She hand-cranked the window down another six inches. “Yes?” she said.

“I saw you upstairs at the library,” the man said.

“I know. What is it you want?”

“It looks like you got car trouble. I can call Triple A for you or give you a ride.”

“Why do you think we’re having car trouble?” Molly said.

“Because your car won’t start,” the man replied, a half-smile on his face.

“But how would you know that? The engine made no sound,” Molly said.

“I saw you twisting the key a couple of times, that’s all.”

“We’re fine, here. Thanks for the offer,” she said.

The man looked out into the darkness, toward the side of the building, holding his raincoat closed at the throat, his face filmed with the mist blowing out of the cypress trees. “It’s nasty weather to be out. I think a storm is coming,” he said.

Alafair gave Molly a look, then pulled Molly’s purse toward her, easing it down by her foot.

The man who wore a hat that cupped his ears and whose mustache was streaked with white leaned closer to the window. “I got to tell you ladies something. I didn’t choose this. I feel sorry for you. I’m not that kind of man.”

“Take the mashed potatoes out of your mouth and say it, whatever it is,” Molly said.

But before the man in the raincoat could answer, Alafair’s window exploded in shards all over the interior of the car. Alafair’s face jerked in shock, her hair and shirt flecked with glass. A hand holding a brick raked the glass down even with the window frame, grinding it into powder against the metal.

Alafair and Molly stared at the grinning face of Ronald Bledsoe. In his right hand he clutched the brick, in his left, a.25-caliber blue-black automatic. He fitted the muzzle under Alafair’s chin and increased the pressure until she lifted her chin and shut her eyes.

“Pop the hood so Tom can reconnect your battery, Miz Robicheaux,” he said. “Then lean over the backseat and open the door for me. We’re going to take a drive. Y’all are going to be good the whole way, too.” He leaned forward and smelled Alafair’s hair. “Lordy, I like you, Miss Alafair. You’re a darlin’ young girl, and I know what I’m talking about, because I’ve had the best.”

Molly hesitated.

“You want to see her brains on the dashboard, Miz Robicheaux?” Bledsoe said.

Molly pulled on the hood release, then leaned over the backseat and opened the rear door. Bledsoe slipped inside, closing the door as quickly as possible to turn off the interior light. Molly was still extended over the seat, and his face and eyes were only inches from hers. His silk shirt rippled like blue ice water. She could smell the dampness on his skin, the dried soap he had used in shaving his head, an odor like soiled kitty litter that rose from his armpits.

The man in the raincoat slammed down the hood.

“Start the car,” Bledsoe said, clicking the switch on the interior light to the “off” position.

“I don’t think I should do that,” Molly said.

The man in the raincoat pulled open the back door and got inside. He struggled a minute with his raincoat before getting the door shut. He would not look directly at either Molly or Alafair.

“Want to be the cause of this little girl’s death?” Bledsoe said. “Want to be the cause of your own, just because you decide to be stubborn? That doesn’t sound like a nun to me. That sounds like pride talking.”

Molly’s hand started to shake as she turned the ignition. “My husband is going to hang you out to dry, buddy boy,” she said.

“He’d like to. But so far, he hasn’t done such a good job of it, has he?” Bledsoe said. He teased the muzzle of the.25 under Alafair’s ear. “Pull onto the street, Miz Robicheaux.”

Molly turned on the headlights and began backing up, craning her neck to see out the back window. The sidewalk and lawn area in front of Burke Hall were empty, the giant oak by the entrance obscuring the light from the intersection to the south.

“Miss Alafair, reach there into your book bag and give me that yellow tablet you were writing on,” Bledsoe said. “That’s right, reach in and hand it to me. You a good girl. You play your cards right, you cain’t tell what might happen. You might come out of this just fine.”

Bledsoe took the yellow legal pad from Alafair’s hand and examined the top page, all the while holding the.25 against Alafair’s head. “Miss Alafair, you just made a bunch of people very happy. Isn’t that something, Tom? It was sitting in your backyard all the time, under that big generator, I bet. It took an educated young woman to figure this out for us. She’s special is what she is. Hear that, darlin’? You special and that’s how I’m gonna treat you. You’ll like it when we get there.”

He picked a piece of glass out of her hair and flicked it out the window. He did not say where “there” was.

They pulled out on the boulevard and drove past a women’s dormitory to a stop sign on the edge of the campus. Then they turned onto University Avenue and headed toward the edge of town.

MOMENTS LATER, a few blocks up the avenue, between a Jewish cemetery that was covered with the deep shadows of cedar and oak trees, and an old icehouse that had been converted into a topless club, a jogger had to dodge a car that had plunged out of the traffic, across the median, and possibly had been hit by another car. The jogger could not see clearly inside the car because of the mist, but when he called 911, he told the dispatcher he had heard a sound like muffled firecrackers and he thought he had seen a series of flashes inside the windows.

I CLAMPED THE portable emergency flasher on the roof of my truck and let Clete drive. By the time Clete had driven us through the little town of Broussard, the highway was slick, the sky black, and traffic was backing up because of construction outside Lafayette. We went through a long section of urban sprawl that in my college days had been sugarcane fields and pecan orchards, threaded by a two-lane highway that had been lined on each side with live oaks. But that was all gone.

It was almost 10:00 p.m. I had called Molly’s cell phone three times en route, getting her voice mail each time.

“You’re worrying too much. They’re probably headed home by now,” Clete said.

“She always checks her voice mail. It’s an obsession with her,” I said.

“Think about it a minute, Dave. Nothing has changed since this afternoon, except for the fact we found out Claggart is Asswipe’s half brother. That doesn’t mean Molly and Alafair are in greater danger. You know what I think is bothering you?”

“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”

“You smoked Rydel and now you want to drink.”

When I didn’t speak, he said, “Remember when we did that bunch of Colombians? I’ve never been so scared in my life. I drank a dozen double Scotches that night and it didn’t make a dent.”

“Clete?”

“Yeah?”

“Will you shut up?”

He looked at me in the glow of the dash, then mashed on the accelerator, swerving across a double stripe to pass a tractor-trailer rig, rocking both of us against the doors.

I punched in 911 and got a Lafayette Parish dispatcher. “What’s the nature of your emergency?” a black woman’s voice said.

“This is Detective Dave Robicheaux, Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department,” I said. “I’m on my way to the UL campus to find my wife and daughter. They usually park by Cypress Lake, next to Burke Hall. They’re not responding to my calls. I think they may be in jeopardy. Will you send a cruiser to the campus and check out their vehicle, please?”

I gave her the make and model of Molly’s car.

“We have a five-car accident on University, but we’ll get someone over to the campus as soon as possible,” she said. “Do you want me to call Campus Security?”