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

"I didn't hear you say that, deputy," Rosie said.

"It don't matter to me," he said. "A fella like that, they's people 'round here get their hands on him, you ain't gonna have to be worryin' about evidence, no. Ax Dave."

In the trunk we had found eleven small pairs of girls' underwear, children's socks, polka-dot leotards, training bras, a single black patent-leather shoe with a broken strap, a coloring book, a lock of red hair taped to an index card, torn matinee tickets to a local theater, a half-dozen old photographs of Murphy Doucet in the uniform of a Jefferson Parish deputy sheriff, all showing him with children at picnics under moss-hung trees, at a Little League ball game, at a swimming pool filled with children leaping into the air for the camera. All of the clothing was laundered and folded and arranged in a neat pink and blue and white layer across the bottom of the trunk.

After a moment, Rosie said, "It's his shrine."

"To what?" I said.

"Innocence. He's a psychopath, a rapist, a serial killer, a sadist, maybe a necrophiliac, but he's also a pedophile. Like most pedophiles, he seeks innocence by being among children or molesting them."

Then she rose from her chair, went into the bathroom, and I heard the water running, heard her spit, heard the water splashing.

"Could you wait outside a minute, Expidee?" I said to the deputy.

"Yeah, sure," he said.

"We'll be along in a minute. Thanks for your help today."

"That fella gonna make bail, Dave?"

"Probably."

"That ain't right," he said, then he said it again as he went out the door, "Ain't right."

The bathroom door was ajar when I tapped on it. Her back was to me, her arms propped stiffly on the basin, the tap still running. She kept trying to clear her throat, as though a fine fish bone were caught in it.

I opened the door, took a clean towel out of a cabinet, and started to blot her face with it. She held her hand up almost as though I were about to strike her.

"Don't touch me with that," she said.

I set the towel on the tub, tore the top Kleenex from a box, dropped it in the waste can, then pulled out several more, balled them up, and touched at her face with them. She pushed down my wrist.

"I'm sorry. I lost it," she said.

"Don't worry bout it."

"Those children, that smell in the trunk of the car."

She made her eyes as wide as possible to hold back the tears, but it didn't work. They welled up in her brown eyes, then rolled in rivulets down her cheeks.

"It's okay, Rosie," I said, and slipped my arms around her. Her head was buried under my chin. I could feel the length of her body against mine, her back rising and falling under my palms. I could smell the strawberry shampoo in her hair, a heated fragrance like soap in her skin.

The window was open, and the wind blew the curtain into the room. Across the street on a putting green, a red flag snapped straight out on a pole that vibrated stiffly in the cup. In the first drops of rain, which slanted almost parallel to the ground, I saw a figure standing by a stagnant reed-choked pond, a roiling myrtle bush at his back. He held himself erect in the wind with his single crutch, his beard flying about his face, his mouth an O, his words lost in distant thunder. The stump of his amputated right leg was wrapped with fresh white bandages that had already turned scarlet with new bleeding.

"What are you trying to warn me of, general? Why has so much pain come back to you, sir?"

I felt Rosie twist her face against my chest, then step away from me and walk quickly out the door, picking up her handbag from a chair in one smooth motion so I could not see her face. The screen door slammed behind her.

I put everything from Doucet's trunk into evidence bags, locked the house, and got into the pickup just as a storm of hailstones burst from the sky, clattered on the cab, and bounced in tiny white geysers on the slopes of the golf course as far as the eye could see.

That night the weatherman on the ten o'clock news said that the hurricane was moving again in a northwesterly direction

and would probably make landfall sometime late tomorrow around Atchafalaya Bay, just to the east of us. Every offshore drilling rig in the Gulf had shut down, and the low-lying coastal areas from Grand Isle to Sabine Pass were being evacuated.

At eleven the sheriff called.

"Somebody just torched Mikey Goldman's trailer out at Spanish Lake. A gallon milk bottle of gasoline through the window with a truck flare right on top of it," he said. "You want to go out there and have a look?"