Crusader's Cross (Dave Robicheaux 14)

"He sliced up his sister?"

"I wouldn't put it past him. But I doubt it."

"Why?"

"He doesn't have the guts."

"How does this figure into anything, except the fact you hate Valentine Chalons?"

"He tried to have me killed. I'm getting tired of your social outrage, partner."

For the first time I could remember, Koko Hebert had nothing acerbic to say.

"The old man always went to Houston for his serious medical work. We need to get the judge involved," he said. "In the meantime, I'll process some stuff on the computer. Organ transplants involve lots of agencies. Maybe I can take a shortcut. I used to know the Chalons family physician in Lafayette. But I think he might be dead," he said.

"I appreciate it," I said.

"No, you're like all drunks, Dave. You just want your way," he replied.

He was probably right, but at that point I didn't care. I attended the noon meeting of the Insanity Group, then drove back to the department through streets where the storm sewers had backed up and cars had flooded out and been left abandoned by their owners. At the noon meeting I made no allusion to the fact that the previous night I had forced a terrified man to point a revolver into my chest and pull the trigger and that I in turn had jammed the weapon down his throat and done the same to him. I began to wonder if in fact there were some deeds you confessed only to God, because no one else would believe them.

At 1:36 p.m. Dana Magelli called from NOPD. "There's no DNA match on Ernest Fogel," he said. "We've got him on the abduction of the fifteen-year-old, but that's it. You got anything at your end?"

"Nothing I haven't already told you," I replied.

"You remember the story about the abduction and murder of John Walsh's kid?" he said.

"Yeah, sure."

"The partner of that serial killer in Texas, Henry Lucas? He might have murdered Walsh's boy. But we'll never know. The guy died of AIDS in the Broward County Stockade."

I wasn't quite sure what his point was and in truth I was afraid to ask. The story he had alluded to was one of the saddest I had ever encountered as a law officer.

"I think Ernest Fogel is like that guy in the Broward County Stockade. We'll never know the extent of his crimes," Dana said. "He'll be out in a few years and keep killing people, maybe children, and it won't stop until mortality catches up with him. My wife says that's why I don't sleep at night. How about you? You get a full night's sleep?"

The radio said the hurricane churning out in the Gulf might make landfall between New Orleans and Mobile. Down in Plaquemines Parish, whose narrow extremities dangle like a severed umbilical cord far out in the salt, most reasonable people had already begun heading up Highway 1 toward Red Cross shelters in New Orleans. But by midafternoon the wind and rain had stopped in New Iberia and a dripping stillness had descended upon the town. Molly had said she was going to stop at the grocery store after work, but I thought it might be a fine evening to go out for dinner. Before leaving the office for the day, I called Molly at her agency and got the message machine.

When I parked in the driveway, Snuggs was waiting for me on the gallery railing, his paws tucked under his chest, his thick, short-haired tail flipping and curling and uncurling in the air like a magician's rope.

"How's it hangin', Snuggs?" I said, picking him up.

He rested on his back against the crook of my arm, purring, tightening his feet against me for extra purchase. The two of us went inside. Molly was still not home. I called again at the agency. This time the message machine did not pick up.

I fed Snuggs and Tripod, then walked down to the bayou. The water had risen into the trees along the bank and was swollen with mud and cluttered with broken tree limbs and floating islands of green hyacinths that had torn loose from their root systems and were now blooming incongruently with yellow flowers. In the middle of the bayou an upside-down pirogue spun in an eddy, its hull shining dully in the overcast. The air was as cool and clean and fresh-smelling as spring, the trees dripping chains of rain rings into the bayou. Out of nowhere, two brown pelicans sailed past me and landed on the water not thirty feet from me.

I heard Tripod waddling down the bank behind me. I scooped him up and folded his tail down and rested his seat on my palm so he could have a good overview of the bayou. "Check it out, Tripod," I said. "The pelicans are back on the Teche, just like Bootsie said they would be. You happen to know these two guys?"

If he did, he wasn't saying.

The pelicans floated past me, their feathers necklaced with raindrops, their long beaks pulled into their breasts. I flipped Tripod up on my shoulder and walked back toward the house, an unexpected sense of serenity singing in my soul.

Squirrels were chasing one another around the tree trunks and robins and mockingbirds were picking insects out of the new leaves on the ground. The bird-house I had bought from Andre Bergeron hung suspended on a wire over my head, canting slightly in the breeze, its perch empty. I remembered I had still not poured birdseed in it. "Time to fill her up, huh, Tripod?" I said, setting him down.

I got a sack of seed and a stepladder from the shed, and climbed up to the bird-house. I pulled the beveled plug from the roof and began pouring seed down into the feeder compartment inside. The plug swung back and forth on a tiny brass chain that was affixed to the plug's bottom and pinned inside the roof, so that the chain didn't dangle outside the hole and impair the clean structural lines of the wood. The birdhouse, with its peg

s and hand-notched joints and sanded surfaces stained with vegetable oil, was a fine example of craftsmanship and obviously the work of someone who had an aesthetic eye.

But my attention was diverted away from my activity when I happened to glance back through my kitchen window. Inside, I could see the red light flashing on my message machine. Molly must have called when I had been watching the pelicans with Tripod, I thought. I climbed down from the ladder and went through the back door.