James Burke - Crusader's Cross

My men could have left me there. I'd screwed up and taken them down a night trail that was strung with bouncing betties and trip-wired 105 duds. But that was not their way. They came from barrios and southern shitholes and black northern slums and were the bravest and finest kids I ever knew. While I lay on a poncho liner and a mountain boy from North Georgia rigged up a litter with web gear, I could hear the rounds from an offshore battery arcing with a whooshing sound out of their trajectory, exploding in the jungle, shaking the earth under me. I was laced with morphine and blood-expander and knew I was going to die unless I got to battalion aid. I heard someone calling for the dust-off, then a voice whispering, "They can't get the slick in. He's fucked, man. Oh Jesus Christ, they're coming through the grass."

But they carried me all night, with no sleep, their arms straining against one hundred eighty pounds of dead weight, while they humped their own weapons and packs and radios and sweltered inside their flak vests, their exposed skin a feast for the mosquitoes that boiled out of the elephant grass.

That's when I felt my long-held fear of death finally use itself up and lift from my soul the way ash floats off a dead fire. I closed my eyes in surrender to my fate and placed my trust in the tender mercies of those who bore me toward an uncertain destination, perhaps one that would be lit by flame and filled with explosions that sounded like ships' boilers blowing apart.

But I was not a player any longer. The dice had rolled out of the cup, and if the numerical sum on them was snake-eyes or boxcars, the matter was out of my control, and that simple conclusion about my life-span on earth set me free.

I fell asleep in the jail cell, even though a drunk snored loudly on the floor and a deranged man in sweatpants and a woman's blouse kept shouting accusations through the bars at a city cop he claimed had stolen his airline tickets to Paris.

When the sun came up, I realized I'd just had the first restful sleep since I had gotten drunk. With my cell partners I ate a breakfast of scrambled eggs, tiny sausages, toast, jelly, and coffee. Then I heard Helen Soileau's voice in a foyer and a moment later a screw unlocked my cell door and walked me to the front of the jail.

"Saw you on early-morning TV," Helen said as she drove us back to New Iberia.

"Val Chalons doesn't take prisoners," I said.

"What were your latents doing at the crime scene, Dave?"

The sky was still pink with sunrise, the air sweet with the smell of flowers and rain, the cane waving in the fields. I started to lie, to say that perhaps indeed I had been at Val's guesthouse on another occasion, even though earlier I had already denied that possibility to her. But I couldn't do it.

"I'm not sure how they got there. I got back on the juice. I was drunk all weekend," I said.

She took a call on her radio, her expression frozen in place. Then she hung her microphone back on the dash. "What was that last part?"

"I've got two days sobriety now," I said.

"Two days?"

I waited for her to go on. But she didn't. In the silence I could hear the tires of the cruiser on the asphalt. "I think maybe I went to Val Chalons's guesthouse in a blackout. I think I took a CD from his stereo, one with Ida Durbin's voice on it," I said.

"Ida Durbin again?"

"The CD is at the house. I think there's a blood smear on it, maybe from my own hand."

She rubbed at one temple with the ends of her fingers, as though an intolerable migraine had begun to eat its way through her head. "Maybe it's time for you not to say any more without a lawyer."

"I didn't kill Honoria."

"You don't know what you did, so don't give me your doodah. Dave, you make me so mad I want to stop the car and beat the shit out of you. Goddamn it!"

"I'm sorry," I said.

She swerved the cruiser to the shoulder and got out under a spreading oak tree. She walked up and down by my window, her fists on her hips, the corner of her mouth bitten white. For a moment I thought she was truly going to lose it. She stood still for a long time, her back to me, then got back in the vehicle.

"Helen -"

"Shut up," she said.

She did not speak again until she turned into my drive. "Be in my office in one hour, looking sharp, your head out of your ass for a change," she said.

Doogie Dugas and his posse comitatus had tossed my house from one end to the other. They had even pulled all my lawn tools out of my shed and left them scattered in the yard. The doors to my truck were ajar, the lock on the steel toolbox I had welded to the bed sheared in half by bolt cutters. The driver's seat was still pushed against the steering wheel, the floor area behind it empty of the flop hat and hooded raincoat I had worn during my blackout Saturday.

The irony of Dugas's search was that he had probably tainted any evidence he had seized by using an improperly acquired warrant. The greater irony was the fact that he and his friends had evidently ignored an item they should have picked up. It was a sheet of yellow legal pad paper, now rain-damaged, speckled with mud, blown into the canebrake that separated my yard from Miss Ellen's. I would have probably paid little attention to it as well, but every day I picked up litter that either blew or was thrown into my yard. It was dated Saturday, 9:15 p.m. and read:

Dear Dave,

Why don't you stay home? Who's taking care of your cat and raccoon? Anyone who neglects or who is cruel to a defenseless creature deserves to be tortured.

I have to tell someone about the secrets nobody in our family will deal with. My father won't admit the harm our silence has caused. Maybe our souls are damned. My prayer today is that hell is oblivion and not a place of torment.

You must call me. I can tell you about Ida Durbin.

Love, H.

Was she insane? Twisted on coke and booze? Or perhaps touched with an insight into evil that would make most of us shudder? Whatever the answer, she had taken her secrets to the grave.

After I shaved and showered and changed clothes, I placed Honoria's note in one Ziploc bag and put the CD with the blood smear on the surface in another, and drove to the department. Helen was waiting for me, her mood still rumpled. "What's that?" she said, indicating Honoria's note.

I placed it on her desk. She was standing up, her palms propped on her desk blotter as she read Honoria's words, her chest rising and falling. The door was closed now, the blinds open, and people passing in the corridor made a point of not glancing inside. The room seemed to grow warmer, the sunlight through the window more intense.

"This was in your yard?" Helen said.

"Right."

"This is your parachute on a murder beef?"

"I don't know what it is. My guess is Honoria was an incest victim."

"Where in the name of God do you get these ideas?"

"Koko Hebert says Honoria had intercourse in the twenty-four-hour period before she died. She was about to shower in the guesthouse, where Val Chalons lives, not in the main house, where she lived. She had every behavioral characteristic of someone who has been the long-term victim of a sexual predator."

"Dave, APIS came back with only one match that didn't belong in that guesthouse – yours."

"Except I had no motive to murder her. There was DNA in her genital area. I'll bet the lab will show it was left there by a relative. My guess is it belongs either to the father or the brother."

But I had already lost her attention. "I must have had two dozen calls this morning," she said. "They want you skinned, salted, and hung in a gibbet."

"Am I suspended?"

"Suspension might be the least of it."

"What do you want me to do, Helen?"

"Lose the nun."