I WENT HOME instead of returning to the office. I sat at one of the spool tables on the dock, the Cinzano umbrella popping in the breeze above my head, and looked at the blue jays flying in and out of the cypress and willow trees. I watched the clouds marble the swamp with shadow and light, and the wind from the Gulf straightening the moss on the dead snags. I stayed there a long time, although I didn't look at my watch, like a person who has strayed unknowingly into the showing of a pornographic film and would like to rinse himself of a new and unwanted awareness about human behavior.

The story of Carmouche's death was repellent. I wished I had not heard it, and I wished I did not have to make decisions about it.

I walked up to the house and told Bootsie of my morning with Passion Labiche.

She didn't say anything for perhaps a full minute. She got up from the kitchen table and stood at the sink and looked into the yard.

"What are you going to do?" she asked, her back to me.

"Nothing she told me can help her sister."

"You have the sickle in the truck?"

"I put it back under the house." I went to the stove and poured a cup of coffee. She turned around and followed me with her eyes.

"You're going across a line, Dave," she said.

"I virtually coerced a confession out of her. I don't know if Carmouche deserved to die the way he did, but I know the girls didn't deserve what happened to them." She walked to the stove and slipped her hand down my forearm and hooked her fingers under my palm.

"You know what I would do?" she said.

"What?" I said, turning to look at her.

"Start the day over. You set out to help Passion and Letty. Why bring them more harm? If Letty were tried today, she might go free. You want to enable a process that's already ignored the injury done to two innocent children?"

Bootsie was forever the loyal friend and knew what to say in order to make me feel better. But the real problem was one that went beyond suppression of nonexculpatory evidence in a crime of eight years ago. I was tired of daily convincing myself that what I did for a living made a difference.

I fixed a ham and onion sandwich for myself and ate it on the picnic table in the backyard. A few minutes later Bootsie came outside and sat down across from me, a small cardboard box in her hand.

"I hate to hit you with this right now, but this came in the morning mail. Alafair left it on her bed. I shouldn't have read the letter, but I did when I saw the name at the bottom," she said.

The box was packed with tissue paper and contained a six-inch-high ceramic vase that was painted with miniature climbing roses and a Confederate soldier and a woman in a hoop dress holding each other's hands in an arbor of live oaks. The detail and the contrast of gray and red and green were beautiful inside the glazed finish.

The letter, handwritten on expensive stationery and folded in a neat square, read:

Dear Alafair,

I hope you don't think too badly of me by this time. Your father cares for you and wants to protect you, so I don't hold his feelings toward me against him. This is the vase I was working on. I tried to make the girl look like you. What do you think? You can't see the face of the Confederate soldier. I'll let you imagine who he is.

I wish I could have lived in a time like the soldier and the girl on the vase did. People back then were decent and had honor and looked after each other.

You're one of the best people I ever met. If you ever need me, I promise I will be there for you. Nobody will ever make me break that promise.

Your devoted friend from the library,

Johnny

"Where is she?" I asked.

"At the swimming pool." Bootsie watched my face. "What are you thinking?"

"That boy is definitely not a listener."

I went back to the office and placed another call to the psychologist at the Florida State Penitentiary in Raiford. It wasn't long before I knew I was talking to one of those condescending, incompetent bureaucrats whose sole purpose is to hold on to their jobs and hide their paucity of credentials.

"You're asking me if he has obsessions?" the psychologist said.

"In a word, yeah."

"We don't have an adequate vocabulary to describe what some of these people have."

"You don't have to convince me of that," I said. "He was a suspect in a killing here. A gasoline bomb thrown inside another inmate's cell. Your man was probably raped. You were faxed everything we have. I don't know what else to tell you about him."

"Wait a minute. You didn't know him?"

"No. I thought you all understood that. Dr. Louvas worked with O'Roarke, or Remeta, as you call him. Dr. Louvas is at Marion now."

"Excuse me for seeming impatient, but why didn't you tell me that?"

"You didn't ask. Is there anything else?" I called the federal lockup at Marion, Illinois, and got Dr. Louvas on the phone. His was a different cut from his colleague in Florida.

"Yeah, I remember Johnny well. Actually I liked him. I wouldn't suggest having him over for dinner, though," he said.

"How's that?"

"He has two or three personalities. Oh, I don't mean he suffers dissociation, or any of that Three Faces of Eve stuff. He has an abiding sense of anger that he refuses to deal with. If he'd gotten help earlier, he might have turned out to be a writer or artist instead of a candidate for a lobotomy."

"Because he was raped in prison?"

"His father would take him to a blind pig on skid row. That's what they call after-hours places in Detroit. According to Johnny, a couple of pedophiles would use him while the old man got drunk on their tab. Family values hadn't made a big splash in the Detroit area yet."

"So he's hung up over his father?"

"You got it all wrong, Mr. Robicheaux. He doesn't blame the father for what happened to him. He thinks the mother betrayed him. He's never gotten over what he perceives as her failure."

"He's making overtures to my daughter."

There was no response.

"Are you there?" I asked.

"You're asking me to tell you his future? My bet is Johnny will do himself in one day. But he'll probably take others with him," the psychologist said.

The next morning I drove to Baton Rouge and went to Connie Deshotel's office. The secretary told me Connie used her lunch hour on Thursdays to play racquet-ball at a nearby club.

The club was dazzling white, surrounded with palm trees that were planted in white gravel; the swimming pool in back was an electric blue under the noon sun. Inside the building, I looked down through a viewing glass onto the hardwood floor of a racquetball court and watched Connie take apart her male opponent. She wore tennis shoes with green tubes of compressed air molded into the rubber soles, a pleated tennis skirt, and a sleeveless yellow jersey that was ringed under the neck and arms with sweat. Her tanned calves hardened with muscle when she bent to make a kill shot.

Her opponent, a tall, graying, athletic man, gave it up, shook hands good-naturedly, and left. She bounced the rubber ball once, served the ball to herself off the wall, then fired it into a low ricochet that sent it arching over her head, as though she were involved in a private celebration of her victory. Her eyes followed the ball's trajectory until they met mine. Then her face tightened, and she pushed her hair out of her eyes and left the court through a door in the back wall, slamming it behind her. I went down the stairs and intercepted her in the lounge area.

"I have some information about my mother's death,"