Free Crusader's Cross by James Lee Burke Page A

the next question. “Is he —”
    “I didn’t hang around. Last I saw, he was thrashing around on the floor, holding his throat. Red froth was kind of blowing out of his mouth,” Clete said. He looked at me again, waiting for me to speak, unable to hide the apprehension in his face.
    So I slipped back into my old role as Clete’s enabler and answered the question that was in his eyes. “To my knowledge no one has contacted the department. Did you check in with Willie and Nig?” I said.
    “Are you kidding? The last thing they want is their hired skip chaser bringing an A and B beef down on their heads.”
    He lit a Lucky Strike with an old Zippo and flicked the cap shut. He inhaled on the cigarette, blowing the smoke out through his fingers, then ground it out in the dirt. I could almost see his heart beating against his shirt.
    “I’ll make some calls. It’s probably not as bad as you think,” I said.
    St. Augustine said we should never use the truth to injure. Who was I to argue with a patristic saint? Besides, what else can you do when your best friend regularly allows his soul to be shot out of a cannon on your behalf?
    I changed the subject and told him about my encounter with Valentine Chalons at the homicide scene Thursday night. At first Clete’s eyes remained focused inward on his own thoughts, then I saw his attention begin to shift from his own troubles to mine.
    “You say this guy Chalons blew it?” he said.
    “He told me he never heard of Troy Bordelon. But his news crew was at the hospital. I’m sure they were covering the knife attack on Troy.”
    “That doesn’t mean Chalons knew about it,” Clete said.
    “He’s a good newsman. Nothing slides by him.”
    “We’re back to this Ida Durbin broad again? And rich people in St. Mary Parish you can’t stand. There’s a pattern here, big mon,” Clete said.
    “Clete, sometimes you can make me wish one of us was stone drunk or down at the methadon clinic,” I said.
    “What can I say? You’ll never change. If you don’t believe me, ask anybody who knows you.”
    I wanted to punch him.
     
    I went to the office and buried myself in our newly opened investigation into the death by strangulation and massive head trauma of Fontaine Belloc, the wife of the DEQ officer serving federal time at Seagoville, Texas. She had been raped before she died., and the semen in her body had come back a match with the Baton Rouge serial killer’s, pulling us into an investigation that was now drawing national attention and every kind of meddlesome intrusion imaginable.
    A famous crime novelist from the East ensconced herself in the middle of the investigation and the attendant publicity; psychics came out of the woodwork; and psychological profilers were interviewed on state television almost daily. The revelation that the murders of over thirty Baton Rouge women had remained unsolved in the last decade left local people stunned and disbelieving. Sporting goods stores quickly ran out of pepper spray and handguns.
    Law enforcement agencies in other states began to contact Baton Rouge P.D. looking for ties to their own files of unsolved pattern homicides. The number of serial killings throughout the United States, as well as disappearances that were likely homicides, was a comment about the underside of our society that no humanist would care to dwell upon.
    In Wichita, Kansas, a psychopath who called himself BTK, for “bind, torture, and kill,” had committed crimes against whole families that were so cruel, depraved, and inhuman that police reporters as well as homicide investigators refused to reveal specific details to the public, even in the most euphemistic language.
    Baton Rouge P.D. received inquiries from Miami and Fort Lauderdale about a series of silk stocking strangulations back in the 1970s that came to be known as the “Canal Murders,” which may have been committed by one or several persons.
    Years ago, in Texas, a demented man by the name of