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

"I don't know."

"It sounds like bullshit to me, sheriff. It sounds like cops on a pad who don't want outsiders walking around on their turf."

"Maybe that's true, Dave, but I'm worried about you. I think you're overextending yourself and you're not hearing me when I talk to you about it."

"Did Twinky Lemoyne call?"

"No. Why should he?"

"I went over to Lafayette and questioned him yesterday afternoon."

He removed his rimless glasses, wiped them with a Kleenex, and put them back on. His eyes came back to meet mine.

"This was after I talked to you about involving people in the investigation who seem to have no central bearing in it?" he asked.

"I'm convinced that somehow Baby Feet was mixed up with Cherry LeBlanc, sheriff. Twinky Lemoyne has business ties to Feet. The way I read it, that makes him fair game."

"I'm really sorry to hear this, Dave."

"An investigation clears as well as implicates people. His black employees seem to think well of him. He didn't call in a complaint about my talking to him, either. Maybe he's an all-right guy."

"You disregarded my instructions, Dave."

"I saw the bodies of both those girls, sheriff."

"And?"

"Frankly I'm not real concerned about whose toes I step on."

He rose from his chair and tucked his shirt tightly into his gunbelt with his thumbs while his eyes seemed to study an unspoken thought in midair.

"I guess at this point I have to tell you something of a personal nature," he said. "I don't care for your tone, sir. I don't care for it in the least."

I picked up my coffee cup and sipped off it and looked at nothing as he walked out of the room.

Rosie Gomez was down in Vermilion Parish almost all day. When she came back into the office late that afternoon her face was flushed from the heat and her dark hair stuck damply to her skin. She dropped her purse on top of her desk and propped her arms on the side of the air-conditioning unit so the windstream blew inside her sleeveless blouse.

"I thought Texas was the hottest place on earth. How did anyone ever live here before air conditioning?" she said.

"How'd you make out today?"

"Wait a minute and I'll tell you. Damn, it was hot out there. What happened to the rain?"

"I don't know. It's unusual."

"Unusual? I felt like I was being cooked alive inside wet cabbage leaves. I'm going to ask for my next assignment in the Aleutians."

"I'm afraid you'll never make the state Chamber of Commerce, Rosie."

She walked back to her desk, blowing her breath up into her face, and opened her purse.

"What'd you do today?" she asked.

"I tried to run down some of those old cases, but they're pretty cold now—people have quit or retired or don't remember, files misplaced, that sort of thing. But there's one interesting thing here—" I spread a dozen National Crime Information Center fax sheets over the top of my desk. "If one guy committed several of these unsolved murders, it doesn't look like he ever operated outside the state. In other words, there don't seem to be any unsolved female homicides that took place during the same time period in an adjoining area in Texas, Arkansas, or Mississippi.

"So this guy may not only be homegrown but for one reason or another he's confined his murders to the state of Louisiana."

"That'd be a new one," she said. "Serial killers usually travel, unless they prey off a particular local community, like gays or streetwalkers. Anyway, look at what jumped up out of the weeds today."