I turned and began walking back to my truck. Through the shade I could see the security guard urinating by the open door of the Cadillac. Elrod caught up with me. His hand clenched on my arm again.

"You want to write me off as a wet-brain, that's your business," he said. "You don't care about what these guys went through, that's your business, too. I didn't bring you out here for this, anyway."

"Then why am I here?"

He turned me toward him with his hand.

"Because I don't like somebody carrying my oil can," he said.

"What?"

"That's a Texas expression. It means I don't want somebody else toting my load. You've convinced yourself the guy who killed Kelly thought he had you in his sights. That's right, isn't it?"

"Maybe."

"What makes you so goddamn important?"

I continued to walk toward my truck. He caught up with me again.

"You listen to me," he said. "Before she was killed I had a blowout with Mikey. I told him the script stinks, the screenwriters he's hired couldn't get jobs writing tampon ads, he's nickel-and-dimeing the whole project to death, and I'm walking off the set unless he gets his head on straight. The greaseballs heard me."

"Which greaseballs?"

"Balboni's people. They're all over the set. They killed Kelly to keep me in line."

His facial skin high up on one cheek crinkled and seemed almost to vibrate.

"Take it easy, El."

"They made her an object lesson, Mr. Robicheaux."

I touched his arm with my hand.

"Maybe Julie's involved, maybe not," I said. "But if he is, it's not because of you. You've got to trust me on this one."

He turned his face away and pushed at one eye with the heel of his hand.

"When Julie and his kind create object lessons, they go right to the source of their problem," I said. "They don't select out innocuous people. It causes them too many problems."

I heard his breath in his throat.

"I made them keep the casket closed," he said. "I told the funeral director in Kentucky, if he let her parents see her like that, I'd be back, I'd-"

I put my arm over his shoulder and walked back through the cemetery with him.

"Let's go back to town and have something to eat," I said. "Like somebody said to me this morning, it's no good to kick ourselves around the block, is it? What do you think?"

"She's dead. I cain't see her, either. It's not right."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I see those soldiers but I cain't see her. Why's that? It doesn't make any sense."

"I'll be honest with you, partner. I think you're floating on the edge of delirium tremens. Put the cork in the jug before you get there, El. Believe me, you don't have to die to go to hell."

"You figure me for plumb down the road and around the bend, don't you? I don't blame you. I got my doubts about what I see myself."

"Maybe that's not a bad sign."

"When we were driving through that canebrake, I said to Murph, the security guy, 'Who's that standing behind Mr. Robicheaux?' Then I looked again and I knew who it was. Except I've never seen him in daylight before. When I looked again, he was gone. Which isn't the way he does things."

"I'm going to an A A meeting tonight. You want to come?"

"Yeah, why not? It cain't be worse than having dinner with Mikey and the greaseballs."

"You might be a little careful about your vocabulary when you're around those guys."

"Boy, I wonder what my grandpa would say if he saw me working with the likes of that bunch. I told you he was a Texas ranger, didn't I?"

"You surely did."

"You know what he once told me about Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow? He said-"

"I have to get back to the office. How about I pick you up at your place at seven-thirty?"

"Sure. Thanks for coming out, Mr. Robicheaux. I'm sorry about my bad manners on the phone. I'm not given to using profanity like that. I don't know what got into me." He picked up his soda can off the hood of his Cadillac and started to drink out of it. "It's just Coca-Cola. That's a fact."

"You'd better drink it then."

He smiled at me.

"It rots your teeth," he said, and emptied the can into the dirt.

That night I sat alone in the bait shop, a glass of iced coffee in my hand, and tried to figure the connection between Kelly's death and the pursuit of a serial killer who might also be involved with prostitution. Nothing in the investigation seemed to fit. Was the serial killer also a pimp? Why did his crimes seem to be completely contained within the state of Louisiana? If he had indeed mistaken Kelly for me, what had I discovered in the investigation that would drive him to attempt the murder of a police officer? And what was Baby Feet Balboni's stake in all this?

Equally troubling was the possibility that Kelly's death had nothing to do with our hunt for a serial killer. Maybe the rifleman in the fedora had had another motivation, one that was connected with a rat's nest of bones, strips of dried skin, rotted clothing, and a patch of kinky hair attached to a skull plate. Did someone out there believe that somehow that gaping mouth, impacted with sand, strung with green algae, could whisper the names of two killers who thought they had buried their dark deed in water thirty-five years ago?

We live today in what people elect to call the New South. But racial fear, and certainly white guilt over racial injustice, die hard. Hogman Patin, who probably feared very little in this world, had cautioned me because of my discovery of the lynched black man out in the Atchafalaya. He had also suggested that the dead man had been involved with a white woman. To Hogman, those events of years ago were still alive, still emblematic of an unforgiven and collective shame, to be spoken about as obliquely as possible, in all probability because some of the participants were still alive, too.

Maybe it was time to have another talk with Hogman, I thought.

When I drove out to his house on the bayou, the interior was dark and the white curtains in his open windows were puffing outward in the breeze. In the back I could hear the tinkling of the Milk of Magnesia bottles and the silver crosses that he had hung all over the branches of a live oak.

Where are you, Hogman? I thought. I wedged my business card in the corner of his screen door.

The moon was yellow through the trees. I could smell the unmistakable odor of chitterlings that had been burned in a pot. Out on the blacktop I heard a car engine. The headlights bounced off the tree trunks along the roadside, then the driver slowed and I thought he was about to turn into the grove of trees at the front of Hogman's property. I thought the car was probably Hogman's, and I started to walk toward the blacktop. Then the driver accelerated and his headlights swept past me.

I would have given no more notice to the driver and his vehicle, except that just as I started to turn back toward my truck and leave, he cut his lights and really gave it the gas.

If his purpose had been to conceal his license number, he was successful. But two other details stuck in my mind: the car looked new and it was dark blue, the same characteristics as the automobile that two witnesses had seen on the levee in Vermilion Parish where the asphyxiated girl had been stuffed nude into a metal barrel.

Or maybe the car had simply contained a couple of teenage neckers looking for a little nocturnal privacy. I was too tired to think about it anymore. I started my truck and headed home.

The night was clear, the constellations bursting against the black dome of sky overhead. There was no hint of rain, no sudden drop or variation in temperature to cause fog to roll off the water. But two hundred yards down from Hogman's house the road was suddenly white with mist, so thick my headlights couldn't penetrate it. At first I thought a fire was burning in a field and the wind had blown the smoke across the road. But the air smelled sweet and cool, like freshly turned earth, and was almost wet to the touch. The mist rolled in clouds off the bayou, covered the tree trunks, closed about my truck like a white glove, drifted in wisps through my windows. I don't know whether I deliberately stopped the truck or my engine killed. But for at least thirty seconds my headlights flickered on and off, my starter refused to crank, and my radio screamed with static that was like fingernails on a blackboard.