The connection had been there all along. I just hadn't looked in the right place. As soon as I went into the office at 8 a.m. the next morning I called the probation and parole officer in Lafayette and asked the supervising P.O. to pull the file on Cherry LeBlanc.
"Who busted her on the prostitution charge?" I said.
I heard him leafing back and forth through the pages in the file.
"It wasn't one officer. There was a state-police raid on a bar and some trailers out on the Breaux Bridge highway."
S.P. Yes, the state police. Thanks, Lou, old friend.
"Who signed the arrest report?" I asked.
"Let's see. It's pretty hard to read. Somebody set a coffee cup down on the signature."
"It's real important, partner."
"It could be Doucet. Wasn't there a state policeman around here by that name? Yeah, I'd say initial M., then Doucet."
"Can you make copies of her file and lock them in separate places?"
"What's going on?"
"It may become evidence."
"No, I mean Lou Girard was looking at her file last week. What's the deal?"
"Do this for me, will you? If anybody else tries to get his hands on that file, you call me, okay?"
"There's an implication here that I think you should clarify."
Outside, the skies were gray, and dust and pieces of paper were blowing in the street.
"Maybe we have a fireman setting fires," I said.
He was quiet a moment, then he said, "I'll lock up the file for you, detective, and I'll keep your call confidential. But since this may involve a reflection on our office, I expect a little more in the way of detailed information from you in the next few days."
After I hung up, I opened my desk drawer and took out the black-and-white photograph that Cholo Manelli had given me of Cherry LeBlanc and Julie Balboni at the beach in Biloxi. I looked again at the man who was reading a newspaper at another table. His face was beyond the field of focus in the picture, but the light had struck his glasses in such a way that it looked as if there were chips of crystal where his eyes should have been, and my guess was that he was wearing bifocals.
As with most police investigations, the problem had now become one of the time lag between the approaching conclusion of an investigation and the actual arrest of a suspect. It's a peculiar two-way street that both cops and criminals live on. As a cop grows in certainty about the guilt of a suspect and begins to put enough evidence together to make his case, the suspect usually becomes equally aware of the impending denouement and concludes that midsummer isn't a bad time to visit Phoenix after all.
The supervising P.O. in Lafayette now knew my suspicions about Doucet, so did Twinky Hebert Lemoyne, and it wouldn't be long before Doucet did, too.
The other problem was that so far all the evidence was circumstantial.
When Rosie came in I told her everything I had.
"Do you think Lemoyne will make a confession?" she said.
"He might eventually. It's obvious he's a tormented man."
"Because I don't think you'll ever get an indictment on the lynching unless he does."
"I want to get a search warrant and toss everything Doucet owns, starting with the security building out at Spanish Lake."
"Okay, Dave, but let me be honest with you. So far I think what we've got is pretty thin."
"I didn't tell you something else. I already checked Doucet's name through motor vehicle registration in Baton Rouge. He owns a blue 1989 Mercury. I'll bet that's the car that's been showing up through the whole investigation."
"We still don't have enough to start talking to a prosecutor, though, do we?"
"That's what a search warrant is for."
"What I'm trying to say is we don't have witnesses, Dave. We're going to need some hard forensic evidence, a murder weapon, clothing from one of the victims, something that will leave no doubt in a jury's mind that this guy is a creature out of their worst nightmares. I just hope Doucet hasn't already talked to Lemoyne and gotten rid of everything we could use against him, provided there is anything."
"We'll soon find out."
She measured me carefully with her eyes.
"You seem a little more confident than you should be," she said.
"It all fits, Rosie. A black pimp in the New Orleans bus depot told me about a white man selling dirty pictures. I thought he was talking about photographs or postcards. Don't you see it? Doucet's probably been delivering girls to Balboni's pornographic film operation."
"The only direct tie that we have is the fact that Doucet arrested Cherry LeBlanc."
