Sunset Limited (Dave Robicheaux 10)

I didn't answer. We stared at each other across the desk. Then his eyes broke.

"Good seeing you, Dave. Thanks for giving Megan the gun," he said.

I watched silently as he opened the office door and went out into the hall.

I propped my forehead on my fingers and stared at the empty green surface of my desk blotter. Why hadn't I seen it? I had even used the term "aerialist" to the San Antonio homicide investigator.

I went out the side door of the building and caught Cisco at his car. The day was beautiful, and his suntanned face looked gold and handsome in the cool light.

"You called the dead man a cowboy," I said.

He grinned, bemused. "What's the big deal?" he said.

"Who said anything about how the guy was dressed?"

"I mean 'cowboy' like 'hit man.' That's what contract killers are called, aren't they?"

"You and Boxleiter worked this scam together, didn't you?"

He laughed and shook his head and got in his car and drove out of the lot, then waved from the window just before he disappeared in the traffic.

THE FORENSIC PATHOLOGIST CALLED me that afternoon.

"I can give it to you over the phone or talk in person. I'd rather do it in person," he said.

"Why's that?"

"Because autopsies can tell us things about human behavior I don't like to know about," he replied.

An hour later I walked into his office.

"Let's go outside and sit under the trees. You'll have to excuse my mood. My own work depresses the hell out of me sometimes," he said.

We sat in metal chairs behind the white-painted brick building that housed his office. The hard-packed earth stayed in shade almost year-round and was green with mold and sloped down to a ragged patch of bamboo on the bayou. Out in the sunlight an empty pirogue that had pulled loose from its mooring turned aimlessly in the current.

"There're abrasions on the back of her head and scrape marks on her shoulder, like trauma from a fall rather than a direct blow," he said. "Of course, you're more interested in cause of death."

"I'm interested in all of it."

"I mean, the abrasions on her skin could have been unrelated to her death. Didn't you say her husband knocked her around before she fled the home?"

"Yes."

"I found evidence of water in the lungs. It's a bit complicated, but there's no question about its presence at the time she died."

"So she was alive when she went into the marsh?"

"Hear me out. The water came out of a tap, not a swamp or marsh or brackish bay, not unless the latter contains the same chemicals you find in a city water supply."

"A faucet?"

"But that's not what killed her." He wore an immaculate white shirt, and his red suspenders hung loosely on his concave chest. He snuffed down in his nose and fixed his glasses. "It was heart failure, maybe brought on by suffocation."

"I'm not putting it together, Clois."

"You were in Vietnam. What'd the South Vietnamese do when they got their hands on the Vietcong?"

"Water poured on a towel?"