Crescent City Connection

beer.
    It was the lead story. “Police believe a religious group headed by the Reverend Errol Jacomine, a former candidate for mayor of New Orleans, is responsible for kidnapping a student at a Gentilly school and attempting a second kidnapping that resulted in a man’s death. Jane Storey has that report.”
    The Monk felt panic rise in his throat. His heart began to pound like a piston.
    His first thought was that he liked Jane Storey’s looks. She was a youngish blonde, softer than most reporters, looking more as if she came from Kansas than Central Casting. He wondered how she got away with showing her real face instead of a makeup mask.
    She was standing in front of a blowup of a city map. “Police have confirmed that a shoot-out at a juice bar on Maple Street today was actually a botched kidnapping. Detectives are withholding the identity of a man killed in that attempt, but we have confirmed that the getaway car in a kidnapping two hours later at McDonogh Forty-three in Gentilly—” here she pointed on her map “—was registered to the same man, who was a follower of the Reverend Errol Jacomine during his ministry in New Orleans. The victim is an eight-year-old girl, Shavonne Bourgeois. The identity of the intended victim in the juice bar shoot-out is being withheld, but sources close to the investigation say that she is a twenty-year-old woman with close ties to Jacomine.”
    What followed was a detailed report of the school kidnapping, followed by one of the “juice bar kidnapping,” followed in turn by a lengthy history of Errol Jacomine’s checkered history and suspected crimes.
    The Monk was shaking when it was over. The things that shocked him were these: A second man had been shot in the school kidnap, though he was in “stable” condition, whatever that was. His father, for reasons he couldn’t begin to fathom, had kidnapped a child—not Lovelace, but a child. And his brother had been the instrument of it.
    The station even had a police artist’s drawing of the gunman at the school. It didn’t look exactly like Daniel, but there was no doubt in The Monk’s mind.
    He went back to his vacant lot, but couldn’t even begin to sleep. He tried meditating, though his blood was full of alcohol, and that was no better. In his half-drunk state, it should have put him to sleep, but his mind was like a cricket.
    Hey!
he thought suddenly.
Hey. The name
. He had listened to his father’s name seven or eight times and hadn’t felt a thing. That was the way his other mind was—his crazy one. You didn’t have the least idea what it was going to do when. One thing he’d noticed, though—focus made a difference. If he absolutely had to do something—or, as in this case, simply get through something—his real mind, his sane mind, seemed to get the upper hand.
    If he ever needed it, he needed it now. He had to think. He laced his hands behind his head and stared up at the sky until it began to lighten, and then he called the police from a pay phone. He had to wait until Langdon called him back.
    * * *
    There were witnesses at the school, witnesses at the scene, and an army of anonymous tipsters. There were also some hate calls from people who thought the police should leave a man of God alone.
    Yet there was nothing—not one shred of information—that could shed light on where the hell Jacomine actually was.
    Skip thought she would like to kill Jane Storey—and possibly everyone else in the media.
    The FBI called in a psychologist, and Skip asked for Cindy Lou as well. But it was a waste of taxpayers’ dollars. Both said they thought Jacomine had fixated on Skip and believed he could get to her through Shavonne. By “get to her,” they seemed to mean mess with her mind. But what he might do next they couldn’t say, and Skip had nightmarish visions of cut-off ears and fingers.
    Shellmire wanted to know if Jacomine was “decompensating, as you fellas say.” The FBI guy said he didn’t know. Cindy Lou said, “Law, man, I would have said he was decompensating last time he pulled something like this. But he got away with it and he did it again. What if he is decompensating? It doesn’t seem to make him any easier to catch.”
    Skip wasn’t about to argue with Cindy Lou when she decided to go all practical and non-shrinky—which she often did in police work. But Shellmire said, “Look, there was the getaway car. That was really careless if he doesn’t want us to figure out who’s behind