Crusader's Cross (Dave Robicheaux 14)

I pushed the "play" button on the machine. "I might be late. I'll pick up some frozen gumbo for supper at the Winn-Dixie on the way home, but first I need to take care of a problem," Molly's voice said. Then after a pause, as though she were trying to restrain a vexation she didn't want to vent, she added, "I'm disappointed in someone. He borrowed my tools again without asking. I need to straighten this guy out. Some people, huh, troop?"

I called the agency, but no one answered and the machine was still off. I tried her cell phone but got her voice-mail recording. The time was 5:43 p.m.

Straighten which guy out?

I stared out the kitchen window at the birdhouse suspended on a wire above my stepladder, the plug from the feeder hole dangling from its tiny chain.

Good God, I thought, and shut my eyes at my own stupidity.

I looked up Koko Hebert's phone number in the directory and punched it in on my cell phone as I headed out the door. "Koko, can you go to the evidence locker and find the piece of chain that was on the body of Fontaine Belloc?"

I heard him sigh. "How about tomorrow?"

"I bought a birdhouse from Andre Bergeron. Inside the construction is a length of brass chain that looks like the piece you found on the Belloc woman . . . You there?"

"Why don't you take care of it?"

"Because I think Bergeron may be with my wife now," I replied.

I got in my truck and began backing up into the East Main. But a pearly limo with charcoal-tinted windows pulled to the curb and blocked my way. Someone in the backseat rolled a window down on its electrical motor.

"Get out of the driveway, Val," I said.

He sat on the rolled white leather seat, dressed in pleated beige slacks and a golfing shirt, a bottle of Cold Duck balanced on his knee. On the far side of him was a woman I didn't know. Her face was stiff with makeup, her blouse unbuttoned on the tops of her breasts. I saw her take the last hit on a roach and drop it out of the top of her window onto the street.

"Your wife shouldn't make remarks about Andre," Val said. "Big mistake."

"Say that again."

"Somebody told Andre how your wife made fun of him. Not good, Davey boy. No, no, not at all good," he said.

"You move your fucking car before I pull your teeth out," I said.

He laughed, spoke to his chauffeur, then rolled up his window while handing the bottle of Cold Duck to the woman, as though the world beyond the boundaries of his limo no longer existed.

I backed into the street, cars swerving and blowing around me, then ran the red light down by the Shadows and headed for Molly's agency.

On the way I punched in a 911 on my cell phone and asked the dispatcher to send a cruiser to the agency and one to Andre Bergeron's house in Jeanerette.

"What's the nature of the emergency, sir?" she asked.

"My wife's life could be in danger. Who is this?" I said.

She gave me her name. She was new on the job and obviously swamped with calls reporting traffic accidents and power outages. "Two of the bridges have been hit by boats and are closed," she said. "The bridge at Nelson's Canal might be open in a few minutes. But we can't be certain."

"Call Jeanerette. Ask them to send a city car to the Chalons property. Tell them to place the black man, Andre Bergeron, in custody."

"Sir, I can't do that without an explanation," she said.

"He's the Baton Rouge serial killer."

"Sir, I have to have verification of who you are," she replied.

I dropped the cell phone on the seat and steered around a truck from the electric company and a repair crew that was working on a downed power line. Up ahead, I could see the turnbridge at the confluence of Nelson's Canal and Bayou Teche. Evidently the huge sprockets on the bridge had jammed when it was partially opened, and now traffic had backed up for hundreds of yards on both sides of the bayou.

There was only one thing for it. I abandoned my truck and began running by the side of the road toward the bridge, my hand tight on my holstered .45. But even as I was running past the line of idling cars and the faces of the curious and the bemused, the image of Val Chalons seated in the back of his limo would not go out of my head. No, it was not his imperious or insulting manner that bothered me, or that he seemed to be embracing and flaunting the meretricious world represented by his mother and Lou Kale. It went beyond that, something that was raw, designing, inhuman, genuinely evil.

But what?