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“Anonymous tip came in. Ride along?”
“Sure.” He gathered his jacket, keys, and sidearm. They walked through the halls, past other cops, and around the construction site that had been cordoned off with thick plastic sheets. Workers behind the semi-opaque curtain were closing up shop, turning off equipment and packing up toolboxes.
Outside it was still daylight. Late afternoon, a lazy breeze blowing in from the gulf followed Montoya to Bentz’s Jeep. “How far is this?” Montoya asked as he slid into the warm interior and Bentz got behind the wheel.
“Over an hour.” Bentz slid a pair of sunglasses over the bridge of his nose. “That okay?”
“Yeah.” It wasn’t. He’d have to let Abby know that he wouldn’t make it home for Benjamin’s bedtime. But that was the job. Traffic was heavy in New Orleans, but Bentz picked up speed after they passed through the city limits, the sun setting low in the western sky, the strip malls and subdivisions giving way to larger tracts of land, small farms, and more isolated houses. Bentz explained that they were meeting with Cyrus Unger, the owner of a dozen or so cabins in the bayou.
“So the tip came in. Anonymous, but the number was tracked. To Unger. In his original message he said he might have seen a priest asking about a cabin, but he wasn’t too interested in coming in to talk at the station and I thought it might be a good idea to have a look around myself. Unger, he’s not happy that we’re coming, but he finally agreed.” He slid a look in Montoya’s direction. “I think Unger might be working a side hustle or two. Poaching or drugs or something that makes him uneasy around the cops.”
“But he called it in.”
“Homicide is a long way from some petty grift or killing an alligator without a tag or taking a bear out of season or dealing meth.” The road curved in a wide arc that cut through fields of rice growing in ponds where the tops of crawdad traps were visible. As the farms disappeared, they drove into the bayou, where the last rays of a dying sun pierced through the swamp. Pale cypress trees, their branches draped with Spanish moss, loomed, growing out of the dark water where duckweed and spider lilies seemed to float.
Using his GPS system, Bentz cut off the main road to a narrow gravel lane that wound through the trees and over an ancient wooden bridge barely wide enough for the SUV, and drove another mile into the swamp.
“You really think Father John would live this far from the city?”
“Don’t know, but he’s comfortable in the swamp.” That much was true; the killer’s original lair, a rustic cabin, had been located deep in the bayou and, Montoya had thought, he’d died in the swamp.
“Here we go.” The beams of the Jeep’s headlights washed onto a long, low cabin, once white, but now grayed with age. A porch that listed a bit covered the entrance and a faded red sign hanging over the door announced that this building was the office. Other signs had been nailed to the siding, and as Montoya climbed out of the SUV he read the hours of operation along with notices that this establishment sold live bait and cold beer.
He also noted that the neon vacancy sign was lit and humming slightly. Mosquitoes were definitely on the attack despite a bug-zapping device that crackled with the death of a new unseen victim as he passed.
Before he and Bentz could climb the one rickety step to the porch, the door swung open and a balding man with a flushed complexion, bulbous nose, and a burst of freckles over all of his face waved them inside. “I’m Cyrus,” he said as they introduced themselves and showed their ID, which he examined with a jaundiced eye. “But ever’buddy ’round here calls me CU, y’know—my initials. Like ‘see you.’” He snorted. “Started in grade school. The other kids thought it was real funny and it stuck. So, I just roll with it. I mean, what’re ya gonna do? Know what I mean?” He wore an orange T-shirt and battered jeans held up by suspenders that stretched over a protruding belly. His beard was gray and thin, his feet slipped into moccasins that had stretched and looked a size too big. As they stepped into the office, he closed the door quickly behind them, pulled down the shade, and with the click of a switch killed the vacancy sign. “We need a little privacy,” he explained, “and some of my guests, well, they get a little squirrely around cops, if ya know what I mean.”
Montoya did.
The office itself was small with low ceilings and smelled of tobacco, fish, and dust. A counter ran along one side of the room, a refrigerated case on the opposite wall stacked with cold drinks—soda, beer, water, refrigerated snacks that included processed cheese and sausage, and bait. Next to the cold drink case was a chest freezer stuffed with frozen waffles, pizza, corn dogs, ice cream sandwiches, and more bait.
Nuts, pretzels, M&M’s, cigarettes, and chewing tobacco were also available and displayed beneath the glass top of the counter, while behind the register was a wall-to-ceiling display of hard liquor bottles and packages of ammunition, all tightly locked behind Plexiglas doors. A bulletin board held curled and yellowed business cards, photos of hunters with dead alligators or deer, or fishermen with their catches, along with a piece of paper offering CU’s cabins for rent with his phone number on tabs at the bottom. The paper was missing four or five slips where potential customers had torn off the information. Not exactly high-tech, the kind of advertising one did in local grocery stores.
“Come on back to the livin’ room,” Cyrus suggested.
They followed him down a short hallway where supplies nearly blocked the path to an area that was a rustic studio apartment, a bed pushed into one corner, couch and recliner stretched across the opposite wall, television on a swiveling stand so that it could face the recliner or bed.
The kitchen was an alcove with a microwave, mini fridge, and hot plate, and over the scents of mildew and dust, the smell of recently fried fish still lingered.
Sliding doors opened to a large deck built over the water of the swamp and decorated with hanging lights and another couple of bug zappers.
“So tell us about the priest,” Bentz suggested after letting CU know the interview was being recorded.
“I’m not sure he was a priest.” CU settled into his recliner and stared out the window to the darkness beyond.
“What made you think he was?” Montoya asked.
“He was dressed all in black, no collar—just black pants and shirt, which isn’t all that odd these days, but there was something about him that made me think . . .” He let his voice fade off for a minute. “It was all odd. He called, asking about a cabin, which isn’t weird, of course, said he’d heard that I had one from a friend of a friend, though he never gave any names. Again, that’s not out of the ordinary. But it felt fishy to me. I’ve got a pretty good inner bullshit detector and this guy—he set off all kinds of alarms. I figured he was hiding something, but hey—not my business.
“Anyway, I don’t advertise on the Internet or anything high-tech, try to keep my business on the down low, if you know what I mean. Local stores and shops know about me and I even put up some flyers with my phone number across the bottom, where you tear it off and give me a call. But he didn’t do that either.
“Came in on foot. No damned vehicle. Nowthat’sunusual.” CU stared out the back door to the swamp, recalling. “He said he caught a ride with a buddy and that’s still fine, but the buddy didn’t stick around, didn’t show his face, so I’m a little suspicious. Then he asks about a cabin and he was real clear that it had to be remote, maybe only got to by boat, and I do have one but it’s rented. Yearly tenant. Pays on time. I’m not kicking him out, if you know what I mean.” Scratching his beard, CU said, “So I showed him what was available—got cabins all along this bayou, y’know, but he wasn’t interested. They were all too near civilization.” He pulled on his lower lip. “Some of these places are a quarter mile in, no one around, if you know what I mean, but he seemed to think they were too accessible, and he said he needed a place where he could be completely alone, a place to meditate, just him and God.”
“Is that why you thought he was a priest?”
“Hell, no. You don’t have to be part of the clergy to want to communicate with the big guy upstairs. Uh-uh.”
“So why?”