"Right. And even though he knew I was investigating her murder, he never mentioned it, did he? He wasn't even curious about how the investigation was going. Does that seem reasonable to you?"
"Well, let's get the warrant and see what Mr. Doucet has to say to us this morning."
We had it in thirty minutes and were on our way out of the office when my extension rang. It was Bootsie. She said she was going to town to buy candles and tape for the windows in case the hurricane turned in to the coast and I would find lunch for me and Alafair in the oven.
Then she said, "Dave, did you leave the house last night?"
"Just a second," I said, and took the receiver away from my ear. "Rosie, I'll be along in just a minute."
Rosie went out the door and bent over the water cooler.
"I'm sorry, what did you say?"
"I thought I heard your truck start up in the middle of the night. Then I thought I just dreamed it. Did I just dream it?"
"I had to take care of something. I left a note on the lamp for you in case you woke up, but you were sound asleep when I came back."
"What are you doing, Dave?"
"Nothing. I'll tell you about it later."
"Is it those apparitions in the marsh again?"
"No, of course not."
"Dave?"
"It's nothing to worry about. Believe me."
"I am worried if you have to conceal something from me."
"Let's go out to eat tonight."
"I think we'd better have a talk first."
"A very bad guy is about to go off the board. That's what it amounts to. I'll explain it later."
"Does the sheriff know what you're doing?"
"He didn't ask. Come on, Boots. Let's don't be this way."
"Whatever you say. I'm sorry I asked. Everybody's husband goes in and out of the house in the middle of the night. I'll see you this afternoon."
She hung up before I could speak again; but in truth I didn't know how to explain to her the feelings I had that morning. If Murphy Doucet was our serial killer, and I believed he was, then with a little luck we were about to throw a steel net over one of those pathological and malformed individuals who ferret their way among us, occasionally for a lifetime, and leave behind a trail of suffering whose severity can only be appreciated by the survivors who futilely seek explanations for their loss the rest of their lives.
I lost my wife Annie to two such men. A therapist told me that I would never have any peace until I learned to forgive not only myself for her death but the human race as well for producing the men who killed her. I didn't know what he meant until several months later when I remembered an event that occurred on a winter afternoon when I was seven years old and I had returned home early, unexpectedly, from school.
My mother was not at work at the Tabasco bottling plant, where she should have been. Instead, I looked from the hallway through the bedroom door and saw a man's candy-striped shirt, suspenders, and sharkskin zoot slacks and panama hat hung on the bedpost, his socks sticking out of his two-tone shoes on the floor. My mother was naked, on all fours, on top of the bedspread, and the man, whose name was Mack, was about to mount her. A cypress plank creaked under my foot, and Mack twisted his head and looked at me, his pencil mustache like a bird's wings above his lip. Then he entered my mother.
For months I had dreams about a white wolf who lived in a skeletal black tree on an infinite white landscape. At the base of the tree was a nest of pups. In the dream the wolf would drop to the ground, her teats sagging with milk, and eat her young one by one.
I would deliberately miss the school bus in the afternoon and hang around the playground until the last kids took their footballs or kites and walked off through the dusk and dead leaves toward lighted houses and the sound of Jack Armstrong or Terry and the Pirates through a screen door. When my father returned home from trapping on Marsh Island, I never told him what I had seen take place in their bedroom. When they fought at night, I sat on the back steps and watched the sugarcane stubble burning in the fields. The fires looked like thousands of red handkerchiefs twisting in the smoke.
I knew the wolf waited for me in my dreams. Then one afternoon, when I started walking home late from school, I passed an open door in the back of the convent. It was the music room, and it had a piano in it, a record player, and a polished oak floor. But the two young nuns who were supposed to be waxing the floor had set aside their mops and rags, turned on a radio, and were jitterbugging with each other in their bare feet, their veils flying, their wooden rosary beads swirling on their waists.
They didn't see me, and I must have watched them for almost five minutes, fascinated with their flushed faces inside their wimples and the laughter that they tried to hide behind their hands when it got too loud.
