Ladice Hulin, Tee Bobby's grandmother, sat in a wicker chair on her gallery, her thick gray hair hanging below her shoulders, her hands folded on the crook of a walking cane.

I got out of the cruiser and walked into the yard. Three uniformed deputies and a plainclothes detective were in back, raking garbage out of an old trash pit. As a young woman, Ladice had been absolutely beautiful, and even though age had robbed her in many ways, it had not diminished her femininity, and her skin still had the smoothness and luster of chocolate. She didn't ask me onto the gallery.

"They tear up your house, Miss Ladice?" I said.

She continued to look at me without speaking. Her eyes had the clarity, the deepness, the unblinking fixed stare of a deer's.

"Is your grandson inside?" I asked.

"He didn't come home after y'all turned him loose. Y'all put the fear of God in him, if that make you feel good," she replied.

"We tried to help him. He chose not to cooperate. He also showed no feeling at all over the rape and murder of an innocent young girl," I said.

She wore a white cotton dress with a gold chain and religious medal around her neck. A perforated gold-plated dime hung from another chain on her anklebone.

"No feeling, huh?" Then she brushed at the air and said, "Go on, go on, take care of your bidness and be done. The grave's waiting for me. I just wish I didn't have to deal with so many fools befo' I get there."

"I always respected you, Miss Ladice," I said.

She put one hand on the arm of her chair and pushed herself erect.

"He's gonna run from you. He's gonna sass you. It's 'cause he's a scared li'l boy inside. Don't hurt him just 'cause he's scared, no," she said.

I started to speak, but Helen touched me on the arm. The plainclothes in back was waving at us, a dirty black watch cap on a stick in his right hand.

CHAPTER 3

One week later an assistant district attorney, Barbara Shanahan, sometimes known as Battering Ram Shanahan, came into my office without knocking. She was a statuesque, handsome woman, over six feet tall, with white skin and red hair and green eyes. She wore white hose and horn-rim glasses and a pale orange suit and a white blouse, and she seldom passed men anywhere that they did not turn and look at her. But her face always seemed enameled with anger, without cause, her manner as sharp as razor wire. Her dedication to destroying criminals and defense attorneys was legendary. However, the reason for that dedication was a matter of conjecture.

I looked up from the newspaper that was spread on my desk.

"Excuse me for not getting up. I didn't hear you knock," I said.

"I need everything you have on the Amanda Boudreau investigation," she said.

"It's not complete."

"Then give me what you have and update me on a daily basis."

"You caught the case?" I asked.

She sat down across from me. She looked at the tiny gold watch on her wrist, then back at me. "Is it always necessary that I say everything twice to you?" she said.

"The forensics just came in on the watch cap we dug up at Tee Bobby's place. The rouge and skin oils came off Amanda Boudreau," I said.

"Good, let's cut the warrant." As she got up to go, her eyes paused on mine. "Something wrong?"

"This one doesn't hang together."

"The victim's DNA is on the suspect's clothes? His prints are on a beer can at the murder scene? But you have doubts about what occurred?"

"The semen on the girl wasn't Tee Bobby's. The man who called in the 'shots fired' said there were three people in the car. But Amanda's boyfriend said only two men accosted him. Where was the other one? The boyfriend said he was tied up with a T-shirt. Why didn't he try to get away?"

"I have no idea. Why don't you find out?" she said.

I hesitated before I spoke again. "I have another problem. I can't see Tee Bobby as a killer."

"Maybe it's because you want it both ways," she said.

"Excuse me?"

"Some people always need to feel good about themselves, usually at the expense of others. In this case at the expense of a dead girl who was raped while she had a sock stuffed down her throat."

I folded my newspaper and dropped it in the trash can.

"Perry LaSalle is representing Tee Bobby," I said.

"So?"

I got up from my chair and closed the Venetian blinds on the corridor windows.

"You hate the LaSalles, Barbara. I think you asked for this case," I said.

"I don't have any feeling about the LaSalle family one way or another."

"Your grandfather went to prison for old man Julian. That's how he got his job as a security guard on LaSalle's bridge."

"Have the paperwork in my office by close of business. In the meantime, if you ever impugn my motives as a prosecutor again, I'll take you into civil court and fry your sorry ass for slander."

She threw the door open and marched down the corridor toward the sheriff's office. A uniformed cop watched her sideways while he drank from the water fountain, his eyes glued on her posterior. He grinned sheepishly when he saw me looking at him.

It was Friday afternoon and I didn't want to think anymore about Barbara Shanahan or a young girl who had probably been forced to stare into the barrel of a shotgun and wait helplessly while her executioner decided whether or not to pull the trigger.

I drove south of town, down a dusty road, along a tree-lined waterway, to the house built by my father during the Depression. The sunlight looked like yellow smoke in the canopy of the live oaks, and up ahead I saw the dock and bait shop that I operated as a part-time business and a lavender Cadillac convertible parked by the boat ramp, which meant that my old Homicide partner, the bane of NOPD, the good-natured, totally irresponsible, fiercely loyal Clete Purcel, was back in New Iberia.

He had dumped his cooler on a bait table at the end of the dock and was gutting a stringer of ice-flecked sac-a-lait and bream and big-mouth bass with a long, razor-edged knife that had no guard on the handle. He wore only a pair of baggy shorts and flip-flops and a Marine Corps utility cap. His whole body was oily with lotion and baked with sunburn, his body hair matted in gold curlicues on his massive arms and shoulders.

I parked my pickup truck in the driveway to the house and walked across the road and down the dock, where Clete was now scaling his fish with a tablespoon and washing them under a faucet and placing them on a clean layer of ice in his cooler.

"It looks like you had a pretty good day," I said. "If I can use your shower, I'll take you and Bootsie and Alafair to Bon Creole." He picked up a salted can of beer off the dock rail and watched me over the bottom of it while he drank. His hair was bleached by the sun, his green eyes happy, one eyebrow cut by a scar that ran across the bridge of his nose.

"You just here for a fishing trip?" I asked. "I got a shitload of bail slaps to pick up for Nig and Willie. Plus Nig may have written a bond on a serial killer."

I was tired and didn't want to hear about Clete's ongoing grief as a bounty hunter for Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine. I tried to look attentive, but my gaze started to wander toward the house, the baskets of impa-tiens swaying under the eaves of the gallery, my wife, Bootsie, weeding the hydrangea bed in the shade.

"You listening?'' Clete said.

"Sure," I replied.

"So this is how we heard about the serial sex predator or killer or whatever the hell he is. No Duh Dolowitz got nailed trying to creep Fat Sammy Figorelli's skin parlor, but this time Nig says he's had it with No Duh and his half-baked capers, like putting dog shit in the sandwiches at a Teamsters convention or impersonating a chauffeur and driving away with the Calucci family's limo.