"Hey, Broussard! You're assaulting an officer!"

The shout came from the road. Mullen. He had parked on the shoulder-a piece-of-crap Chevy truck with a bass boat dragging behind. Encased in tight jeans, his legs were skinny as an egret's. He compensated with a puffed-up green satin baseball jacket.

"She claims there's a copperhead in there," York said, hooking a thumb at the Jeep.

"Yeah, like he doesn't already know that," Annie snapped.

Mullen made a face at her. "There you go again. Hysterical. Paranoid. Maybe you need to get your hormones adjusted, Broussard."

"Fuck you."

"Oooh, verbal abuse, assaulting an officer, reckless driving…" He swaggered around to the passenger side to look in the window. "Maybe she's drunk, York. You better put her through the paces."

"The hell you will." Annie rounded the hood. "Keying me out on the radio was bad enough, and I can take the crap at the station, but somebody other than me could have gotten killed with this stunt. If I can find one scrap of evidence linking you to this-"

"Don't threaten me, Broussard."

"It's not a threat, it's a promise."

He sniffed the air. "I think I smell whiskey. You better run her in, York. The stress must be getting to you, Broussard. Drinking in the morning on your way to work. That's a shame."

York looked apprehensive. "I didn't smell anything."

"Well, Christ," Mullen snapped. "She's seeing snakes and driving off the damn road. Tag the vehicle and take her in!"

Annie planted her hands on her hips. "I'm not going anywhere until you get that snake out of my Jeep."

"Resisting," Mullen added to her list of sins.

"I think we'd better go in to the station to sort this out, Annie," York said, straining to look apologetic.

He reached for her arm and she yanked it away. There was no out. York couldn't let her get back into her vehicle if there was a question of her sobriety, and she'd be damned if she was going to go through the drunk drill for them like a trick poodle.

"Uh-I think you better sit in the back," he said as she reached for the passenger-side door on his cruiser.

Annie bit her tongue. At least she had driven Fourcade to the station in her own vehicle, calling as little attention to the situation as possible. No one was going to offer her the same courtesy.

"I need my duffel bag," she said. "My weapon is in it. And I want that Jeep locked up."

She watched as he went back into the ditch and said something to Mullen. York went around to the driver's side and pulled the keys, while Mullen opened the passenger's door, hauled her duffel out, then bent back into the vehicle. When he emerged again, he had hold of the writhing snake just behind its head. It looked nearly four feet in length, big enough, though copperheads in this part of the country regularly grew bigger. Mullen said something to York and they both laughed, then Mullen swung the snake around in a big loop and let it fly into a field of sugarcane.

"Just a king snake!" he shouted up at Annie as he came toward the car with her bag. "Copperhead! You must be drunk, Broussard. You don't know one snake from the next."

"I wouldn't say that," Annie shot back. "I know what kind of snake you are, Mullen."

And she stewed on it all the way in to Bayou Breaux.

Hooker was in no mood for dealing with the aftermath of a practical joke, malicious or otherwise. He ranted and swore from the moment York escorted her into the building, directing his wrath at Annie.

"Every time I turn around, you're in the middle of a shit pile, Broussard. I've about had it up to my gonads with you."

"Yes, sir."

"You got some kind of brain disorder or something? Deputies are supposed to be out arresting crooks, not each other."

"No, sir."

"We never had this kind of trouble when it was just men around here. Throw a female into the mix and suddenly everybody's got some kind of hard-on."

Annie refrained from pointing out that she'd been on the job here two years and had never had any trouble to speak of until now. They stood inside Hooker's office, which a maintenance person had painted chartreuse while Hooker was gone having angioplasty in January. The perpetrator of that joke had yet to come forward. The door stood wide open, allowing anyone within earshot to listen to the diatribe. Annie held on to the hope that this would be the last of the humiliation. She could weather the storm. Hooker would eventually run out of insults or have a stroke, and then she could go out on patrol.

"I've had it, Broussard. I'm tellin' you right now." From somewhere down the hall came another raised voice. "What do you mean, you can't find it?" Annie recognized Smith Pritchett's nasal whine. Dispatch was down the hall. What would Pritchett want from them? What would Pritchett want badly enough to come in on a Saturday?

"Y'all are telling me you keep these 911 tapes for-frigging-ever, but you don't have the one tape from the night of Fourcade's arrest?"

A pulsing vein zigzagged across Pritchett's broad forehead like a lightning bolt. He stood in the hall outside the dispatch center in a lime green Izod shirt, khakis, and golf spikes, a nine iron in hand.

The woman on the other side of the counter crossed her arms. "Yessir, that's what I'm tellin' you. Are you callin' me a liar?"

Pritchett stared at her, then wheeled on A.J. "Where the hell is Noblier? I told you to call him."

"He's on his way," A.J. promised. Bad enough that Pritchett had sent him on this quest on Saturday morning-a surprise attack, he called it-now they could all have a knock-down-drag-out brawl besides. He bet his money on the dispatch supervisor. Even though Pritchett was armed, she had to outweigh him by eighty pounds.

He would have saved the news that the tape was missing, but Pritchett was like an overeager five-year-old at Christmas. He had called in on his cellular phone from the third tee. While Fourcade's lawyer had yet to submit a written account of his client's version of events, Noblier had stated the detective had been responding to a call of a possible prowler in the vicinity of Bowen amp; Briggs. A bald-faced lie, certainly. The 911 tapes would confirm it as such, and the dispatch center in the sheriff's office handled all 911 calls in the parish. But the 911 tape from that fateful night was suddenly nowhere to be found.

The door to the sheriff's office swung open, and Gus came into the hall in jeans and cowboy boots and a denim shirt, the pungent aroma of horses hanging on him like bad cologne. "Don't get your shorts in a knot, Smith. We'll find the damn tape. This is a busy place. Things get mislaid."

"Mislaid, my ass." Pritchett shook the nine iron at the sheriff. "There's no tape because there's no damn call on the tape referring to a prowler in the vicinity of Bowen and Briggs."

"Are you calling me a liar? After all the years I've backed you? You are a small, ungrateful man, Smith Pritchett. You don't believe me, you talk to my deputies on patrol that night. Ask them if they heard the call."

Pritchett rolled his eyes and started down the hall toward the sheriff, his spikes thundering on the hard floor. "I'm sure they'd tell me they heard the archangels singing Dixieland jazz if they thought it would get Fourcade off," he shouted above the racket. "It's a damn shame this has to come between us, Gus. You've got a bad apple in your barrel. Cut him out and be done with it."

Gus squinted at him. "Maybe the reason we don't have that tape is that Wily Tallant came and got it already. As exculpatory evidence."

"What?" Pritchett squealed. "You would just blithely hand something like that over to a defense attorney?"

Gus shrugged. "I'm not saying it happened. I'm saying it might have."