I could not explain it to myself, but I knew each night thereafter that if I thought of the dancing nuns before I fell asleep, I would not dream about the white wolf in the tree.
I wondered what kind of dreams Murphy Doucet had. Maybe at one time they were the same as mine. Or maybe it was better not to know.
I had no doubt, though, that he was ready for us when we arrived at the security building at Spanish Lake. He stood with his legs slightly spread, as though at parade rest, in front of the door, his hands propped on his gunbelt, his stomach flat as a plank, his eyes glinting with a cynical light.
I unfolded the search warrant in front of him.
"You want to look it over?" I said.
"What for? I don't give a good fuck what y'all do here," he replied.
"I'd appreciate it if you'd watch your language," I said.
"She can't handle it?" he said.
"Stand over by my truck until we're finished," I said.
"What do you think y'all gonna find?" he said.
"You never know, Murph. You were a cop. People get careless sometimes, mess up in a serious way, maybe even forget they had their picture taken with one of their victims."
Tiny webs of brown lines spread from the corners of his eyes.
"What are you talking about?"
"If I'd been you, I wouldn't have let Cholo take my picture with Baby Feet and Cherry LeBlanc over in Biloxi."
His blue eyes shuttered back and forth; the pupils looked like black pinheads. The point of his tongue licked across his bottom lip.
"I don't want her in my stuff," he said.
"Would you like to prevent me from getting in your 'stuff,' Mr. Doucet?" Rosie said. "Would you like to be charged this morning with interfering with a federal officer in the performance of her duty?"
Without ever removing his eyes from her face, he lifted a Lucky Strike with two fingers from the pack in his shirt pocket and put it in the corner of his mouth. Then he leaned back against my truck, shook open his Zippo lighter, cupped the flame in his hands, sucked in on the smoke, and looked away at the pecan trees bending and straightening in the wind and an apple basket bouncing crazily across a field.
On his work table were a set of Exacto knives, tubes of glue, small bottles of paint, tiny brushes, pieces of used sandpaper, and the delicate balsa-wood wing struts of a model airplane pinned to a blueprint. Outside, Doucet smoked his cigarette and watched us through the door and showed no expression or interest when I dropped his Exacto knives into a Ziploc bag.
His desk drawers contained Playboy magazines, candy wrappers, a carton of Lucky Strikes, a thermos of split pea soup, two ham sandwiches, paper clips, eraser filings, a brochure advertising a Teamster convention in Atlantic City, a package of condoms.
I opened the drawer of his work table. In it were more sheets of sandpaper, an unopened model airplane kit, and the black-handled switchblade knife he had lent me to trim back the insulation on an electrical wire in my truck. I put it in another Ziploc bag.
Doucet yawned.
"Rosie, would you kick over that trash basket behind his desk, please?" I said.
"There's nothing in it," she said, leaning over the corner of the desk.
My back was turned to both her and Doucet when I closed the drawer to the work table and turned around with an aluminum-handled utility knife in my fingers. I dropped it into a third plastic bag.
"Well, I guess this covers it," I said.
Through the door I saw his hand with the cigarette stop in midair and his eyes lock on the utility knife.
He stepped toward us as we came out of the building.
"What do you think you're doing?" he said.
"You have a problem with something that happened here?" I said.
"You planted that," he said, pointing at the bag with the utility knife in it. "You sonofabitch, you planted it, you know you did."
"How could I plant something that belongs to you?" I said. "This is one of the tools you use on your airplane models, isn't it?"
Rosie was looking at me strangely.
"This woman's a witness," he said. "You're salting the shaft. That knife wasn't there."
"I say it was. I say your fingerprints are all over it, too. It's probably going to be hard to prove it's not yours, Murph."
"This pepper-belly bitch is in on it, isn't she?" he said.
I tapped him on the cheek with the flat of my hand. "You say anything else, your day is going to deteriorate in a serious way," I said.
