Crusader's Cross (Dave Robicheaux 14)

A half hour later Mack Bertrand called from the lab. "I don't know if this is good news or bad news," he said. "The casts I made out at the Trajan crime scene this morning? I'm reasonably sure we've got a match with the casts I made under your bedroom window."

"You say 'reasonably sure'?"

"You ever watch this TV show where guys are always examining used Q-tips or a Kleenex some gal wiped her lipstick on?"

"I'm lost," I said.

"None of this stuff is nuclear science. We're talking about muddy boots," he said.

I called Molly at her agency and told her the voyeur at our house may have been the Baton Rouge serial killer.

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; "Well, he'd better not come around again," she said. "I'm going to pick up some steaks on the way home. Is there anything else you want from the store?"

You want a stand-up woman in your life? Marry a nun.

I bought flowers at the Winn-Dixie and took them to the nurse's station in the intensive-care unit at Iberia General. "They're for Mr. Raphael," I said.

"He can't have flowers in his room now. But I can keep them here at the station and put them in his room when he's moved," she said. She was a pleasant-looking older woman, with soft pink skin and blue-tinted white hair.

"That would be fine," I said. "Can I talk to him?"

"No, I'm afraid not," she replied. "Who did you say you are?"

"Detective Dave Robicheaux, with the Iberia Sheriff's Department."

"Are you the one who —"

"Mr. Chalons's son insulted my wife and I tore him up. I'm the one."

"I see." She had set my flowers on a shelf under the counter. She retrieved them and pushed them toward me. "You need to talk to the resident about these," she said, holding her eyes on mine. "Sometimes the water in the container forms bacteria and creates problems for us."

I walked off and left the flowers where they were. Through a partially opened door I saw the comatose face of Raphael Chalons, his head sunk deep in the pillow, his leaded eyes and hooked nose strangely suggestive of a carrion bird's.

That evening, while Snuggs and Tripod watched Molly flip a pair of sirloin steaks on the grill in the backyard, I called Jimmie at his apartment and asked for the address and phone number of the home on Lake Pontchartrain where Ida Durbin was staying with Jimmie's friends.

"What for?" he asked.

"I'm being hung out to dry by her son. That might have something to do with it."

"Why blame her?"

"I'm not. So lose the attitude."

"She's not in New Orleans."

"Jimmie —"

"She's in Lafayette. Out on Pinhook Road. So is Lou Kale. Stay away from Kale. He's a real shithead."

"You figured that out?"

After I hung up the phone, I joined Molly at our picnic table in the backyard and we ate supper under the trees with Tripod and Snuggs, who had their own bowls at the end of the table. Then she and I walked downtown and had ice cream, as couples do on a late-summer evening, and I said nothing about Ida Durbin or the Baton Rouge serial killer.

At sunup the next day I drove to Lafayette.

chapter Twenty-six