Then the three of them were silent, suppressing their grins, their eyes roving around the parking lot.

"Drop by my office sometime today, Rufus," I said. "Anytime before five o'clock. You think you can work it in?"

"It's just a joke, Dave. I'm not the guy who said it, either."

"That's right. So it's nothing personal. I'd just like to go through your jacket with you."

"What for?"

"You've been here eight or nine years, haven't you?"

"That's right."

"Why is it that I always have the feeling you'd like to be an NCO again, that maybe you have some ambitions you're not quite telling us about?"

His lips became a tight, stitched line, and I saw a slit of yellow light in his eye.

"Think about it and I'll talk to you later, Rufus," I said, and went inside the building, into the air-conditioned odor of cigar butts and tobacco spittle, and closed the door behind me.

Ten minutes later the sheriff walked into my office and sat down in front of my desk with his arms propped stiffly on his thighs. In his red-faced concentration he reminded me of a football coach sitting on the edge of a bench.

"Where do you think we should begin?" he said.

"You got me."

"From what I hear about that scene in the restaurant, you tried to tear that fellow apart."

"Those guys think they're in the provinces and they can do what they want. Sometimes you have to turn them around."

"It looks like you got your message across. Balboni had to take the guy to the hospital. You broke his tooth off inside his gums."

"It was a bad morning. I let things get out of control. It won't happen again."

He didn't answer. I could hear him breathing through his nose.

"You want some coffee?" I said.

"No."

I got up and filled my cup from my coffee maker in the corner.

"I've had two phone calls already about your trip to New Orleans last night," he said.

"What about it?"

He took a folded-back notebook out of his shirt pocket and looked at the first page.

"Did you ever hear of a black guy named Robert Brown?" he asked.

"Yep, that's Downtown Bobby Brown."

"He's trying to file charges against you. He says you smashed his face into a men's-room door at the bus depot."

"I see."

"What the hell are you doing, Dave?"

"He's a pimp and a convicted child molester. When I found him, he was scamming two girls who couldn't have been over sixteen years old. I wonder if he passed on that information when he filed his complaint."

"I don't give a damn what this guy did. I'm worried about a member of my department who might have confused himself with Wyatt Earp."

"This guy's charges aren't going anywhere and you know it."

"I wish I had your confidence. It looks like you got some people's attention over in Jefferson Parish, too."

"I don't understand."

"The Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Department seems to think we may have a loose cannon crashing around on our deck."

"What's their problem?"

"You didn't check in with them, you didn't coordinate with anybody, you simply went up and down the Airline Highway on your own, questioning hookers and bartenders about a pimp with no name."

"So?"

He rubbed the cleft in his round chin, then dropped the flat of his hand on his thigh.

"They say you screwed up a surveillance, that you blew a sting operation of some kind," he said.

"How?"

"I don't know."

"It sounds like bullshit to me, sheriff. It sounds like cops on a pad who don't want outsiders walking around on their turf."

"Maybe that's true, Dave, but I'm worried about you. I think you're overextending yourself and you're not hearing me when I talk to you about it."

"Did Twinky Lemoyne call?"

"No. Why should he?"

"I went over to Lafayette and questioned him yesterday afternoon."

He removed his rimless glasses, wiped them with a Kleenex, and put them back on. His eyes came back to meet mine.

"This was after I talked to you about involving people in the investigation who seem to have no central bearing in it?" he asked.

"I'm convinced that somehow Baby Feet was mixed up with Cherry LeBlanc, sheriff. Twinky Lemoyne has business ties to Feet. The way I read it, that makes him fair game."

"I'm really sorry to hear this, Dave."

"An investigation clears as well as implicates people. His black employees seem to think well of him. He didn't call in a complaint about my talking to him, either. Maybe he's an all-right guy."

"You disregarded my instructions, Dave."

"I saw the bodies of both those girls, sheriff."

"And?"

"Frankly I'm not real concerned about whose toes I step on."

He rose from his chair and tucked his shirt tightly into his gunbelt with his thumbs while his eyes seemed to study an unspoken thought in midair.

"I guess at this point I have to tell you something of a personal nature," he said. "I don't care for your tone, sir. I don't care for it in the least."

I picked up my coffee cup and sipped off it and looked at nothing as he walked out of the room.

Rosie Gomez was down in Vermilion Parish almost all day. When she came back into the office late that afternoon her face was flushed from the heat and her dark hair stuck damply to her skin. She dropped her purse on top of her desk and propped her arms on the side of the air-conditioning unit so the windstream blew inside her sleeveless blouse.

"I thought Texas was the hottest place on earth. How did anyone ever live here before air conditioning?" she said.

"How'd you make out today?"

"Wait a minute and I'll tell you. Damn, it was hot out there. What happened to the rain?"

"I don't know. It's unusual."

"Unusual? I felt like I was being cooked alive inside wet cabbage leaves. I'm going to ask for my next assignment in the Aleutians."

"I'm afraid you'll never make the state Chamber of Commerce, Rosie."

She walked back to her desk, blowing her breath up into her face, and opened her purse.

"What'd you do today?" she asked.

"I tried to run down some of those old cases, but they're pretty cold now-people have quit or retired or don't remember, files misplaced, that sort of thing. But there's one interesting thing here-" I spread a dozen National Crime Information Center fax sheets over the top of my desk. "If one guy committed several of these unsolved murders, it doesn't look like he ever operated outside the state. In other words, there don't seem to be any unsolved female homicides that took place during the same time period in an adjoining area in Texas, Arkansas, or Mississippi.

"So this guy may not only be homegrown but for one reason or another he's confined his murders to the state of Louisiana."

"That'd be a new one," she said. "Serial killers usually travel, unless they prey off a particular local community, like gays or streetwalkers. Anyway, look at what jumped up out of the weeds today."

She held up a plastic Ziploc bag with a wood-handled, brass-tipped pocket knife inside. The single blade was opened and streaked with rust.

"Where'd you find it?"

"A half mile back down the levee from where the girl was found in the barrel. It was about three feet down from the crest."

"You covered all that ground by yourself?"

"More or less."

I looked at her a moment before I spoke again. "Rosie, you're kind of new to the area, but that levee is used by fishermen and hunters all the time. Sometimes they drop stuff."

"All my work for nothing, huh?" She smiled and lifted a strand of hair off her eyebrow.

"I didn't say that-"

"I didn't tell you something else. I ran into an elderly black man down there who sells catfish and frog legs off the back of his pickup truck. He said that about a month ago, late at night, he saw a white man in a new blue or black car looking for something on the levee with a flashlight. Just like that alligator poacher you questioned, he wondered why anybody would be down there at night with a new automobile. He said the man with the light wasn't towing a boat trailer and he didn't have a woman with him, either. Evidently he thinks those are the only two reasonable explanations for anyone ever going down there."