Reluctantly, Tucker loosened his grip. "We're going to finish this, you and me."

Stone-faced, Burns straightened his tie. "It'll be a pleasure." He remained standing, turning to the bulletin board at his back. "Mr. Longstreet, were you acquainted with Arnette Gantrey?" Burns tapped a finger against the space between a photo of a smiling blond woman and a black-and-white police photo taken at Gooseneck Creek.

"I knew Arnette. We went to school together, dated a few times."

"And Francie Logan?" Burns slid his finger to the next set of photos.

"I knew Francie." Dwayne averted his eyes. "Everybody knew Francie. She grew up here. Lived in Jackson for a while, then came back after getting divorced."

"And you were acquainted with Edda Lou Hatinger?"

Dwayne forced himself to look back, but focused on the tip of Burns's finger. "Yeah. I knew Darleen, too, if that's what you're getting at."

"Did you know a woman named Barbara Kinsdale?"

"I don't think so." Dwayne's brow creased as he tried out the name in his head. "Nobody around here named Kinsdale."

"Are you quite sure?" Burns unpinned a photo from the board. "Take a look."

Dwayne picked up the photo from the desk, grateful it was a shot of a live woman. She was a pretty brunette, perhaps thirty, with straight hair sweeping slight shoulders. "I've never seen her before."

"Haven't you?" Burns picked up his notes. "Barbara Kinsdale, five foot two, a hundred three pounds, brown hair, blue eyes. Age thirty-one. Does that description sound familiar?"

"I can't say."

"You should be able to say," Burns continued. "It's almost a perfect description of your ex-wife. Mrs. Kinsdale was a cocktail waitress at the Stars and Bars Club in Nashville. Residence 3043 Eastland Avenue. That's about three blocks away from your ex-wife's home. Emmett Cotrain, your ex-wife's fiance, performed at the Stars and bars on weekends. An interesting coincidence, isn't it?"

A thin bead of sweat dripped down Dwayne's back. "I guess it is."

"It's more interesting that Mrs. Kinsdale was found floating in the Percy Priest Lake, outside of Nashville, late this spring. She was naked, her throat had been slit, and her body mutilated."

Burns tossed another photo across the desk, but in this one, Barbara Kinsdale was very dead. "Where were you on the night of May 22 of this year, Mr. Longstreet?"

"Oh, Jesus." Dwayne shut his eyes. The body hadn't been covered in the police shot, but had been laid out, gray and tortured, for the cold camera lens.

"I should tell you that my information places you in Nashville from the twenty-first to the twenty-third."

"I took my boys to the zoo." Dwayne rubbed shaking hands over his eyes. It did look like Sissy. God almighty, especially dead it looked like Sissy. "I took them to the zoo and to a pizza parlor. They stayed with me at the hotel."

"On the night of the twenty-second you were seen in the hotel bar at approximately ten-thirty. Your children weren't with you."

"They were asleep. I left them in the room and went down and had a drink. Couple drinks," he said with a sigh. "Sissy'd been on me about doing more for them, and wanting a bigger house once she and the guy she was with got married. I didn't have more than two drinks because I didn't want to forget the boys were asleep upstairs."

"And didn't you call your wife from the bar just before midnight?" Burns continued. "You argued with her, threatened her."

"I called her. I was sitting there in the room while the boys slept. My boys. It didn't seem right that I was to help her buy a new house so she could live in it with another man my sons would think of as a father." Pale, shaken, Dwayne looked over at Tucker. "It wasn't the money."

"It was the humiliation," Burns suggested. "The humiliation at the hands of a woman. She'd already made you a laughingstock by locking you out of your own house, leaving you for another man. Now she was demanding more money so she could live a better life with that man."

"I didn't care who she lived with. It just didn't seem right-"

"No, it didn't seem right," Burns agreed. "So you told her there'd be no more money, and that you'd take her to court if she didn't watch her step. That you'd pay her back."

"I don't know what I said exactly."

"She does. Oh, despite your estrangement, she's loyal enough to add that you were always full of bluster when you'd been drinking. She didn't take anything you said seriously, and went back to listen to the next set at the bar. Even stayed on after it closed, since she didn't have the boys to get home to. But Barbara Kinsdale left about two. She walked out into a deserted parking lot. A dark parking lot, where she was knocked unconscious and dragged to a waiting car. She was driven to the lake and slaughtered."

Burns waited a beat. "Do you own a knife, Mr. Longstreet? A long-bladed hunting knife?"

"This is crazy." Dwayne dropped his hands into his lap. "I didn't kill anybody."

"Where were you on the night of June thirtieth, between nine p.m. and midnight?"

"For chrissakes." He stumbled to his feet. "Burke, for chrissakes."

"I think he should have a lawyer." Strain had etched lines around Burke's mouth when he turned to Burns. "I don't think he should answer any more questions without a lawyer."

Well satisfied, Burns spread his hands. "That's his right, of course."

"I was just driving around," Dwayne blurted out. "It was raining and I didn't want to go home. I had a flask in the car and I just drove around."

"And on the night of June twelfth?" Burns asked, working back to the night of Edda Lou's murder.

"I don't know. How the fuck is a man supposed to remember where he is every night of the year?"

"Don't say anything else." Tucker stepped forward to take both of Dwayne's arms. "Don't say anything. You hear me?"

"Tucker, I didn't-you know I didn't."

"I know. Be quiet." He turned to stand between Burns and his brother. "Are you bringing charges?"

The holiday weekend had bogged down his paper-work. Not everyone was as dedicated to justice as Matthew Burns. "I'll have a warrant within twenty-four hours."

"Fine. In the meantime you can fuck yourself. Let's get you home, Dwayne."

"Mr. Longstreet," Burns rose with a nod to each brother. "I'd advise that neither of you think of leaving the area. The federal government has a very long arm."

"I need a drink."

"You need to keep a clear head," Tucker contradicted him, and punched Josie's car up to seventy. "You stay clear of the bottle, Dwayne." He took his eyes off the road long enough to shoot his brother a warning. "Until we get this mess straightened out, you stay clear. I mean it."

"They think I did it." Dwayne rubbed his hands over his face until he was afraid he'd scrub off a layer of skin. "They think I killed all those women, Tuck. Even the one I'd never seen before. She looked like Sissy. Christ, she did look like Sissy."

"We're going to call our lawyer," Tucker said calmly even as his knuckles whitened on the wheel. "And you're going to. keep your head clear so you can think back. Think back real carefully until you find out what you were doing, who you were with when Arnette, Francie, and Edda Lou were killed. One's all you need. One of those nights you had to be somewhere with somebody. They won't have a case then. They know it was the same person killed them all. You just have to think."

"Don't you think I want to? Don't you think I'm trying?" Teeth gritted, Dwayne pounded his fists on the dash. "Goddammit, you don't know what it's like once I start in drinking. I told you I forget things. I fucking blank out." Moaning, he dropped his head between his knees. "I blank out, Tucker. Oh, God, I don't know what I'm doing when that happens. I could've done it." Terrified, he squeezed his eyes tight. "Jesus help me, I could've killed them all and not even know."