Crescent City Connection

faster as she scanned the letter again.
    Maybe there’s a reason it makes me think of Jacomine.
    “Bigger fish to fry.” That phrase again.
    And the cadences. The rhythm—so like a sermon. The Bible verses at the end, as if tacked on—first the rational mind, then a little glimpse of craziness, as if the writer couldn’t stop himself.
    And New Orleans—why focus on New Orleans?
    I’m crazy. I’m not thinking like a cop.
    But the idea wouldn’t leave her. She let it be for a while, decided to go home and sleep on it. And an hour later found herself wandering back to Abasolo’s cubicle.
    Abasolo was someone with whom she’d partnered up a number of times and if truth be told, she’d probably rather work with him than anyone in the department—not that she’d rather have him for her sergeant than Cappello; this way she felt a little more free to run crazy ideas by him. Like her bizarre notion that The Jury was very likely a group instead of one crazy person— because that was the way Errol Jacomine worked. He always managed to draw people into his schemes, get them blind-loyal; he had a dark charisma that was lost on her but was dangerous to underestimate. Because he was crazy—and she was quite sure he was—he didn’t mind looking like a fool, or asking others to do crazy things.
    He had once mounted a letter-writing campaign against her that was so transparent a seventh grader would have been ashamed of it. Yet it worked—most of the brass took his side against her.
    “Adam, tell me if I’m crazy.”
    “You are. We all are. Nothing that happened today could really have happened. We hallucinated it.”
    She slipped into the chair across from him, chewing on a pencil. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this Jury thing.”
    “Well, yeah. Sure you’re crazy. All right-thinking people are thrilled about it.”
    “Now, don’t laugh. The letter reminded me of Jacomine.”
    “Well, look, all these nuts—” he broke off. “How, exactly?”
    “Well, he quoted the Bible.”
    “Yeah.” Abasolo looked interested.
    “And he wouldn’t stop. That’s exactly what Jacomine did. He’d get started and he’d go on and on. Like he’d memorized a lot of verses with a particular word in them, but that didn’t really make much sense when you put them together.”
    “Well, yeah, but it’s the kind of thing a nut would do, right?”
    “This is a reality check—you tell me.” She put out her hands, palms up. “I never saw anyone else do it. Did you?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “And there was this one phrase he used to use—’bigger fish to fry.’”
    “Yeah. Yeah.” He was biting his lip a little.
    “And then there’s the way the thing reads like it was done by more than one person—like a ghostwriter did the real work, and then along came the boss and screwed it up with Bible verses. I mean, it seems so normal except for that.” She felt her face twitch with embarrassment. “I don’t mean normal. I mean …”
    “Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean. Lucid, I guess. Like nobody but a crazy person would do this, but he doesn’t talk so crazy.” He sighed and leaned back. “Have you talked to Cindy Lou at all?”
    “No.”
    “Well, I think she’s in the building. I had to take something down to Juvenile and she was coming in when I left.” He picked up the phone without waiting for Skip’s concurrence. “Hey, Cece. Is Cindy Lou still down there?”
    Cindy Lou was the department’s consulting psychologist and coincidentally Skip’s best woman friend. She was black, she was brilliant, she was breathtakingly beautiful, and—what had drawn Skip to her—she could handle hotshots who liked to put down women.
    Though the two women had been close, their friendship had suffered when Errol Jacomine ran for mayor and Skip tried to expose him as a psychopath. Because he was strong on minority rights, Cindy Lou supported him. And because she knew Skip wasn’t any too stable at the time, she was inclined to dismiss her friend’s fears about him. The friendship was more or less healed, but inwardly Skip winced at the notion of opening up old arguments.
    Waiting the five or ten minutes for Cindy Lou to show up, she remembered the other times they’d been through this—except Skip hadn’t needed a reality check. That time she was sure she was right, and Cindy Lou was equally sure she was wrong.
    “Adam,” Skip said. “You present the problem, okay?”
    Cindy Lou—Lou-Lou to her