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

She held up a plastic Ziploc bag with a wood-handled, brass-tipped pocket knife inside. The single blade was opened and streaked with rust.

"Where'd you find it?"

"A half mile back down the levee from where the girl was found in the barrel. It was about three feet down from the crest."

"You covered all that ground by yourself?"

"More or less."

I looked at her a moment before I spoke again. "Rosie, you're kind of new to the area, but that levee is used by fishermen and hunters all the time. Sometimes they drop stuff."

"All my work for nothing, huh?" She smiled and lifted a strand of hair off her eyebrow.

"I didn't say that—"

"I didn't tell you something else. I ran into an elderly black man down there who sells catfish and frog legs off the back of his pickup truck. He said that about a month ago, late at night, he saw a white man in a new blue or black car looking for something on the levee with a flashlight. Just like that alligator poacher you questioned, he wondered why anybody would be down there at night with a new automobile. He said the man with the light wasn't towing a boat trailer and he didn't have a woman with him, either. Evidently he thinks those are the only two reasonable explanations for anyone ever going down there."

"Could he give you a description of the white man?"

"No, he said he was busy stringing a trotline between some duck blinds. What's a trotline, anyway?"

"You stretch a long piece of twine above the water and tie it to a couple of stumps or flooded trees. Then intermittently you hang twelve-inch pieces of weighted line with baited hooks into the water. Catfish feed by the moon, and when they hook themselves, they usually work the hook all the way through their heads and they're still on the trotline when the fisherman picks it up in the morning."

I sat on the corner of her desk and picked up the plastic bag and looked at the knife. It was the kind that was made in Pakistan or Taiwan and could be purchased for two dollars on the counter of almost any convenience store.

"If that was our man, what do you think happened?" I said.

"Maybe that's where he bound her with the electrician's tape. He used the knife to slice the tape, then dropped it. He either searched for it that night or came back another night when he discovered it was missing."

"I don't want to mess up your day, Rosie, but our man doesn't seem to leave fingerprints. At least there were none on the electrician's tape in the two murders that we think he committed. Why should he worry about losing the knife?"

"He needs to orchestrate, to be in control. He can't abide accidents."

"He left the ice pick in Cherry LeBlanc."

"Because he meant to. He gave us the murder weapon; it'll never be found on him. But he didn't plan to give us his pocket knife. That bothers him."

"That's not a bad theory. Our man is all about power, isn't he?"

She stood her purse up straight and started to snap it shut. It clunked on the desk when she moved it. She reached inside and lifted out her .357 magnum revolver, which looked huge in her small hand, and replaced it on top of her billfold. She snapped the catch on the purse.

"I said the obsession is about power, isn't it?"

"Always, always, always," she said.

The concentration seemed to go out of her eyes, as though the day's fatigue had just caught up with her.

"Rosie?"

"What is it?"

"You feel okay?"

"I probably got dehydrated out there."

"Drop the knife off with our fingerprint man and I'll buy you a Dr Pepper."

"Another time. I want to see what's on the knife."