Crusader's Cross (Dave Robicheaux 14)

"Fibers from your clothing were on the body of a girl by the name of Holly Blankenship, Mr. Fogel. How do you account for that?" I said.

"Was that her name?" he said, looking up at me.

"It was the name of a runaway somebody killed and threw in a garbage dump," I said.

"Me and my wife busted up. I ain't proud of everything I've did since then. That's just the way it is," he said.

"The way what is?" Helen said.

"When you're a single man, that's the way it is. There's women for hire. I ain't put them on the street," he replied.

"She was murdered the same day a friend of mine and I interviewed her," I said. "Then fibers from your shirt show up on her body. Then you get busted with a girl tied up in your home. That's a lot for coincidence, isn't it?"

"I don't know about no interview or what that's got to do wit' me. But say what you want." He was looking straight ahead now, seemingly indifferent to his legal jeopardy.

"I think you're a player in this, Mr. Fogel. But I think you're the weak sister in the script," I said.

His eyes clicked up at mine. "I'm what?"

"Serial killers often work in pairs. One guy is the orchestrator, the other guy does the scut work. Between the two of them, they form a third personality that commits deeds neither man could do on his own. You with me so far?"

"No," he said.

But he was lying. I saw the insult take hold in his face, a resentful light glimmer inside his eyelashes.

"It's an easy concept," I said. "One guy is the brains. The other guy is a sock puppet. You want to ride the needle for some dude who's probably having a nice lunch right now, maybe knocking back a cold beer, while you take his weight?"

Ernest Fogel made no reply.

"Do you know where you are? This is central lockup," Helen said. "Ever had the midnight express up your ass?"

He looked into space for a long time. Down the corridor a cop dragged his baton along the bars of a cell door.

"How about it, buddy? Why not get your side of things out on the table? Maybe your situation isn't as bad as you think," Dana said.

"I need a razor and some decent soap. I need a hairbrush, too, maybe some aftershave," Fogel said.

"That can be arranged," Dana said. "You want to make a statement?"

"No, there's gonna be press at my arraignment. I ain't going there looking like a street person. I'd better talk to a lawyer now. Y'all got a good one? I don't mean nobody's cousin in the public defender's office, either."

Helen, Dana, and I looked at one another. The only sound in the cell was the reverberation of a flushing toilet farther down the corridor. Dana's handsome face was pinched with anger and frustration.

"You ever hurt children? You ever do that, Ernest?" he asked, his hands folding and unfolding by his sides.

Fogel stirred the tip of his finger in a small jelly container on his food tray, then licked his finger clean, the back of his head turned to us so we could not see his face.

A tractor-trailer rig had spun out on the bridge at Des Allemands, backing up westbound traffic all the way through St. Charles Parish, so Helen and I headed up the interstate toward Baton Rouge, our flasher rippling. On the southwestern edge of Lake Pontchartrain

I asked her to pull off on the shoulder a moment.

"What's up?" she said.

"I just want to look at the lake," I said.

It was an odd request, I suspect, but Helen was a tolerant and decent person and had become a survivor because she had always accepted people for what they are. The lake was smoky green, dented with rain, blown with whitecaps. It looked exactly as the Gulf had looked on the day Jimmie and I had found ourselves trapped on the third sandbar off Galveston beach many years ago, the day Ida Durbin saved us from our own recklessness. The horizon was threaded with lightning, the air peppered with the smell of brine, the surf brown and frothy with sand sliding back from the beach. For just a moment it was 1958 again, and I thought perhaps if I turned my head fast enough I would see the glistening hard-candy surfaces of Chevy Bel Airs and chopped-down '32 and '39 Fords with Merc engines roaring down the highway, their Hollywood mufflers throbbing off the asphalt in the rain.

But it was not 1958 and I was a fool to keep holding on to memories about it. For good or bad, the present and the future lay right up the Mississippi River — a ninety-mile corridor called Toxic Alley. Its smokestacks and settling ponds told their own story. And maybe I had seen the reality of my own future back at central lockup. I had been inches away from a deviant who was arguably a child molester, an appellation that had now been attached to my name. I got back in the cruiser and shut the door.