"I don't read it that way."

"They say you gave him a pretty bad time in a Baton Rouge restaurant."

"I had five minutes' conversation with him. I didn't see anything that unusual in it, considering the fact that I think he's involved with a murder."

"This is another thing that bothers me, Dave. We don't have any evidence that Earl is connected with Garrett's death. But you seem determined to tie Earl to it."

"Should I leave him alone?" I looked him straight in the face.

"I didn't say that. I'm just asking you to look at your motivations."

"I want-" He saw the heat in my face.

"What?" he asked.

"I want to turn the key on the people who killed Garrett. It's that simple, sheriff."

"Sometimes we have an agenda we don't tell ourselves about. It's just human."

"Maybe it's time somebody 'fronts a guy like Earl. Maybe he's gotten a free pass too long."

"You're going to have to ease up, Dave, or it'll be out of my hands."

"He's got that kind of juice?"

"No, he doesn't. But if you try to shave the dice, you'll give it to him. You got into it at his house, then you created a situation with him in a public place. I don't want a suit filed against this department, I don't want a couple of peckerwood politicians telling me I've got a rogue cop on my hands. It's time to take your foot off the accelerator, Dave."

My palms were ringing with anger.

"You think I'm being too hard on you?" he asked.

"You have to do what you think is right."

"You're probably the best cop we ever had in this department. Don't walk out of here thinking my opinion is otherwise, Dave. But you've got a way of kicking it up into overdrive."

"Then the bottom line is we're cutting Bobby Earl some slack."

"You once told me the best pitch in baseball is a change of pace. Why not ease up on the batter and see what happens?"

"Ease up on the wrong guy and he'll drill a hole in your sternum with it."

He turned his hands up on the blotter.

"I tried," he said, and smiled.

When I left the room, the back of my neck felt as though someone had held a lighted match to it.

Drew answered her door in a print sundress covered with yellow flowers. Her tan shoulders were spotted with freckles the size of pennies. Even though her left hand was swathed in bandages as thick as a boxing glove, she had put on eye shadow, lipstick, and dangling earrings set with scarlet stones, and she looked absolutely stunning as she stood with one plump hip pressed against the door jam.

I had called fifteen minutes earlier.

"I don't want to keep you if you're on your way out, Drew," I said.

"No, it's fine. Let's sit on the porch. I fixed some tea with mint leaves in it."

"I just need to look around back."

"What for?"

"I might have missed something when I was out before."

"I thought you might like some tea."

"Thanks just the same."

"I appreciated the flowers."

"What flowers?"

"The ones you sent up to my hospital room with the Amnesty International card. One of the pink ladies saw you buy them."

"She must have been mistaken."

"I wanted to act nice toward you."

"I need to look around back. If you don't want to give me your permission, I have to get a warrant."

"Who lit your fuse today?"

"The law's impersonal sometimes."

"You think I'm trying to get you in the sack?"

"Give it a break, Drew."

"No, give me an honest answer. You think I'm all heated up for you, that I'm going to walk you into my bedroom and ruin your marriage? Do you think your old girlfriends are lining up to ruin your marriage?"

"Can I go in back?"

She put her good hand on her hip. Her chest swelled with her breathing.

"What do you think you'll find that no one else did?" she asked.

"I'm not sure."

"Whose side are you on, Dave? Why do you have to spend so much time and effort on me and Weldon? Do you have any doubt at all that an animal like Joey Gouza belongs in jail? Of all the people in the parish, why are you the only one who keeps turning the screws on us? Have you asked yourself that?"

"Should I go after the warrant?"

"No," she said quietly. "Look anywhere you want to… You're a strange man. You understand principle, but I wonder how well you understand pain in other people."

"That's a rotten thing to say."

"No, you're not going to get away with that, Drew. If you and Weldon weren't my friends, both of you would have been in jail a long time ago for obstruction of justice."

"I guess we're very fortunate to have a friend such as you. I'm going to shut the door now. I really wish you had had some tea. I was looking forward to it."

"Listen, Drew-"

She closed the door softly in my face, then I heard her turn the bolt in the lock.

I went back to my truck, took a screwdriver and three big Ziploc bags off the seat, and walked through the side yard to the gazebo. The latticework was thick with bugle and grapevine, and the myrtle bushes planted around the base were in full purple flower. I knelt down in the moist dirt and probed through the bushes until I found the two pieces of brick I had seen previously. I dropped them both in a plastic bag, then found the broken slat from an apple crate and picked it up carefully by the edges. There was a split from the top down to a nail hole in the center of the slat. I turned it over between my fingers. Even in the deep shade I could see a dark smear around the hold on the opposite side. I slipped the slat into another bag and worked my way back out of the myrtle bushes onto the grass.

I glanced behind me and saw her face at a window. Then it disappeared behind a curtain.

Each of the steps on the gazebo had been carpentered with a two-inch gap between the horizontal and perpendicular boards. I tried looking through the openings into the darkness below the gazebo but could see nothing. I used the screwdriver to unfasten a section of latticework at the bottom of the gazebo and lifted it out with my fingers. It was moist and cool inside and smelled of standing water and pack-rat nests. I reached underneath the steps and touched the cold metal head of a ball-peen hammer.

I wondered if she had tried to remove it before I had arrived. I worked it out from under the steps with the screwdriver and carefully fitted it into the third plastic bag, then walked up to the screened-in porch on the side of the house.

When she didn't answer, I banged louder with the side of my fist against the wall.

"What is it?" she said, jerking open the door, her face pinched with both anger and defeat.

I let her take a hard look at the two broken bricks, the split apple-box slat, and the ball-peen hammer.

"I'm going to tell you a speculation or two, Drew, but I don't want you to say anything unless you're willing to have it used against you later. Do you understand that?"

Her mouth was a tight line, and I could see her pulse beating in her neck.

"Do you understand me, Drew? I don't want you to say anything to me unless you're completely aware of the jeopardy it might put you in. Are we perfectly understood on that?"

"Yes," she said, and her voice almost broke in her throat.

"You punched the nail through the slat, and you laid the slat across the two bricks. Then you put your hand under the nail and drove it all the way through into the step. The pain must have been terrible, but before you passed out, you splintered the slat away from the nail and shoved it and the bricks into the myrtle bushes. Then you pushed the hammer through the gap in the step."

Her eyes were filming.

"Your prints are probably all over the bricks and the slat, but that won't mean anything in itself," I said. "But I have a feeling there won't be any prints on the hammer except yours. That one might be hard to explain, particularly if there are blood traces on the hammer and we know for sure it's the one that was used to drive the nail into the gazebo floor."