He turned his attention back to the News-Press articles. Spencer Duvall’s body had been found by his secretary, Eleanor Silvestri, when she came to work at eight A.M. the next morning. According to the medical examiner, Duvall had been shot once in the head, the time of death estimated around nine-thirty P.M. Duvall and his secretary had been alone in the office, working late, but she left at about nine. Jack Cade had visited Duvall’s office earlier in the day and been overheard making threats to the attorney.

Louis moved on to the most recent article about Cade’s arraignment. He paused, seeing Susan Outlaw’s name. She said she would not seek a change of venue, even given Cade’s history. “What happened twenty years ago has no bearing whatsoever on my client’s current legal situation,” she was quoted as saying.

Man, was this woman naive or just plain dumb?

There were other older articles about Spencer Duvall, including a feature that detailed his rise to one of the state’s highest-profile criminal lawyers, with an estimated net worth of 5.3 million. His professional style had earned him the nickname The Tortoise. He was plodding and thorough-and he never lost.

Finally, there was an old copy of Gulfshore Life. It was a heavy glossy that advertised itself as “The Magazine of Southwest Florida” but was more a bible of the good life, stuffed with ads for art galleries, plastic surgeons and financial advisers.

The magazine had an article about a renovation at the Thomas Edison House, led by the historical society. The Duvalls were mentioned as the project’s leading contributor, coughing up a cool quarter mil.

The librarian had also marked another page in the back. It was a society column called The Circuit, and it took Louis a minute to find the Duvalls in one of the color group photographs. It was one of those typical society snaps, a line-em-up-shoot-em-down, with the subjects posed, champagne glasses in hand, faces frozen in smiles.

It was a Christmas party of some kind, and there were eight people in the photograph, all in gowns and tuxes. He picked out Candace Duvall in the front-small, tanned and attractive with blond hair sleekly upswept, a big toothy smile, dressed in strapless red with diamonds at her neck and ears. Spencer Duvall towered at her side, a good-looking man of about forty-five, with thinning sandy hair over a wide forehead and intelligent dark eyes behind stylish wire-rimmed glasses. In contrast to his wife, he was somber, unsmiling. He looked more like a befuddled physics professor than a dogged defense attorney.

Louis set the articles aside and looked out to the gulf. The rain was letting up, the afternoon sun slanting low through a slit in the gray clouds. The odor of low tide hung in the air, that familiar brew of kelp, brine and rotting things.

Why was he doing this? He didn’t want this case. Why was he even reading these damn articles?

He felt something touch his bare ankles and looked down to see Issy staring up at him.

“What?” he said.

The cat didn’t move.

“Food? Is that it?” He pushed himself out of the chair and the cat followed him into the kitchen. He shook some Tender Vittles into a bowl on the floor. He leaned against the sink, thinking of Ronnie Cade, about what he had said about losing his father for twenty years.

Shit, at least Jack Cade was still alive.

The dampness was creeping through the cabin. Louis rubbed his hands over the thin cotton of his T-shirt. He went into the bedroom to get a sweatshirt.

At the dresser, he rummaged through the drawers until he found an old University of Michigan sweatshirt. He pulled it on. He was about to close the drawer when he paused.

The manila envelope was tucked under some old shirts. He had forgotten that he had put it there.

He pulled it out and undid the clasp. He upended the contents onto the top of the dresser. There were only a handful of photographs, a couple from college, a few of Phillip and Frances Lawrence, one of Bessie, the old woman who had rented him a room in Black Pool, Mississippi. A faded portrait of his mother when she was eighteen, a snapshot of his sister, Yolanda, and another of his brother, Robert.

Then, he found it. A small square in black and white, its edges pinked in the old style of the fifties. A white man, standing on a porch, wearing overalls and a straw hat that shielded his face. The image was blurred slightly, like the man had been moving just as the picture was snapped.

He hadn’t looked at the photograph in a long time, so long in fact that he half-expected the man in the picture to age. But he never did. He was always exactly the same.

Louis stared at his father, his thumb rubbing the slick surface.

Then he gathered up the photos and put them away. Going back to the kitchen, he scanned the counter and spotted the business card laying next to the phone.

He picked up the phone and dialed Ronnie Cade’s number.

Chapter Six

The sky was still bruised with clouds by the time Louis made his way across the causeway to Sereno Key. The Dodies lived on the key, so he knew his way around, and he headed the Mustang quickly through the small town center and up to the north end, looking for Mantanzas Trail. Sereno Key was a small island, comprised of trailer parks, marinas and neat little canal-laced retiree neighborhoods like where the Dodies lived. The key also was the home to half a dozen wholesale nurseries that grew native palms for the landscapers replanting the scorched-earth tract-home developments springing up around Fort Myers. There was a building boom going on in Southwest Florida, and money was being made digging up century-old oak trees and replacing them with scraggly palms.

But prosperity had apparently bypassed J.C. Landscape. The sign that greeted Louis outside the chain-link gate said WE MEET ALL YOUR LANDSCAPING NEEDS, but what he saw suggested Ronnie Cade’s business could barely meet its own.

The grounds, puddled from the rain, were dotted with scrubby palm trees and plats of plants struggling to stay upright. A five-foot pile of black plastic pots was heaped against a shed next to pallets of mulch rotting in their faded bags. A small tan and black dog was laying near the door, chained to the shed, and it raised its snout to sniff the air as Louis got out of the Mustang, then went back to sleep. The smell of gasoline and manure hung in the air.

Ronnie Cade had heard the Mustang’s door and came out of the shed, wiping his hands on a dirty rag.

“You found the place,” Ronnie said.

“It wasn’t hard.” Louis looked around. There was a double-wide trailer parked behind the shed. It was fronted by a small concrete patio that held a barbecue grill and some plastic chairs clustered around an old wooden electrical spool. Huge purple thunderheads were piling up again in the west.

“You have a lot of land here,” Louis said.

Ronnie squinted out over the grounds. “Yeah, ten acres,” he said flatly. “Come on inside. We can talk while I finish up.”

Louis followed, stepping over the comatose dog. Inside, it was cool and smelled of cut grass. The shed was filled with bags of fertilizer, compost, power mowers, edgers and other gardening tools. Ronnie went to a workbench, where the guts of a gas-powered leaf blower lay exposed under the glare of a florescent light.

“I was surprised when you called,” Ronnie said, picking up a screwdriver. “I thought when I didn’t hear from you, you decided to blow me off.”

“I went and saw your father,” Louis said.

Ronnie turned to look at him, but then went back to poking the screwdriver in the blower. “So?”

“He didn’t give me any compelling reason to take your case.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“Maybe you can.”

“Can what?”