"What was his name?"

"Who care what his name? Maybe he got what he ax for. But them people who done that still out there. I say past is past. I say don't be messin' in it."

"Are you cautioning me?"

"When I was in the pen, yo' daddy, Mr. Aldous, brought my mother food. He care for her when she sick, he pay for her medicine up at the sto'. I ain't forgot that, me."

"Sam, if you have information about a murder, the law requires that you come forward with it."

"Whose law? The law that run that pen up there? You want to find bodies, go dig in that levee for some of them boys the gunbulls shot down just for pure meanness. I seen it." He touched the corner of his eye with one long finger. "The hack get drunk on corn liquor, single out some boy on the wheelbarrow, holler out, 'Yow! You! Nigger! Run!' Then he'd pop him with his.45, just like bustin' a clay duck."

"What was the white woman's name?"

"I got to be startin' my supper now."

"Was the dead man in a jail?"

"Ain't nobody interested back then, ain't nobody interested now. You give it a few mo' years, we all gonna be dead. You ain't goin' change nothin' for a nigger been in the river thirty years. You want to do some good, catch the pimp tore up that young girl. 'Cause sho' as God made little green apples, he gonna do it again."

He squinted one eye in a shaft of sunlight that fell through the tree branches and lighted one half of his face like an ebony stage mask that was sewn together from mismatched parts.

It was almost dusk when I got home that evening, but the sky was still as blue as a robin's egg in the west and the glow of the late sun looked like pools of pink fire in the clouds. After I ate supper, I walked down to the bait shop to help Batist close up. I was pulling back the canvas awning on the guy wires over the spool tables when I saw the sheriff's car drive down the dirt road and park under the trees.

He walked down the dock toward me. His face looked flushed from the heat, puffy with fatigue.

"I guarantee you, it's been one scorcher of a day," he said, went inside the shop, and came back with a sweating bottle of orange pop in his hand. He sat down at a table and wiped the sweat off his neck with his handkerchief. Grains of ice slid down the neck of the pop bottle.

"What's up, sheriff?" I said.

"Have you seen Rosie this afternoon?" He took a drink out of the bottle.

I sat down across from him. Waves from a passing boat slapped against the pilings under the dock.

"We went out to the movie location, then she went to Lafayette to check out a couple of things," I said.

"Yeah, that's why I'm here."

"What do you mean?"

"I've gotten about a half-dozen phone calls this afternoon. I'm not sure what you guys are doing, Dave."

"Conducting a murder investigation."

"Oh, yeah? What does the director of a motion picture have to do with the death of Cherry LeBlanc?"

"Goldman got in your face?"

"He didn't. But you seem to have upset a few other people around here. Let's see, I received calls from two members of the Chamber of Commerce; Goldman's lawyer, who says you seem to be taking an undue interest in our visiting film community; and the mayor, who'd like to know what the hell my people think they're doing. If that wasn't enough, I also got a call from a Teamster official in Lafayette and a guy named Twinky Hebert Lemoyne who runs a bottling plant over there. Are you two working on some kind of negative outreach program? What was she doing over in Lafayette Parish?"

"Ask her."

"I have a feeling she was sent over there."

"She was checking out the Teamsters' involvement with Goldman and Julie Balboni."

"What does that have to do with our investigation?"

"I'm not sure. Maybe nothing. What did this guy Twinky Lemoyne call about?"

"He owns half of a security service with a guy named Murphy Doucet. Lemoyne said Rosie came out to his bottling plant, asked him questions that were none of her business, and told him that he should give second thought to doing business with the mob. Do you know who Twinky Lemoyne is?"

"Not really."

"He's a wealthy and respected man in Lafayette. In fact, he's a decent guy. What are y'all trying to do, Dave?"

"You sent me to invite Julie Balboni out of town. But now we find that Julie has made himself a big part of the local economy. I think that's the problem, sheriff, not me and Rosie."

He rubbed his whiskers with the backs of his fingers.

"Maybe it is," he said finally, "but there's more than one way to do things."

"What would you suggest that we do differently?"

His eyes studied a turkey buzzard that floated on the hot-air currents above the marsh.

"Concentrate on nailing this psychopath. For the time being forget about Balboni," he said. His eyes didn't come back to meet mine when he spoke.

"Maybe Julie's involved."

"He's not. Julie doesn't do anything unless it's for money."

"I'm getting the strong feeling that the Spanish Lake area is becoming off limits."

"No, I didn't say that. It's a matter of priorities. That brings up another subject, too-the remains of that black man you found out in the Atchafalaya Basin."

"Yes?"

"That's St. Mary Parish's jurisdiction. Let them work the case. We've got enough on our own plate."

"They're not going to work it."

"Then that's their choice."

I didn't speak for a moment. The twilight was almost gone. The air was heavy and moist and full of insects, and out in the cypress I could hear wood ducks fluttering across the surface of the water.

"Would you like another cold drink?" I asked.

"No, this is fine," he answered.

"I'd better help Batist lock up, then. We'll see you, sheriff," I said, and went inside the bait shop. I didn't come back out until I heard his car start and head down the dirt road.

Sam "Hogman" Patin was wrong. Cherry LeBlanc's killer would not merely find another victim in the future. He already had.

Chapter 7

I got the call at eleven o'clock that night. A fisherman running a trotline by the levee, way down in the bottom of Vermilion Parish, almost to the salt water, had seen a lidless oil drum half submerged on its side in the cattails. He would have paid little attention to it, except for the fact that he saw the backs of alligator gars arching out of the water in the moonlight as they tore at something inside the barrel.

I drove down the narrow dirt track on top of the levee through the miles of flooded sawgrass that eventually bled into the Gulf. Strips of black cloud floated across the moon, and up ahead I could see an ambulance and a collection of sheriff's cars parked on the levee in a white and red glow of floodlamps, burning flares, and revolving emergency lights.

The girl was already in a body bag inside the ambulance. The coroner was a tired, overweight Jewish man with emphysema and a terrible cigarette odor whom I had known for years. There were deep circles under his eyes, and he kept rubbing mosquito repellent onto his face and fat arms.

Down the bank a Vermilion Parish plainclothes was interviewing the fisherman, whose unshaven face looked bloodless and gray in the glare of the floodlamps.

"You want to see her, Dave?" the coroner asked.

"Should I?"

"Probably."

We climbed into the back of the ambulance. Even with the air conditioner running, it was hot and stale-smelling inside.

"I figure she was in the water only a couple of days, but she's probably been dead several weeks," he said. "The barrel was probably on the side of the levee, then it rolled into the water. Otherwise, the crabs and the gars would have torn her up a lot worse."