Mistake.
He leaped into my face, his left hand like a claw in my eyes, his right fist flailing at my head, his knees jerking at my groin. I lost my balance, tried to turn away from him and raise my arm in front of my face; his fists rained down on the crown of my skull.
Rosie pulled her.357 from her purse, extended it straight out with both hands, and pointed the barrel into his ear.
"Down on the ground, you understand me?" she shouted. "Do it! Now! Don't look at me! Get your face on the ground! Did you hear me? Don't look at me! Put your hands behind your head!"
He went to his knees, then lay prone with the side of his face in the grass, his lined, deeply tanned neck oozing sweat, his eyes filled with the mindless light that an animal's might have if it were pinned under an automobile tire.
I slipped my handcuffs from the back of my belt and snipped them onto his wrists. I pulled his revolver and can of Mace from his gunbelt, then raised him to his feet. His arm felt like bone in my hand.
"You're under arrest for assaulting an officer of the law, Murph," I said.
He turned toward me. The top button of his shirt was torn and I could see white lumps of scar tissue on his chest like fingers on a broken hand.
"It won't stick. You've got a bum warrant," he said.
"That knife is the one you used on Cherry LeBlanc, isn't it?" I said.
Rosie walked behind me into his office and used his phone to call for a sheriff's car. His eyes watched her, then came back onto me. He blew pieces of grass out of his mouth.
"She let you muff her?" he said.
We brought him in through the back door of the sheriff's department, fingerprinted and booked him, let him make a phone call to an attorney in Lafayette, then took him down to our interrogation room. Personnel from all over the building were finding ways to get a look at Murphy Doucet.
"You people get back to work," the sheriff said in the hallway. "This man is in for assaulting an officer. That's all he's charged with. Have y'all got that?"
"There's three news guys outside your office, sheriff," a deputy said.
"I'd like to know who called them down here, please," he said.
"Search me," the deputy said.
"Will you people get out of here?" he said again to the crowd in the hall. Then he pushed his fingers through his hair and turned to me and Rosie. "I've got to talk to these reporters before they break a Jack the Ripper story on us. Get what you can from this guy and I'll be right back. Who's his lawyer?"
"Jeb Bonin," I said.
"We'll still have Doucet till his arraignment in the morning. When are y'all going to search his place?"
"This afternoon," Rosie said. "We already sent a deputy over there to sit on it for us."
"Was the blue Merc out at Spanish Lake?" the sheriff said.
"No, he drives a pickup to work. The Merc must be at his house," I said.
"All right, get on it. Do it by the numbers, too. We don't want to blow this one."
The sheriff walked back toward his office. Rosie touched me lightly on the arm.
"Dave, talk with me a second before we go inside," she said.
"What is it?"
She didn't reply. She went inside our office and waited for me.
"That utility knife you took out of his drawer," she said. "He was completely surprised when you found it. That presents a troubling thought for me."
"It's his knife, Rosie. There's no question abut it."
"Why was he so confident up until that moment?"
"Maybe he just forgot he'd left it there."
"You got into that security building during the night, removed the knife, then replaced it this morning, didn't you?"
"Time's always on the perp's side, Rosie. While we wait on warrants, they deep-six the evidence."
"I don't like what I'm hearing you say, Dave."
"This is our guy. You want him to walk? Because without that knife, he's sure going to do it."
"I see it differently. You break the rules, you arm the other side."
"Wait till you meet his lawyer. He's the best in southwest Louisiana. He also peddles his ass to the Teamsters, the mob, and incinerator outfits that burn PCBs. Before he's finished, he'll turn Doucet into a victim and have the jury slobbering on their sleeves."
Her eyes went back and forth thoughtfully, as though she were asking herself questions and answering them. Then she raised her chin.
