James Burke - Crusader's Cross

"No."

"Gee, I wish I had that kind of latitude. Blow into town, blow out of town, body dumped in a trash pit, sayonara, sonofabitch. Can I get a job over there?"

I wanted to be angry at Dana, but I couldn't. The fact the Baton Rouge serial killer had targeted a teenage prostitute, a girl who bore no similarity to his other victims, indicated either a dramatic change in the nature of his obsession or the possibility he was sending a message.

"Did you hear me?" he said.

"Yeah, I did. I wish I hadn't gotten near that girl," I replied.

That evening I stood outside my bedroom window, staring at the indentations sculpted into my flower bed. Were these from the workboots of the Baton Rouge serial killer? I called Mack Bertrand, our forensic chemist, at his home. "Can you make some casts in my flower bed?" I said.

"We're a little backed up, but, yeah, what d'you got, Dave?" he said.

"Maybe just a Peeping Tom."

"Can you be a little more forthcoming?"

"I interviewed the latest serial killer's victim shortly before she was killed. Maybe the guy knows me."

Mack was quiet a moment, and I realized how grandiose if not paranoid my statement must have sounded. But Mack was always a gentleman. "We'll get it done first thing in the morning, podna," he said.

That night I placed flowers on Bootsie's tomb in St. Martinville. The bayou was black, wrinkled with wind, bladed by moonlight. I sat for a long time on the steel bench in the darkness, saying nothing to Bootsie, not even thinking thoughts she might hear. Then I walked to the old church in the square, pressed a folded five-dollar bill into the poor box, and returned with a votive candle burning inside a small blue vessel. I heard a flapping of wings overhead., but could see no birds in flight. Then I told Bootsie about Molly and me.

I believe the dead have voice and inhabit the earth as surely as we do. I believe they speak in our dreams or inside the sound of rain or even in the static of a telephone call, on the other side of which there is no caller. But Bootsie did not speak to me, and I felt an intolerable sense of guilt about the affair I had embarked upon with Molly Boyle.

I not only felt I had betrayed Bootsie, I could no longer deny I was creating scandal for Molly as well as for my church. My rationalizations of my behavior left me exhausted in the morning and agitated during the day.

"What should I do, Boots?" I said.

But there was no answer. On another occasion when I had visited her grave, I had seen two brown pelicans floating on the bayou, farther inland than I had seen pelicans since my childhood. On that day Bootsie had spoken to me. Her voice and her presence were as real as if she had sat beside me, clasped my hand, and looked directly into my face. She said that one day the pelicans would return to Bayou Teche, that hope was indeed eternal, and the world was still a grand place in which to live.

But the wings I had heard earlier were those of bats and the only sound in the cemetery was music from a jukebox in a neon-scrolled bar across the Teche. An evil man once told me that hell is a place that has no boundaries, a place that you carry with you wherever you go. A puff of wind blew out the candle burning on Bootsie's tomb. I could hear the blood roaring in my ears as I walked across the drawbridge toward the town square. The hammering sound in my ears was almost as loud as the music and the shouts of the revelers as I pushed open the door of the bar and went inside.

Friday morning I kept myself buried in the case file of the Baton Rouge serial killer. The street outside was blown with leaves and pieces of newspaper, the clouds swollen with rain. I heard a trash can bounce violently across the asphalt, then freight cars slam together on the train track. I picked up the coffee mug from my desk and drank from it, all my movements precise, like a man seated on the deck of a pitching ship, unsure of what might befall him in the next few seconds. My mouth was dry, and no amount of liquid could lessen the level of dehydration in my body. My right hand trembled as I tried to make notes on the death of Holly Blankenship.

Helen opened my office door without knocking and sat on the corner of my desk, which was the only place she ever sat in my office. "Looks like you nicked up your face this morning," she said.

"I think I had a defective blade in my razor," I said. I placed a breath mint in my mouth and cracked it between my molars, my eyes straight ahead.

"Mack Bertrand says you had him make casts of some footprints under your bedroom window," she said.

"There may have been a Peeping Tom in the neighborhood."

I could feel her eyes dissecting my face. "Would you explain why Mack should spend his time on a Peeping Tom?"

"The Blankenship kid was the eighth known victim of the Baton Rouge killer. She died after I interviewed her. Maybe I know the serial killer. Maybe he was following me."

"I think we're leaving something out of the story, here. Was somebody with you the night the Peeping Tom was at your window?"

"I'm just not going to answer a question like that," I said.

"Right," she said. She snuffed down in her nose. "You don't look too good."

"I've got a touch of stomach flu or something," I replied.

She placed her hand on top of mine and pressed it against the desk blotter. "I love you, Pops. Don't make me hurt you," she said.

At lunchtime I ate a bowl of gumbo at Victor's, then threw up in the bathroom. By midafternoon I was sweating, my teeth rattling, the sky outside black and bursting with trees of electricity. I ate six aspirin and washed them down with ice water from the cooler but got no relief. I finally forced myself to call my old AA sponsor, an ex-convict and former barroom owner by the name of Tee Neg. "I had a slip," I said.

"You ain't talking about a dry drunk, you? You actually done it?" he said.

"Last night, in St. Martinville. I was in the cemetery. I don't remember getting home."

"I ain't interested in blow-by-blow. Where you at now?"

"I'm coming apart."

"I ain't axed you that."

"At the sheriff's department."

"Good. You keep your ass there, you. I'm heading into town."

"No, that's not necessary. Tee Neg, did you hear me?"

But he had already hung up. I swallowed, already envisioning his arrival and the hours if not days of abstinence before my metabolism would have any semblance of normalcy.

Some people say you pick up the dirty boogie where you left it off. Others say you pick it up where you would have been had you never gotten off it. I signed out of the office before Tee Neg arrived and drove through a blinding rainstorm to a bar in the Atchafalaya Basin, where people still spoke French, did not travel farther than two parishes from the place of their birth, and believed, in their incurable innocence, that the smokey, green-canopied swamplands of South Louisiana would always be there for them.

I do not remember Saturday at all. At least twenty-four hours of my life had disappeared, just like a large decayed tooth excised from the gums. Later, the odometer on my truck would show I had driven sixty-three miles I could not account for. When I woke Sunday morning, I was in a cabin that was dry and snug, cool from a breeze that inched along the floor. Through the window was a vast, stump-filled lake dimpled by rain. The sky was gray, and when the wind blew the cypress trees on the far side of the lake, the canopy turned a bright green against the somberness of the day, as though the trees drew their color from the wind.

Inside my head I could hear the original 1946 recording of Harry Choates's "Jolie Blon," the song that will always remain for me the most haunting, unforgettable lament ever recorded. Had I dreamed the song? Had I been with someone who had played it over and over again? I had no idea.