"Dave, I'm sorry, I don't know what to say, I-"

"It's not your fault." I replaced the phone receiver in the cradle, my ears whirring with a sound like wind inside a sea shell, the skin of my face as tight as a pumpkin's.

Before Rosie and I left the office I told the dispatcher to put out an all-car alert on Alafair and to contact the state police.

All the way to the house I tried to convince myself that there was an explanation for her disappearance other than the one that I couldn't bear to hold in the center of my mind for more than a few seconds. Maybe Tripod had simply gotten away from her while she was in the bait shop and she was still looking for him, I thought. Or maybe she had walked down to the general store at the four-corners, had forgotten to lock the door, and Tripod had broken loose from the clothesline on his own.

But Alafair never forgot to lock up the bait shop and she wouldn't leave Tripod clipped to the clothesline in the rain.

Moments after I walked into the bait shop, all the images and fears that I had pushed to the edges of my consciousness suddenly became real and inescapable, in the same way that you wake from a nightmare into daylight and with a sinking of the heart realize that the nightmare is part of your waking day and has not been manufactured by your sleep. Behind the counter I saw her Astros baseball cap, where it had been flattened into the Buckboards by someone's muddy shoe or boot. Elrod and Rosie watched me silently while I picked it up and placed it on top of the counter. I felt as though I were deep under water, past the point of depth tolerance, and something had popped like a stick and pulled loose in my head. Through the screen I saw Bootsie's car turn into the drive and park by the house.

"I should have figured him for it," I said.

"Doucet?" Rosie said.

"He was a cop. He's afraid to do time."

"We're not certain it's Doucet, Dave," she said.

"He knows what happens to cops inside mainline jails. Particularly to a guy they make as a short-eyes. I'm going up to talk to Bootsie. Don't answer the phone, okay?"

Rosie's teeth made white marks on her bottom lip.

"Dave, I want to bring in the Bureau as soon as we have evidence that it's a kidnapping," she said.

"So far nothing official we do to this guy works. It's time both of us hear that, Rosie," I said, and went out the screen door and started up the dock.

I hadn't gone ten yards when I heard the telephone ring behind me. I ran back through the rain and jerked the receiver out of the cradle.

"You sound out of breath," the voice said.

Don't blow this one.

"Turn her loose, Doucet. You don't want to do this," I said. I looked into Rosie's face and pointed toward the house.

"I'll make it simple for both of us. You take the utility knife and the photo out of the evidence locker. You put them in a Ziploc bag. At eight o'clock tomorrow morning you leave the bag in the trash can on the corner of Royal and St. Ann in New Orleans. I don't guess you ought to plan on getting a lot of sleep tonight."

Rosie had eased the screen door shut behind her and was walking fast up the incline toward the house in the fading light.

"The photo's a bluff. It's out of focus," I said. "You can't be identified in it."

"Then you won't mind parting with it."

"You can walk, Doucet. We can't make the case on you."

"You lying sonofabitch. You tore up my house. Your tow truck scratched up my car. You won't rest till you fuck me up in every way you can."

"You're doing this because your property was damaged?"

"I'll tell you what else I'm going to do if you decide to get clever on me. No, that's not right. It won't be me, because I never hurt a child in my life. You got that?"

He stopped speaking and waited for me. Then he said it again: "You got that, Dave?"

"Yes," I said.

"But there's a guy who used to work in Balboni's movies, a guy who spent eleven years in Parchman for killing a little nigger girl. You want to know how it went down?"

Then he told me. I stared out the screen door at my neighbor's dark green lawn, at his enormous roses that had burst in the rain and were now scattered in the grass like pink tear drops. A dog began barking, and then I heard it cry out sharply as though it had been whipped across the ribs with a chain.

"Doucet-" I broke in. My voice was wet, as though my vocal cords were covered with membrane.

"You don't like my description? You think I'm just trying to scare you? Get a hold of one of his snuff films. You'll agree he's an artist."

"Listen to me carefully. If you hurt my daughter, I'll get to you one way or another, in or out of jail, in the witness protection program, it won't matter, I'll take you down in pieces, Doucet."

"You've said only one thing right today. I'm going to walk, and you're going to help me, unless you've let that affirmative-action bitch fuck most of your brains out. By the way, forget the trace. I'm at a phone booth and you've got shit on your nose."

The line went dead.

I was trembling as I walked up the slope to the house.

Rosie opened the screen door and came out on the gallery with Bootsie behind her. The skin of Bootsie's face was drawn back against the bone, her throat ruddy with color as though she had a windburn.

"He hung up too soon. We couldn't get it," Rosie said.

"Dave, my God. What-" Bootsie said. Her pulse was jumping in her neck.

"Let's go inside," I said, and put my arm around her shoulder. "Rosie, I'll be out in just a minute."

"No, talk to me right here," Bootsie said.

"Murphy Doucet has her. He wants the evidence that he thinks can put him in jail."

"What for?" she said. "You told me yesterday that he'll probably get out of it."

"He doesn't know that. He's not going to believe anybody who tells him that, either."

"Where is she?"

"I don't know, Boots. But we're going to get her back. If the sheriff calls, don't tell him anything. At least not right now."

I felt Rosie's eyes on the side of my face.

"What are you doing, Dave?" Bootsie said.

"I'll call you in a little while," I said. "Stay with Elrod, okay?"

"What if that man calls back?"

"He won't. He'll figure the line's open."

Before she could speak again, I went inside and opened the closet door in the bedroom. From under some folded blankets on the top shelf I took out a box of twelve-gauge shells and the Remington pump shotgun whose barrel I had sawed off in front of the pump handle and whose sportsman's plug I had removed years ago. I shook the shells, a mixture of deer slugs and double-ought buckshot, out on the bed and pressed them one by one into the magazine until I felt the spring come snug against the fifth shell. I dropped the rest of the shells into my raincoat pockets.

"Call the FBI, Dave," Bootsie said behind me.

"No," I said.

"Then I'll do it."

"Boots, if they screw it up, he'll kill her. We'll never even find the body."

Her face was white. I set the shotgun down and pulled her against me. She felt small, her back rounded, inside my arms.

"We've got a few hours," I said. "If we can't get her back in that time, I'm going to do what he wants and hope that he turns her loose. I'll bring the sheriff and the FBI in on it, too."

She stepped back from me and looked up into my face.

"Hope that he-" she said.

"Doucet's never left witnesses."

She wanted to come with us, but I left her on the gallery with Elrod, staring after us with her hands clenching and unclenching at her sides.

It was almost dark when we turned off the old two-lane highway onto the dirt road that led to Spanish Lake. The rain was falling in the trees and out on the lake and I could see the lights burning in one trailer under the hanging moss by the water's edge. All the way out to the lake Rosie had barely spoken, her small hands folded on top of her purse, the shadows washing across her face like rivulets of rain.