"Don't ever do anything like this again, Dave. Not while we're partners," she said, and walked past me and into the interrogation room, where Murphy Doucet sat in a straight-backed chair at a small table, surrounded by white walls, wreathed in cigarette smoke, scratching at whiskers that grew along the edges of the white chicken's foot embossed on his throat.
I stepped inside the room with Rosie and closed the door.
"Where's my lawyer at?" he asked.
I took the cigarette from his fingers and mashed it out on the floor.
"You want to make a statement about Cherry LeBlanc?" I said.
"Yeah. I've given it some thought. I remember busting a whore by that name three years ago. So now y'all can tell me why I'd wait three years to kill somebody who'd been in my custody."
"We think you're a pimp for Julie Balboni, Mr. Doucet," Rosie said. "We also think you're supplying girls for his pornography operation."
His eyes went up and down her body.
"Affirmative action?" he said.
"There's something else you don't know about, Murph," I said. "We're checking all the unsolved murders of females in areas around highways during the time you were working for the state police. I have a feeling those old logs are going to put you in the vicinity of some bodies you never thought would be connected to you."
"I don't believe this," he said.
"I think we've got you dead-bang," I said.
"You've got a planted knife. This girl here knows it, too. Look at her face."
"We've not only got the weapon and the photo of you with the victim, we know what happened and why."
"What?"
"Cherry LeBlanc told Julie he was a tub of guts and walked out on him. But people don't just walk out on Julie. So he got on the phone and called you up from the motel, didn't he, Murph? You remember that conversation? Would you like me to quote it to you?"
His eyebrows contracted, then his hand went into his pocket for a cigarette.
"No. You can't smoke in here," I said.
"I got to use the can."
"It's unavailable now," I said.
"She's here for another reason. It ain't because of a dead hooker," he said.
"We're all here because of you, Murph. You're going down hard, partner. We haven't even started to talk about Kelly Drummond yet."
He bit a piece of skin off the ball of his thumb.
"What's the bounce on the pimp beef?" he said.
"You think you're going to cop to a procuring charge when you're looking at the chair? What world are you living in?" I said.
"Ask her. She's here to make a case on Balboni, not a security guard, so clean the shit out of your mouth. What kind of bounce am I looking at?"
"Mr. Doucet, you're looking at several thousand volts of electricity cooking your insides. Does that clarify your situation for you?" Rosie said.
He looked into her face.
"Go tell your boss I can put that guinea away for twenty-seven years," he said. "Then come back and tell me y'all aren't interested in a deal."
The sheriff opened the door.
"His lawyer's here," he said.
"We're going to your house now, Murph," I said. "Is there anything else you want to tell us before we leave?"
The attorney stepped inside the room. He wore his hair shaved to the scalp, and his tie and shirt collar rode up high on his short neck so that he reminded you of a light-brown hard-boiled egg stuffed inside a business suit.
"Don't say anything more to these people, Mr. Doucet," he said.
I leaned on the table and stared into Murphy Doucet's face. I stared at his white eyebrows, the jittering of his eyeballs, the myriad lines in his skin, the slit of a mouth, the white scar on his throat that could have been layered there with a putty knife.
"What? What the fuck you staring at?" he said.
"Do you remember me?" I said.
"Yeah. Of course. When you were a cop in New Orleans."
"Look at me. Think hard."
His eyes flicked away from my face, fastened on his attorney.
"I don't know what he's talking about," he said.
"Do you have a point, detective?" the attorney said.
"Your hired oil can doesn't have anything to do with this, Murph," I said. "It's between me and you now. It's 1957, right after Hurricane Audrey hit. You could smell dead animals all over the marsh. You remember? Y'all made DeWitt Prejean run with a chain locked around his chest, then you blew his leg out from under him. Remember the kid who saw it from across the bay? Look at my face."
He bit down on his lip, then fitted his chin on top of his knuckles and stared disjointedly at the wall.
