"Belle!" the lawyer whined as he caught up with his client. "I told you, you hadn't ought to say that in front of people!"

"Oh, for God's sake, Thomas. My daughter has been murdered. People would think it strange if I didn't say these things."

"We're doing the best we can, Mrs. Davidson," Annie said.

"And what have you come up with? Nothing. You're a disgrace to your uniform-when you're wearing one."

She gave Annie's faded T-shirt a sharply dubious look that had likely sent many a Junior Leaguer home in tears.

"I'm not working your daughter's case, ma'am. It's up to Detectives Fourcade and Stokes."

Belle Davidson's expression only hardened. "Don't make excuses, Deputy. We all have obligations in this life that go beyond boundaries. You found my daughter's body. You saw what-" She cut herself off, glancing down at Josie. When she turned back to Annie, her dark eyes glittered with tears. "You know. How can you turn your back on that?

How can you turn your back on that and still show your face to my granddaughter?"

"It's not Annie's fault, Grandma," Josie said, though the gaze she lifted to Annie's face was tainted with disappointment.

"Don't say that, Josie," Belle admonished softly as she slipped an arm around her granddaughter's shoulders and pulled her close. "That's what's wrong with the world today. No one will take responsibility for anything."

"I want justice, too, Mrs. Davidson," Annie said. "But it has to happen within the system."

"Deputy, the only thing we've gotten within the system so far is injustice."

As they walked away, Josie looked back over her shoulder, her brown eyes huge and sad. For an instant Annie felt as if she were watching herself walking away into the painful haze of her past, the memory pulling out from the core of her like a string.

"What happened, Tante Fanchon? Where's Mama?"

"Your maman, she's in heaven, ma 'tite fille."

"But why?"

"It was an accident, chérie. God, He looked away."

"I don't understand."

"Non, chère 'tite bete. Someday. When you get older…"

But she had hurt right then, and promises of later had done nothing to soothe the pain.

3

"We'll get him one way or another, Slick."

Fourcade cast Chaz Stokes a glance out the corner of his eye as he raised his glass. "There's plenty of people who think we already tried 'another.' "

"Fuck 'em," Stokes declared, and tossed back a shot. He stacked the glass on the bar with the half dozen others they had accumulated. "We know Renard's our man. We know what he did. The little motherfucker is wrong. You know it and I know it, my friend. Am I right or am I right?"

He clamped a hand on Fourcade's shoulder, a buddy gesture that was met with a stony look. Camaraderie was the rule in police work, but Fourcade didn't have the time or the energy to waste on it. His focus was, by necessity, on his caseload and himself-getting himself back on the straight and narrow path he had fallen from in New Orleans.

"The state ought to plug his dick into a socket and light him up like a goddamn Christmas tree," Stokes muttered. "Instead, the judge lets him walk on a fucking technicality, and Pritchett throws Davidson in the can. The world's a fucking loony bin, but I guess you already knew that."

Par for the damn course, Nick thought, but he kept it to himself, choosing to treat Stokes's invitation to share as a rhetorical remark. He didn't talk about his days in the NOPD or the incident that had ultimately forced him out of New Orleans. As far as he had ever seen, the truth was of little interest to most people, anyway. They chose to form their opinions based on whatever sensational tidbit of a story took their fancy. The fact that he had been the one to find Pamela Bichon's small amethyst ring, for instance.

He wondered if anyone would have suspected Chaz Stokes of planting the ring, had Stokes been the one to discover it. Stokes had come to Bayou Breaux from somewhere in Crackerland, Mississippi, four years ago, a regular Joe with no past to speak of. If Stokes had found the ring, would the focus now be solely on the injustice of Renard walking free, or would the waters of public opinion have been muddied anyway? Lawyers had a way of stirring up the muck like catfish caught in the shallows, and Richard Kudrow was kingfish of that particular school of bottom feeders.

Nick had to think Kudrow would have cast aspersions on the evidence regardless of who had recovered it. He didn't want to think that his finding it had tainted it, didn't want to think that his presence on the case would block Pam Bichon from getting justice.

Didn't want to think. Period.

Stokes poured another shot from the bottle of Wild Turkey. Nick tossed it back and lit another cigarette. The television hanging in one corner of the dimly lit lounge was showing a sitcom to a small, disinterested audience of businessmen who had come in from the hotel next door to bullshit over chunky glasses of Johnnie Walker and Cajun Chex mix served in plastic ashtrays.

There were no other customers, which was why Stokes had suggested this place over the usual cop hangouts. Nick would have sooner done his brooding in private. He didn't want questions. He didn't want commiseration. He didn't want to rehash the day's events. But Stokes was his partner on the Bichon case, and so Nick made this concession-to pound down a few together, as if they had something more in common than the job.

He shouldn't have been drinking at all. It was one of the vices he had tried to leave in New Orleans, but it and some others had trailed after him to Bayou Breaux like stray dogs. He should have been home working through the intricate and consuming moves of the Tai Chi, attempting to cleanse his mind, to focus the negative energy and burn it out. Instead, he sat here at Laveau's, stewing in it.

The whiskey simmered in his belly and in his veins, and he decided he was just about past caring where he was. Well on his way toward oblivion, he thought. And he'd be damn glad when he got there. It was the one place he might not see Pam Bichon lying dead on the floor.

"I still think about what he did to her," Stokes murmured, fingers absently peeling away strips of the label from his beer bottle. "Don't you?"

Day and night. During consciousness and what passed for sleep. The images stayed with him. The paleness of her skin. The wounds: gruesome, hideous, so at odds with what she had been like in life. The expression in her eyes as she stared up through the mask-stark, hopeless, filled with a kind of terror that couldn't be imagined by anyone who hadn't faced a brutal death.

And when the images came to him, so did the sense of violence that must have been thick in the air at the time of her death. It hit him like a wall of sound, intense, powerful, poisonous rage that left him feeling sick and shaken.

Rage was no stranger. It boiled inside him now.

"I think about what she went through," Stokes said. "What she must have felt when she realized… what he did to her with that knife. Christ." He shook his head as if to shake loose the images taking root there. "He's gotta pay for that, man, and without that ring we got shit for a bill. He's gonna walk, Nicky. He's gonna get away with murder."

People did. Every day. Every day the line was crossed and souls disappeared into the depths of an alternate dimension. It was a matter of choice, a battle of wills. Most people never came close enough to the edge to have any knowledge of it. Too close to the edge and the force could pull you across like an undertow.

"He's probably sitting in his office thinking that right now," Stokes went on. "He's been working nights, you know. The rest of his firm can't stand to have him around. They know he's guilty, same as we do. Can't stand looking at him, knowing what he did. I'll bet he's sitting there right now, thinking about it."