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

Ten minutes later the sheriff, with a file folder open in his hands, came into my office and sat down across from me. He had owned a dry-cleaning business and been president of the local Lions Club before running for sheriff. He wore rimless glasses, and he had soft cheeks that were flecked with blue and red veins. In his green uniform he always made me think of a nursery manager rather than a law officer, but he was an honest and decent man and humble enough to listen to those who had had more experience than he had.

"I got the autopsy and the photographs on that LeBlanc girl," he said. He took off his glasses and pinched the red mark on the bridge of his nose. "You know, I've been doing this stuff five years now, but one like this—"

"When it doesn't bother you anymore, that's when you should start to worry, sheriff."

"Well, anyway, the report says that most of it was probably done to her after she was dead, poor girl."

"Could I see it?" I said, and reached out my hand for the folder.

I had to swallow when I looked at the photographs, even though I had seen the real thing only yesterday. The killer had not harmed her face. In fact, he had covered it with her blouse, either during the rape or perhaps before he stopped her young heart with an ice pick. But in the fourteen years that I had been with the New Orleans Police Department, or during the three years I had worked off and on for the Iberia Parish sheriff's office, I had seen few cases that involved this degree of violence or rage against a woman's body.

Then I read through the clinical prose describing the autopsy, the nature of the wounds, the sexual penetration of the vagina, the absence of any skin samples under the girl's fingernails, the medical examiner's speculation about the moment and immediate cause of death, and the type of instrument the killer probably used to mutilate the victim.

"Any way you look at it, I guess we're talking about a psychopath or somebody wired to the eyes on crack or acid," the sheriff said.

"Yeah, maybe," I said.

"You think somebody else would disembowel a nineteen-year-old girl with a scalpel or a barber's razor?"

"Maybe the guy wants us to think he's a meltdown. He was smart enough not to leave anything at the scene except the ice pick, and it was free of prints. There weren't any prints on the tape he used on her wrists or mouth, either. She went out the front door of the jukejoint, by herself, at one in the morning, when the place was still full of people, and somehow he abducted her, or got her to go with him, between the front door and her automobile, which was parked only a hundred feet away."

His eyes were thoughtful.

"Go on," he said.

"I think she knew the guy."

The sheriff put his glasses back on and scratched at the corner of his mouth with one fingernail.

"She left her purse at the table," I said. "I think she went outside to get something from her car and ran into somebody she knew. Psychopaths don't try to strongarm women in front of bars filled with drunk coonasses and oil-field workers."

"What do we know about the girl?" I took my notebook out of the desk drawer and thumbed through it on top of the blotter.

"Her mother died when she was twelve. She quit school in the ninth grade and ran away from her father a couple of times in Mamou. She was arrested for prostitution in Lafayette when she was sixteen. For the last year or so she lived here with her grandparents, out at the end of West Main. Her last job was waitressing in a bar about three weeks ago in St. Martinville. Few close friends, if any, no current or recent romantic involvement, at least according to the grandparents. She didn't have a chance for much of a life, did she?"

I could hear the sheriff rubbing his thumb along his jawbone.

"No, she didn't," he said. His eyes went out the window then refocused on my face. "Do you buy that about no romantic involvement?"

"No."

"Neither do I. Do you have any other theories except that she probably knew her killer?"

"One."

"What?"

"That I'm all wrong, that we are dealing with a psychopath or a serial killer."

He stood up to leave. He was overweight, constantly on a diet, and his stomach protruded over his gunbelt, but his erect posture always gave him the appearance of a taller and trimmer man than he actually was.

"I'm glad we operate out of this office with such a sense of certainty, Dave," he said. "Look, I want you to use everything available to us on this one. I want to nail this sonofabitc

h right through the breastbone."

I nodded, unsure of his intention in stating the obvious.

"That's why we're going to be working with the FBI on this one," he said.