"The old jailer gave you guys away when he told me that DeWitt Prejean used to drive a soda pop truck. Prejean worked for Twinky Lemoyne and had an affair with his wife, didn't he? It seems like there's always one guy still hanging around who remembers more than he should," I said. "You still think you're in a seller's market, Murph? How long do you think it's going to be before a guy like Twinky cracks and decides to wash his sins in public?"
"Don't say anything, Mr. Doucet," the attorney said.
"He doesn't have to, Mr. Bonin," I said. "This guy has been killing people for thirty-five years. If I were you, I'd have some serious reservations about an ongoing relationship with your client. Come on, Rosie."
The wind swirled dust and grit between the cars in the parking lot, and I could smell rain in the south.
"That was Academy Award stuff, Dave," Rosie said as we got in my truck.
"It doesn't hurt to make the batter flinch once in a while."
"You did more than that. You should have seen the lawyer's face when you started talking about the lynching."
"He's not the kind who's in it for the long haul."
As I started the truck a gust of wind sent a garbage can clattering down the sidewalk and blew through the oak grove across the street. A solitary shaft of sunlight broke from the clouds and fell through the canopy, and in a cascade of gold leaves I thought I saw a line of horsemen among the tree trunks, their bodies as gray as stone, their shoulders and their horses' rumps draped with flowing tunics. I pinched the sweat out of my eyes against the bridge of my nose and looked again. The grove was empty except for a black man who was putting strips of tape across the windows of his barbecue stand.
"Dave?" Rosie said.
"Yes?"
"Are you all right?"
"I just got a piece of dirt in my eye."
When we pulled out on the street I looked into the rearview mirror and saw the detailed image of a lone horseman deep in the trees, a plum-colored plume in his hat, a carbine propped on his thigh. He pushed up the brim of his hat with his gun barrel and I saw that his face was pale and siphoned of all energy and the black sling that held his left arm was sodden with blood.
"What has opened your wounds, general?"
"What'd you say?" Rosie asked.
"Nothing. I didn't say anything."
"You're worried about what Doucet said, aren't you?"
"I'm not following you."
"You think the Bureau might cut a deal with him."
"It crossed my mind."
"This guy's going down, Dave. I promise you."
"I've made a career of discovering that my priorities aren't the same as those of the people I work for, Rosie. Sometimes the worst ones walk and cops help them do it."
She looked out the side window, and now it was she whose face seemed lost in an abiding memory or dark concern that perhaps she could never adequately share with anyone.
Murphy Doucet lived in a small freshly-painted white house with a gallery and a raked, tree-shaded lawn across from the golf course on the north side of Lafayette. A bored Iberia Parish deputy and a Lafayette city cop sat on the steps waiting for us, flipping a pocket knife into the lawn. The blue Mercury was parked in the driveway under a chinaberry tree. I unlocked it from the key ring we had taken from Doucet when he was booked; then we pulled out the floor mats, laid them carefully on the grass, searched under the seats, and cleaned out the glove box. None of it was of any apparent value. We picked up the floor mats by the corners, replaced them on the rugs, and unlocked the trunk.
Rosie stepped back from the odor and coughed into her hand.
"Oh, Dave, it's-" she began.
"Feces," I said.
The trunk was bare except for a spare tire, a jack, and a small cardboard carton in one corner. The dark blue rug looked clean, vacuumed or brushed, but twelve inches back from the latch was a dried, tea-colored stain with tiny particles of paper towel embedded in the stiffened fabric.
I took out the cardboard carton, opened the top, and removed a portable spotlight with an extension cord that could be plugged into a cigarette lighter.
"This is what he wrapped the red cellophane around when he picked up the girl hitchhiking down in Vermilion Parish," I said.
"Dave, look at this."
She pointed toward the side wall of the trunk. There were a half-dozen black curlicues scotched against the pale blue paint. She felt one of them with two fingers, then rubbed her thumb against the ends of the fingers.
"I think they're rubber heel marks," she said. "What kind of shoes was Cherry LeBlanc wearing?"
