-care unit told me Raphael Chalons was alive but paralyzed down one side and unable to speak.

"Is he going to pull through?" I said.

"You say you're with the sheriff's department?" he asked.

"Yes, sir."

"He's been in bad health for some time," he said.