Mean Woman Blues

Ordering was something he did well.
    He’d ordered more than a dozen murders that she personally knew about, and he’d done it with the high-handedness of a dictator. When people were convinced they had God on their side, they’d do anything. Indeed, some of his followers seemed to think he
was
God or had a direct line thereto.
    It wasn’t lost on Skip that Jim Jones, the person responsible for the most deaths in the twentieth century who wasn’t a head of state, was also a preacher— also a white one— who preyed on people of color by embracing liberal causes, matters of human rights and equality, claiming to be their friend. She sometimes wondered what Jacomine thought of Jones, whether the dead preacher was a hero of his or if he was unable to recognize their similarities.
    She gave it up for the moment and gave Shellmire a ring.
    “Skip. Glad you called. I’ve got something for you.”
    “Oh, Lord.”
    “Oh, Lord is right. The news is not good. I’ve been watching Bettina. She’s got a cell phone and a regular phone, but she makes a lot of calls from pay phones. A lot of different pay phones.”
    “Near her house?” Skip asked desperately. If Bettina was calling Jacomine, they had to get a tap.
    “All over town. Never the same one twice.”
    “Damn.” No chance of a tap. “Where do you go from here?”
    “I just have to keep working the case.” She could hear the exasperation in his voice.
    “Keep in touch,” she said, and hoped that he would.
    She went back to studying the photos, trying to think what to do. Well, why try to figure it out alone? She’d been appointed to head a task force; she might as well get one together. After some thought, she decided on a seasoned detective she’d known since her days at headquarters, Danny LeDoux, and a relative rookie, Mercia Hagerty. They were both good officers— that was a given. In addition, they offered diversity. LeDoux was black; so was more than half the city. Hagerty was white, and she cleaned up nicely; she wouldn’t look out of place shopping for antiques. Skip phoned them with the news, setting a meeting for later that day. And let her thoughts go back to Jacomine.
    LeDoux and Hagerty arrived for the meeting rarin’ to go. They couldn’t thank her enough for giving them a piece of the case.
    She thought,
God, I wish I had their enthusiasm.
    What she had to do was pretend. They couldn’t know her mind was elsewhere. “Okay, here’s what we know so far. Last week, the
L.A. Times
broke a story about stolen cemetery art. The
Times-Picayune
picked it up, with pictures. And next thing you know, their switchboard lit up, if they even have switchboards any more. People recognized stuff from their own relatives’ plots. And that started a stampede: Everybody went to check on their family plots, and just about everybody has something missing.” She sighed, knowing she was exaggerating, but wanting to convey the enormity of the task, its importance as a potential public relations coup for the department.
    LeDoux said, “If it’s all gone, that makes it kind of tough to catch anybody red-handed.”
    “Danny, for Christ’s sake,” Hagerty said. “It’s not like you go out there and see bare ground.”
    Skip made conciliatory air pats. “Okay, so I exaggerated. There’s probably enough ornate stuff around here that you could loot graves from here to doomsday and not run out. And there are way too many cemeteries to watch. That’s the part that makes it tough.”
    Both faces brightened. “Hey, how about…”
    “…a sting.”
    The two officers high-fived, delighted at having thought of the same thing.
Good
, Skip thought.
They work and play well with others.
She’d chosen well: Some of their enthusiasm was starting to rub off.
    Hagerty said, “Why don’t I go up and down Magazine Street? I could say I’m a decorator from Texas or something; maybe I’ve got a client who needs some six-foot statues of saints.”
    “Oh, get obvious about it,” LeDoux said.
    She frowned. “Well, something like that.”
    “I like it,” Skip said. “But you take the French Quarter; I’ll take Magazine.” These were the two main antiques districts in the city. “I live in the Quarter; everybody knows me there.”
    “Langdon,” LeDoux said. “Everybody knows you everywhere. You’re too high-profile for this.”
    It was true. She could go undercover on some things, but not this; her picture had been in the
Times-Picayune
too many times.