"Flats with leather soles. And the dead girl in Vermilion didn't have on anything."
"All right, let's get it towed in and start on the house. We really need-"
"What?"
"Whatever he got careless about and left lying around."
"Did you call the Bureau yet?"
"No. Why?"
"I was just wondering."
"What are you trying to say, Dave?"
"If you want a handprint set in blood to make our case, I don't think it's going to happen. Not unless there's some residue on that utility knife we can use for a DNA match. The photograph is a bluff, at least as far as indicting Doucet is concerned. Like you said earlier, everything else we've got so far isn't real strong."
"So?"
"I think you already know what your boss is going to tell you."
"Maybe I don't care what he says."
"I don't want you impairing your career with Fart, Barf, and Itch because you think you have to be hard-nosed on my account, Rosie. Let's be clear on that."
"Cover your own butt and don't worry about mine," she said, took the key ring out of my hand, and walked ahead of me up the front steps of the house and unlocked the door.
The interior was as neat and squared away as a military barracks. The wood floors were waxed, the stuffed chairs decorated with doilies, the window plants trimmed and watered, the kitchen sink and drainboards immaculate, the pots and pans hung on hooks, the wastebaskets fitted with clean plastic liners, his model planes dusted and suspended on wires from the bedroom ceiling, his bedspread tucked and stretched so tightly that you could bounce a quarter off it.
None of the pictures on the walls dealt with human subjects, except one color photograph of himself sitting on the steps of a cabin with a dead eight-point deer at his feet. Doucet was smiling; a bolt-action rifle with iron sights and a sling lay across his lap.
We searched the house for an hour, searched the garage, then came back and tossed the house again. The Iberia Parish deputy walked through the front door with an icecream cone in his hand. He was a dark-haired, narrow-shouldered, wide-hipped man who had spent most of his five years with the department as a crosswalk guard at elementary schools or escorting misdemeanor prisoners to morning arraignment. He stopped eating and wiped the cream out of his mustache with the back of his wrist before he spoke.
"Jesus Christ, Dave, y'all tore the place apart," he said.
"You want to stay behind and clean it up?" I said.
"Y'all the ones done it, not me."
"That's right, so you don't have to worry about it," I said.
"Boy, somebody didn't get enough sleep last night," he said. When I didn't answer he walked into the center of the room. "What y'all found in that trunk?"
When I still didn't answer, he peered over my shoulder.
"Oh man, that's a bunch of little girl's underwear, ain't it?" he said.
"Yes, it is," I said.
The deputy cleared his throat.
"That fella been doin' that kind of stuff, too, Dave?"
"It looks like it."
"Oh, man," he said. Then his face changed. "Maybe somebody ought to show him what happens when you crawl over one of them high barb-wire fences."
"I didn't hear you say that, deputy," Rosie said.
"It don't matter to me," he said. "A fella like that, they's people 'round here get their hands on him, you ain't gonna have to be worryin' about evidence, no. Ax Dave."
In the trunk we had found eleven small pairs of girls' underwear, children's socks, polka-dot leotards, training bras, a single black patent-leather shoe with a broken strap, a coloring book, a lock of red hair taped to an index card, torn matinee tickets to a local theater, a half-dozen old photographs of Murphy Doucet in the uniform of a Jefferson Parish deputy sheriff, all showing him with children at picnics under moss-hung trees, at a Little League ball game, at a swimming pool filled with children leaping into the air for the camera. All of the clothing was laundered and folded and arranged in a neat pink and blue and white layer across the bottom of the trunk.
After a moment, Rosie said, "It's his shrine."
"To what?" I said.
"Innocence. He's a psychopath, a rapist, a serial killer, a sadist, maybe a necrophiliac, but he's also a pedophile. Like most pedophiles, he seeks innocence by being among children or molesting them."
Then she rose from her chair, went into the bathroom, and I heard the water running, heard her spit, heard the water splashing.
