I sat down behind my desk, then noticed that she was looking at the side of my head. Involuntarily I touched my hair.
".You've been with the Bureau a long time?" I said.
"Not really."
"So you're fairly new?"
"Well, just to this kind of assignment. I mean, out in the field, that sort of thing." Her hands looked small on top of her big purse. I think it took everything in her to prevent them from clenching with anxiety. Then her eyes focused again on the side of my head.
"I have a white patch in my hair," I said.
She closed then opened her eyes with embarrassment.
"Someone once told me I have skunk blood in me," I said.
"I think I'm doing a lot of wrong things this morning," she said.
"No, you're not."
But somebody at Fart, Barf, and Itch is, I thought.
Then she sat erect in her chair and concentrated her vision on something outside the window until her face became composed again.
"The sheriff said you don't believe we're dealing with a serial killer or a random killing," she said.
"That's not quite how I put it. I told him I think she knew the killer."
"Why?"
"Her father appears to have been a child molester. She was streetwise herself. She had one prostitution beef when she was sixteen. Yesterday I found out she was still hooking—out of a club in St. Martinville. A girl like that doesn't usually get forced into cars in front of crowded jukejoints."
"Maybe she went off with a john."
"Not without her purse. She left it at her table. In it we found some—"
"Rubbers," she said.
"That's right. So I don't think it was a john. In her car we found a carton of cigarettes, a brand-new hairbrush, and a half-dozen joints in a Baggy in the trunk. I think she went outside to get some cigarettes, a joint, or the hairbrush, she saw somebody she knew, got in his car, and never came back."
"Maybe it was an old customer, somebody she trusted. Maybe he told her he just wanted to set something up for later."
"It doesn't fit. A john doesn't pay one time, then come back the next time with a razor blade or scalpel."
She put her thumbnail between her teeth. Her eyes were brown and had small lights in them.
"Then you think the killer is from this area, she knew him, and she trusted him enough to get in the car with him?"
"I think it's something like that."
"We think he's a psychopath, possibly a serial killer."
"We?"
"Well, actually I. I had a behavioral profile run on him. Everything he did indicates a personality that seeks control and dominance. During the abduction, the rape, the killing itself, he was absolutely in control. He becomes sexually aroused by power, by instilling fear and loathing in a woman, by being able to smother her with his body. In all probability he has ice water in his veins."
I nodded and moved some paper clips around on my desk blotter.
"You don't seem impressed," she said.