"No, I mean Lou Girard was looking at her file last week. What's the deal?"

"Do this for me, will you? If anybody else tries to get his hands on that file, you call me, okay?"

"There's an implication here that I think you should clarify."

Outside, the skies were gray, and dust and pieces of paper were blowing in the street.

"Maybe we have a fireman setting fires," I said.

He was quiet a moment, then he said, "I'll lock up the file for you, detective, and I'll keep your call confidential. But since this may involve a reflection on our office, I expect a little more in the way of detailed information from you in the next few days."

After I hung up, I opened my desk drawer and took out the black-and-white photograph that Cholo Manelli had given me of Cherry LeBlanc and Julie Balboni at the beach in Biloxi. I looked again at the man who was reading a newspaper at another table. His face was beyond the field of focus in the picture, but the light had struck his glasses in such a way that it looked as if there were chips of crystal where his eyes should have been, and my guess was that he was wearing bifocals.

As with most police investigations, the problem had now become one of the time lag between the approaching conclusion of an investigation and the actual arrest of a suspect. It's a peculiar two-way street that both cops and criminals live on. As a cop grows in certainty about the guilt of a suspect and begins to put enough evidence together to make his case, the suspect usually becomes equally aware of the impending denouement and concludes that midsummer isn't a bad time to visit Phoenix after all.

The supervising P.O. in Lafayette now knew my suspicions about Doucet, so did Twinky Hebert Lemoyne, and it wouldn't be long before Doucet did, too.

The other problem was that so far all the evidence was circumstantial.

When Rosie came in I told her everything I had.

"Do you think Lemoyne will make a confession?" she said.

"He might eventually. It's obvious he's a tormented man."

"Because I don't think you'll ever get an indictment on the lynching unless he does."

"I want to get a search warrant and toss everything Doucet owns, starting with the security building out at Spanish Lake."

"Okay, Dave, but let me be honest with you. So far I think what we've got is pretty thin."

"I didn't tell you something else. I already checked Doucet's name through motor vehicle registration in Baton Rouge. He owns a blue 1989 Mercury. I'll bet that's the car that's been showing up through the whole investigation."

"We still don't have enough to start talking to a prosecutor, though, do we?"

"That's what a search warrant is for."

"What I'm trying to say is we don't have witnesses, Dave. We're going to need some hard forensic evidence, a murder weapon, clothing from one of the victims, something that will leave no doubt in a jury's mind that this guy is a creature out of their worst nightmares. I just hope Doucet hasn't already talked to Lemoyne and gotten rid of everything we could use against him, provided there is anything."

"We'll soon find out."

She measured me carefully with her eyes.

"You seem a little more confident than you should be," she said.

"It all fits, Rosie. A black pimp in the New Orleans bus depot told me about a white man selling dirty pictures. I thought he was talking about photographs or postcards. Don't you see it? Doucet's probably been delivering girls to Balboni's pornographic film operation."

"The only direct tie that we have is the fact that Doucet arrested Cherry LeBlanc."

"Right. And even though he knew I was investigating her murder, he never mentioned it, did he? He wasn't even curious about how the investigation was going. Does that seem reasonable to you?"

"Well, let's get the warrant and see what Mr. Doucet has to say to us this morning."

We had it in thirty minutes and were on our way out of the office when my extension rang. It was Bootsie. She said she was going to town to buy candles and tape for the windows in case the hurricane turned in to the coast and I would find lunch for me and Alafair in the oven.

Then she said, "Dave, did you leave the house last night?"

"Just a second," I said, and took the receiver away from my ear. "Rosie, I'll be along in just a minute."

Tags: James Lee Burke Dave Robicheaux Mystery
Source: readsnovelonline.net