In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead (Dave Robicheaux 6)

"What do you make of the fact that he covered her face with her blouse?" I said.

"Blindfolding humiliates the victim and inspires even greater terror in her."

"Yeah, I guess it does."

"But you don't buy the profile."

"I'm not too keen on psychoanalysis. I belong to a twelve-step fellowship that subscribes to the notion that most bad or evil behavior is generated by what we call a self-centered fear. I think our man was afraid of Cherry LeBlanc. I don't think he could look into her eyes while he raped her."

She reached for a folder she had left on the corner of my desk.

"Do you know how many similar unsolved murders of women have been committed in the state of Louisiana in the last twenty-five years?"

"I sent in an information-search request to Baton Rouge yesterday."

"We have an unfair advantage on you in terms of resources," she said. She leafed through the printouts t

hat were clipped together at the top of the folder. Behind her, I saw two uniformed deputies grinning at me through the glass in my office partition.

"Excuse me," I said, got up, closed the door, and sat back down again.

"Is this place full of comedians?" she said. "I seem to make a lot of people smile."

"Some of them don't get a lot of exposure to the outside world."

"Anyway, narrowing it down to the last ten years, there are at least seventeen unsolved homicides involving females that share some similarity with the murder of Cherry LeBlanc. You want to take a look?" she said, and handed me the folder. "I have to go down to the sheriff's office and get my building keys. I'll be right back."

It was grim material to read. There was nothing abstruse about the prose. It was unimaginative, flat, brutally casual in its depiction of the bestial potential among the human family, like a banal rendering of our worst nightmares: slasher cases, usually involving prostitutes; the garroting of housewives who had been abducted in broad daylight in supermarket and bowling-alley parking lots; the roadside murders of women whose cars had broken down at night; prostitutes who had probably been set on fire by their pimps; the drowning of two black women who had been wrapped to an automobile engine block with barbed wire.

In almost all the cases rape, sodomy, or torture of some kind was involved. And what bothered me most was the fact that the perpetrators were probably still out there, unless they were doing time for other crimes; few of them had known their victims, and consequently few of them would ever be caught.

Then I noticed that Rosie Gomez had made check marks in the margins by six cases that shared more common denominators with the death of Cherry LeBlanc than the others: three runaways who had been found buried off highways in a woods; a high school girl who had been raped, tied to a tree in a fish camp at Lake Chicot, and shot at point-blank range; two waitresses who had gone off from their jobs without explanation and a few hours later had been thrown, bludgeoned to death, into irrigation ditches.

Their bodies had all showed marks, in one way or another, of having been bound. They had all been young, working class, and perhaps unsuspecting when a degenerate had come violently and irrevocably into their lives and had departed without leaving a sign of his identity.

My respect for Rosie Gomez's ability was appreciating.

She walked back through the door, clipping two keys onto a ring.

"You want to talk while we take a ride out to Spanish Lake?" I said.

"What's at Spanish Lake?"

"A movie director I'd like to meet."

"What's that have to do with our case?"

"Probably nothing. But it beats staying indoors."

"Sure. I have to make a call to the Bureau, then I'll be right with you."

"Let me ask you an unrelated question," I said.

"Sure."

"If you found the remains of a black man, and he had on no belt and there were no laces in his boots, what speculation might you make about him?"

She looked at me with a quizzical smile.