19

They ate. Stir-fried vegetables and brown rice. No meat. Odd that a man who chain-smoked would be a vegetarian, but Annie knew that she would have to become desensitized to Fourcade's contradictions. To expect the unexpected seemed a wise course, though one not easily settled into.

"You had two years at college. Why'd you quit?" he demanded, stabbing his fork into his dinner. He ate the way he did everything-with vehemence and no wasted movement.

"They wanted me to declare a major." She felt uncomfortable with the idea that he had raided her personnel file. "It seemed… restrictive. I was interested in lots of things."

"Lack of focus."

"Curiosity," she retorted. "I thought you liked my inquisitive nature."

"You need discipline."

"Look who's talking." Annie frowned at him, pushing her rice around with her fork. "What happened to your Taoist principles of nonresistant existence?"

"Often incompatible with police work. With regards to religions, I take what's useful to me and apply it where appropriate. Why did you become a cop?"

"I like helping people. It's different every day. I like solving mysteries. I get to drive a hot car. How about you?"

Words like power and control came to mind, but those were not the words he gave her.

"It's factual, logical, essential. I believe in justice. I believe in the struggle for the greater good. I believe the collective evil metastasizes with malignancies in the souls of individuals."

"So it wasn't just the cool uniforms?"

Fourcade looked bemused.

"You enrolled in the academy in August '93," he said. "Just after the whole Bayou Strangler thing. Connection?"

"You know so much about me-you tell me."

He ignored the suggestion of affront in her voice. He made no apologies for overstepping a boundary. "You went to school with the fifth victim, Annick Delahoussaye-Gerrard. You were friends?"

"Yeah, we were friends," she said.

She took her plate to the sink and stood looking out the window, seeing nothing. Night had wrapped itself around the house. Fourcade had no yard light. Of course he wouldn't. Fourcade would be one with the dark.

"We were best friends when we were little," she said. "The families called us the Two Annies. But, you know, we grew apart, ran with different crowds. Her folks ran a bar- it's the Voodoo Lounge now. They sold out after Annick was killed.

"I ran into her maybe a month before it happened. She was waitressing at the bar. She was getting divorced. I told her she should come up to Lafayette for a weekend, that we'd catch up and have some fun. But you know, that weekend never came. I suppose I didn't really mean for it to. We didn't have much in common anymore. Anyway, then came the news… and then the funeral."

Nick watched her reflection in the window. "Why do you think it hit you so hard if you'd grown so far apart?"

"I don't know."

"Yes, you do."

She was silent for a moment. He waited. The answer lay within her grasp. She didn't want to reach for it.

"We were two sides of the same coin once," she said at last. "A flip of the coin, a twist of fate…"

"It could have been you."

"Sure, why not?" she said. "You know, you read about a crime in the paper and you think how terrible for the victims, and then you turn the page and move on. It's so different when you know the people. The press called her by name for a week, then she became Victim Number Five and they were on to the next big headline. I saw what that crime did to her family, to her friends. I started thinking it would be good to try to make a difference for people like the Delahoussayes."

Nick got up from the table and brought his plate to the sink to nest with hers. "That's a good reason, 'Toinette. Honor, social responsibility."

"Don't forget the hot car."

"That's unnecessary."

"The car?"

"The mask you wear," he said. "The effort you go to hide the truth beneath layers of insignificant mannerisms and humor. It's a waste of energy."

Annie shook her head. "It's called having a personality. You oughta try it sometime. I'm betting it would improve your social life."

The retort was made an instant before she realized what he had really said-that he lived with the protective pretenses stripped away from his soul; his needs, his thoughts, his feelings lay like raw and exposed nerve endings. She would never have thought of him as vulnerable, knew he would never think of himself as such. How strange to see him that way. She wasn't sure it was something she wanted to see.

"A waste of time," he said again, turning away. "We've got a job to do. Let's get to it."

He had turned the grenier, the loft that made up the second half-story of the house, into a study. The bed tucked into the far corner seemed like an afterthought, a grudging concession to the occasional need for sleep. A masculine place, with heavy wood furnishings, and an almost monkish quality in its sense of order. The bookcases were lined with tides, hundreds of books shelved by subject in alphabetical order. Criminology, philosophy, psychology, religion. Everything from aberrant behavior to the mysteries of Zen.

A ten-foot-long table held the reams of paperwork the Bichon homicide had generated. Photocopies of every statement, every lab report. Numbered binders filled with Fourcade's notes. A bulletin board behind the table held maps: one of a three-parish area, one of Partout Parish, one of the immediate Bayou Breaux area including the murder scene and Renard's home. Red pins marked significant sites. Fine red lines drawn between sites were annotated with exact mileage.

A second bulletin board held copies of the crime scene photos-stark, hard reality cast in the harsh light of a camera flash.

"Wow," Annie murmured. "I guess you believe in bringing your work home with you."

"It's a duty, not a hobby." He stood in front of one of the bookcases. "You want a time clock and no worries, get a job at the lamp factory. You want to pass the buck on the tough stuff, stay in uniform." He hit her with the Hard Stare. "Is that what you want, 'Toinette? You wanna stay on the surface where everything is simple and safe, or do you want to go deeper?"

Once again she had the feeling he was the guardian at the gate of some secret world, that if she crossed the threshold, there would be no going back. She resented the idea.

"I want to be a detective," she said. "I want to help clear this case. I'm not pledging my allegiance to the Dark Lord or becoming a Jedi knight. I want to do the job, not be the job."

That was Fourcade, the Zen detective. Disapproval hung on him like mist.

"It's a job, not a religion," Annie said. "You were born out of your time, Fourcade. You'd have made a hell of a Zealot."

Her gaze shifted to the table, to the bulletin board and the pictures of Pam Bichon's grisly death. She wanted Fourcade's resources. She didn't have to embrace his doctrine of obsessive-compulsive behavior.

"I want this solved," she said. "End of story."

She selected Donnie Bichon's file folder and opened it.

"Why did you go to him?" Fourcade asked. "We looked at him and cleared him."

"Because Lindsay Faulkner says he's fixing to sell Pam's half of the realty business."

The news hit Nick like a rock to the chest. He had taunted Donnie with the idea just yesterday, never imagining the man would be fool enough to make such a move so soon after Pam's death. "When did you hear this?"

"This morning. I stopped by the realty office." She hesitated, weighing the pros and cons of telling the whole truth.

"You stopped by and what?" he demanded. "If we're partners, we're partners, chère. No holding back."

She took a deep breath as she set the file aside. "She said Donnie claims he has a possible buyer on the hook… in New Orleans. Donnie told me it was a bluff."