He pulled the radio mike free of its holder, called dispatch, and, identifying himself as Stokes, asked to be patched through to One Able Charlie. The seconds ticked past, each one seeming longer than the last.

"Detective?" the dispatcher came back. "One Able Charlie is not responding. According to the log that unit is off duty."

Nick hung up the mike and started the truck. If Annie was off duty and her Jeep was still in the lot at the station, then where the hell was she?

And where the hell was Renard?

Leaning her head against the side window, Annie tried to fight off a wave of nausea as Doll put the Cadillac in gear and it lurched forward. As they passed the vacant lot adjacent to Po' Richard's, Annie thought she caught a glimpse of Marcus's smiling white mask in the darkness, laughing at her.

They crossed France a block above the party. The color and lights glared in the distance, then vanished. Annie groaned a little as the car turned right, the change of direction exacerbating her dizziness. She wondered what the poison was, wondered if there was an antidote, wondered if the blundering morons in the Our Lady lab would be able to figure any of it out before she died a horrible, agonizing death.

She told herself not to panic. Marcus couldn't have foreseen the events of the evening. He wouldn't have planned for her absolute rejection of him. If he followed his own pattern, he had probably intended only to make her ill so that he could then later offer her comfort. That was his pattern.

The business district gave way to residences. Blocks of small, neat ranch-style houses, many with a homemade shrine to the Virgin Mary in the front yard. Old claw-foot bathtubs had been cut in half and planted on end in the ground to form grottos for totems of Mary. The totems were mass-produced in a town not far from Bayou Breaux, and lay stacked like cordwood in the manufacturing yard beside the railroad tracks. Having seen that took away some of the mystique, Annie thought, her brain waves fracturing.

They should be at the hospital soon. The old grounds-keeper would be scrubbing the toes of the giant Virgin Mary statue with a toothbrush.

"I appreciate this, Mizzuz Renard," she said. "I'll call the sheriff from the hospital. He'll come and pick yyyou up. Youuu did the right thing co-ming to mmme."

"I know. I had to. I couldn't let it go on," Doll said. "I could see it happening all over again. Marcus becoming infatuated with you. You-a woman who would never have him. A woman who wants only to take my son from me and put him into prison-or worse. I can't let that happen. My boys are all I have."

She turned and looked straight at Annie as they passed the turnoff for Our Lady of Mercy. The hate in her eyes seemed to glow red in the light of the dashboard.

"No one takes my boys away from me."

47

I'm on my way to hell.

Civilization passed behind them. The bayou country, ink black, vast and unwelcoming, stretched before them, a wilderness where violent death was the harsh reality of the day. Predator claimed prey here in an endless, bloody cycle, and no survivor mourned the demise of the less fortunate. Only the strong survived.

Annie had never felt weaker in her life. The nausea came in waves. The dizziness wouldn't abate. Her perceptions were beginning to distort. Sound seemed to come to her down a long tunnel. The world around her looked liquid and animated. Had to have been something in the coffee, she decided, something strong.

She tried to focus her eyes on the woman across the width of the big car. Doll Renard appeared elongated and so thin she could have been made of sticks. She didn't look as if she could have possessed the physical strength for violent rage. But Annie reminded herself that Doll Renard was younger than she looked, stronger than she looked. She was also a murderer. The frail, frumpy facade was as much a mask as the sequined domino that lay on the seat between them.

"Yyyou killed Pam? You diiid those things to Pam?" Annie said in disbelief, the gruesome images of the crime scene photos flashing through her mind, bright and bloody. She had dismissed the possibility of a woman perpetrator almost out of hand. Women didn't kill that way-with brutality, with cruelty, with hatred for their own gender.

"She got what she deserved, the whore," Doll said bitterly. "Men panting after her like dogs after a bitch in heat."

"My God," Annie breathed. "But yyyou had to know Mmmarcus would be a sssuspect."

"But Marcus didn't kill her," Doll reasoned. "He's innocent-of murder, at least. I watched him become obsessed with her," she said with disgust. "Just like with that Ingram woman. It didn't matter to him that she didn't want him. He gets these things in his head, and there's no getting them out. I tried. I tried to make her stop him, but he couldn't believe she would try to have him arrested. Her fear only seemed to draw him toward her."

"Yyyou were the one… behiind the stalking?"

"She would have taken him away from me-one way or the other."

And so Doll had stabbed to death, crucified, and mutilated Pam Bichon. To end the obsession that had taken her son's attention away from her.

"I knew the police would question him, of course," she went on. "That was his punishment for trying to betray me. I thought it would teach him a lesson."

Annie tried to swallow. Her reflexes had gone dull. Slowly she inched her right hand along the armrest, fingertips feeling for the butt of the Sig. The gun was gone. Doll had to have lifted it when she had been "helping" Annie into the car, buckling her safely into the passenger's seat.

She glanced in the rearview, hoping against hope to see lights on their tail, but the night closed in behind them, and the swamp stretched out in front of them. Plenty of places to dump a body in the swamp.

The drug pulled at her, dragging her toward unconsciousness.

"Hhhow did yyou get Pam… to the house?" she asked, forcing her brain to stay engaged. She couldn't save herself if she wasn't conscious, and no one else was going to do it for her. Shifting her weight, she brought her right arm across her stomach and groaned, surreptitiously moving her fingertips onto the release button of her seat belt.

"It was pathetically easy. I called her under a false name and asked her to show the property to me," Doll said, smiling at her own cleverness. "Greedy little bitch. She wanted everything-money, beauty, men. She would have taken my son away from me, and she didn't even want him."

It had been as simple as a phone call. Pam wouldn't have thought twice about meeting an older woman to show a rural property, even at night. Her problems had all been with men-or so she had thought. So they all had thought. Fourcade had been right all along: The trail, the logic, led back to Renard. He just hadn't realized which Renard. No one had given a second thought to Marcus Renard's flighty, strident mother.

And now that woman is going to kill me. The thought swept around inside Annie's mind like a cyclone. She thought she could see the letters of the sentence floating in the air. She had to do something. Soon. Before the drug pulled her all the way under.

"You're no better," Doll said. "Marcus wants you. He can't see you're an enemy. His desire for you takes him away from me. I tried to make you stop him from wanting you. Just like I did with that Bichon woman."

"Youuu were in the carrr that night. You came tooo my house," Annie said, the puzzle pieces floating up to the surface of her brain. She envisioned them rising up through the goo, sticky and wet with blood. "How did youuu… get in? Hooow did you know… about the ssstairs?"