James Burke - Crusader's Cross

But no one saw a delivery or official vehicle parked near the crime scene. The black and Hispanic lawn men who worked nearby were questioned and excluded. Every known sex offender in the area was pulled in and run through the ringer. Oddly, the perpetrator had given a free pass to the groups who are usually the targets of misogynistic predators. None of his victims had been a prostitute, runaway, or barroom derelict.

None of the crime scenes showed any sign of struggle or resistance. The broken jar of gourmet barbecue sauce and the spilled mail on a woman's front steps were the only physical indications that in seconds someone's life had turned into a visit to the Abyss.

The serial killer did not have a face or a history that we knew about. His DNA was not in the national database. He had hung Fontaine Belloc's purse in a tree to taunt us and to show his contempt for her and her family. He sought out victims who were reasonably happy and at peace with the world and left society's rejects alone. His body fluids were left behind as a toxic smear on the rest of us.

I read through the autopsy report on Fontaine Belloc again. The details were not of a kind anyone wishes to remember. But one stuck in my mind and would not go away. I picked up my phone and called the office of Koko Hebert, our parish coroner. "She swallowed her wedding ring?" I said.

"From its position, I'd say a couple of hours before she died," he replied.

"He forced her to eat it?"

"Not in my opinion."

"Spell it out, will you, Koko?"

"Her wrists were bound, probably with plastic cuffs. There were teeth marks on the ring finger. I think she used her teeth to work the ring off her finger and swallow it. What difference does it make?"

"Because if she was that determined to keep this bastard from taking her ring, maybe she figured out a way to leave us a message about his identity," I said, my blood rising.

"Yeah, that's a possibility, isn't it?" he replied.

I replaced the receiver in the cradle without saying good-bye.

A mockingbird flew into my window glass, flecking it with a pinpoint of white matter. I got up from the desk and looked down onto the lawn. The bird lay still in the shade, one wing at a broken angle.

It was not a good morning. And it was about to get worse.

Just before noon, Honoria Chalons called the office to ask how I was feeling.

"Excuse me?" I said.

"My first husband is buried at the church cemetery in St. Martinville. I saw you there this morning. You didn't look well. Are you all right?" she said.

"Yes, I'm fine."

"Can you have a drink with me this afternoon?"

"I traded in sour mash for AA. That was after it chewed me up and spit me out."

"So I'll buy you an iced tea."

"Another time."

"You think I'm a mentally ill person?"

"Guys like me don't get to judge other people's stability."

"The things I said to you about death yesterday? They're all true."

"I believe you."

"What I said about the nun is true, too. My father and Val genuinely fear her. They won't even go inside the little church she attends."

"Which nun are we talking about?"

"Have that drink with me?"

"Give me a number where I can call you after work," I said.

I went downstairs and caught Helen on her way to lunch. "You know a nun who's had some run-ins with the Chalons family?" I said.

She thought about it. "There's one on Old Jeanerette Road. Years ago, she stoked up the sugar cane workers in St. Mary Parish. She runs a group that builds houses for the poor now. Why?"

"I was out to the Chalons house. The nun came up in the conversation."

Helen sucked in her cheeks, her eyes studying a dead space between us. "Nothing I say has any influence, does it?" she said.

"Had you rather I not tell you what I'm doing?"

Helen put her hand inside her shirt collar and picked at a mosquito bite on her shoulder, her gaze wandering along the corridor wall, her breath audible in the silence. "If I remember right, about two years back somebody slashed up her car tires. Check the file. Her name is Molly Boyle. Her middle name is 'trouble.' She's your kind of gal."

I went to lunch at Bon Creole and tried not to think about my brief run-in with Helen. When I came out of the restaurant, the sun was like a white flame in the sky, the highway rippling with heat, the air smelling of salt, and water evaporating from backed-up storm ditches. At the office, I pulled a file on the nun and a series of complaints, all involving harassment and vandalism, that she had lodged with the sheriff's department. The deputies' entries in the file were matter-of-fact and made no conclusion about possible perpetrators, other than a mention that several black teenagers in the area had been questioned.

I took a handful of loose mug shots from my desk drawer, dropped them in my shirt pocket, and went to find Sister Molly Boyle.

She had created an administrative center in a restored nineteenth-century farmhouse on the bayou, eleven miles south of town, and lived next door with another nun in a cypress cottage. Ostensibly she worked under the auspices of the diocese in Lafayette, but as I turned into the gravel driveway I had the sense the archenemy of the Chalons family had staked out her own territory.

The entire compound was about three acres in size. The lawn was bright green and freshly mowed, partially shaded by live oaks and pecan trees, the embankment along the Teche planted with elephant ears, caladiums, impatiens, and periwinkles. A large sunny area was devoted to vegetable gardens, beehives, and a huge compost heap piled inside a rectangle of railroad ties. A tractor was parked in a pole shed, and poultry pecked in a bare spot under a spreading oak that grew above the shed and the adjacent barn. A secretary in the office walked with me onto the gallery and said I would probably find Sister Molly in the barn.

She was grinding a machete on an emery wheel, her eyes encased in machinist goggles, the heel of her hand pressed down close to the blade's edge. I waited until she clicked off the toggle switch on the grinder before I spoke. "I didn't want to startle you. Sister. I'm Dave Robicheaux, from the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department," I said.

She pulled her goggles off with one thumb and left a greasy smear by her eyebrow. Her hair was dark red and tied up on her head with a white kerchief, the tails of her denim shirt knotted across her stomach. The heat and trapped moisture inside the barn were stifling. Motes of dust and desiccated manure floated as thick as gnats in the shafts of sunlight through the cracks. But she seemed unbothered by any of it. "I go by Molly," she said, and extended her hand.

"It looks like some vandals were trying to give you a bad time a couple of years back. Have any idea who they were?" I said.

"The deputies who came out thought they were kids from the neighborhood," she replied.

"But you don't?"

"Our dog was poisoned. Our car tires were cut into ribbons. Our secretary was shot in the back with an air rifle. We help impoverished people own their homes. Why would their children want to hurt us?"

I blotted the perspiration out of my eyes on my arm. "Can we go outside?" I said.

She hung the machete on a nail, the edge of its curved blade like a strip of blue ice. Then she pulled her kerchief loose from her head and shook out her hair. "How about some lemonade?" she said.

I sat at a spool table on the back porch of her cottage while she went inside. Through the trees the sunlight looked hard and brittle and unrelenting on the bayou's surface. She came back on the porch with a tray of cookies and two glasses of lemonade, with sprigs of mint in them.

"You tried to unionize the farmworkers hereabouts?" I said.

"For a while. Mechanization took the jobs away, so we turned to other things. We teach people folk crafts and carpentry now."