"Could you wait outside a minute, Expidee?" I said to the deputy.
"Yeah, sure," he said.
"We'll be along in a minute. Thanks for your help today."
"That fella gonna make bail, Dave?"
"Probably."
"That ain't right," he said, then he said it again as he went out the door, "Ain't right."
The bathroom door was ajar when I tapped on it. Her back was to me, her arms propped stiffly on the basin, the tap still running. She kept trying to clear her throat, as though a fine fish bone were caught in it.
I opened the door, took a clean towel out of a cabinet, and started to blot her face with it. She held her hand up almost as though I were about to strike her.
"Don't touch me with that," she said.
I set the towel on the tub, tore the top Kleenex from a box, dropped it in the waste can, then pulled out several more, balled them up, and touched at her face with them. She pushed down my wrist.
"I'm sorry. I lost it," she said.
"Don't worry bout it."
"Those children, that smell in the trunk of the car."
She made her eyes as wide as possible to hold back the tears, but it didn't work. They welled up in her brown eyes, then rolled in rivulets down her cheeks.
"It's okay, Rosie," I said, and slipped my arms around her. Her head was buried under my chin. I could feel the length of her body against mine, her back rising and falling under my palms. I could smell the strawberry shampoo in her hair, a heated fragrance like soap in her skin.
The window was open, and the wind blew the curtain into the room. Across the street on a putting green, a red flag snapped straight out on a pole that vibrated stiffly in the cup. In the first drops of rain, which slanted almost parallel to the ground, I saw a figure standing by a stagnant reed-choked pond, a roiling myrtle bush at his back. He held himself erect in the wind with his single crutch, his beard flying about his face, his mouth an O, his words lost in distant thunder. The stump of his amputated right leg was wrapped with fresh white bandages that had already turned scarlet with new bleeding.
"What are you trying to warn me of, general? Why has so much pain come back to you, sir?"
I felt Rosie twist her face against my chest, then step away from me and walk quickly out the door, picking up her handbag from a chair in one smooth motion so I could not see her face. The screen door slammed behind her.
I put everything from Doucet's trunk into evidence bags, locked the house, and got into the pickup just as a storm of hailstones burst from the sky, clattered on the cab, and bounced in tiny white geysers on the slopes of the golf course as far as the eye could see.
That night the weatherman on the ten o'clock news said that the hurricane was moving again in a northwesterly direction and would probably make landfall sometime late tomorrow around Atchafalaya Bay, just to the east of us. Every offshore drilling rig in the Gulf had shut down, and the low-lying coastal areas from Grand Isle to Sabine Pass were being evacuated.
At eleven the sheriff called.
"Somebody just torched Mikey Goldman's trailer out at Spanish Lake. A gallon milk bottle of gasoline through the window with a truck flare right on top of it," he said. "You want to go out there and have a look?"
"Not really. Who's that yelling in the background?"
"Guess. I can't convince him he's lucky he wasn't in the trailer."
"Let me guess again. He wants Julie Balboni in custody."
"You must be psychic," the sheriff said. He paused. "I've got some bad news. The lab report came in late this evening. That utility knife's clean."
"Are they sure?"
"They're on the same side as we are, Dave."
"We can use testimony from the pathologist about the nature of the wounds. We can get an exhumation order if we have to."
"You're tired. I shouldn't have called tonight."
"Doucet's a monster, sheriff."
"Let's talk about it in the morning."
A sheet of gray rain was moving across my neighbor's sugarcane field toward the house, and lightning was popping in the woods behind it.
"Are you there?" he said through the static.
"We've got to pull this guy's plug in a major way."
"We'll talk with the prosecutor in the morning. Now go to bed, Dave."
After I replaced the receiver in the cradle I sat for a long time in the chair and stared out the open back door at the rain falling on the duck pond and cattails at the foot of my property. The sky seemed filled with electric lights, the wind resonant with the voices of children.