The sky was still pink with sunrise, the air sweet with the smell of flowers and rain, the cane waving in the fields. I started to lie, to say that perhaps indeed I had been at Val's guesthouse on another occasion, even though earlier I had already denied that possibility to her. But I couldn't do it.

"I'm not sure how they got there. I got back on the juice. I was drunk all weekend," I said.

She took a call on her radio, her expression frozen in place. Then she hung her microphone back on the dash. "What was that last part?"

"I've got two days sobriety now," I said.

"Two days?"

I waited for her to go on. But she didn't. In the silence I could hear the tires of the cruiser on the asphalt. "I think maybe I went to Val Chalons's guesthouse in a blackout. I think I took a CD from his stereo, one with Ida Durbin's voice on it," I said.

"Ida Durbin again?"

"The CD is at the house. I think there's a blood smear on it, maybe from my own hand."

She rubbed at one temple with the ends of her fingers, as though an intolerable migraine had begun to eat its way through her head. "Maybe it's time for you not to say any more without a lawyer."

"I didn't kill Honoria."

"You don't know what you did, so don't give me your doodah. Dave, you make me so mad I want to stop the car and beat the shit out of you. Goddamn it!"

"I'm sorry," I said.

She swerved the cruiser to the shoulder and got out under a spreading oak tree. She walked up and down by my window, her fists on her hips, the corner of her mouth bitten white. For a moment I thought she was truly going to lose it. She stood still for a long time, her back to me, then got back in the vehicle.

"Helen -"

"Shut up," she said.

She did not speak again until she turned into my drive. "Be in my office in one hour, looking sharp, your head out of your ass for a change," she said.

Doogie Dugas and his posse comitatus had tossed my house from one end to the other. They had even pulled all my lawn tools out of my shed and left them scattered in the yard. The doors to my truck were ajar, the lock on the steel toolbox I had welded to the bed sheared in half by bolt cutters. The driver's seat was still pushed against the steering wheel, the floor area behind it empty of the flop hat and hooded raincoat I had worn during my blackout Saturday.

The irony of Dugas's search was that he had probably tainted any evidence he had seized by using an improperly acquired warrant. The greater irony was the fact that he and his friends had evidently ignored an item they should have picked up. It was a sheet of yellow legal pad paper, now rain-damaged, speckled with mud, blown into the canebrake that separated my yard from Miss Ellen's. I would have probably paid little attention to it as well, but every day I picked up litter that either blew or was thrown into my yard. It was dated Saturday, 9:15 p.m. and read:

Dear Dave,

Why don't you stay home? Who's taking care of your cat and raccoon? Anyone who neglects or who is cruel to a defenseless creature deserves to be tortured.

I have to tell someone about the secrets nobody in our family will deal with. My father won't admit the harm our silence has caused. Maybe our souls are damned. My prayer today is that hell is oblivion and not a place of torment.

You must call me. I can tell you about Ida Durbin.

Love, H.

Was she insane? Twisted on coke and booze? Or perhaps touched with an insight into evil that would make most of us shudder? Whatever the answer, she had taken her secrets to the grave.

After I shaved and showered and changed clothes, I placed Honoria's note in one Ziploc bag and put the CD with the blood smear on the surface in another, and drove to the department. Helen was waiting for me, her mood still rumpled. "What's that?" she said, indicating Honoria's note.

I placed it on her desk. She was standing up, her palms propped on her desk blotter as she read Honoria's words, her chest rising and falling. The door was closed now, the blinds open, and people passing in the corridor made a point of not glancing inside. The room seemed to grow warmer, the sunlight through the window more intense.

"This was in your yard?" Helen said.

"Right."

"This is your parachute on a murder beef?"

"I don't know what it is. My guess is Honoria was an incest victim."

"Where in the name of God do you get these ideas?"

"Koko Hebert says Honoria had intercourse in the twenty-four-hour period before she died. She was about to shower in the guesthouse, where Val Chalons lives, not in the main house, where she lived. She had every behavioral characteristic of someone who has been the long-term victim of a sexual predator."

"Dave, APIS came back with only one match that didn't belong in that guesthouse – yours."

"Except I had no motive to murder her. There was DNA in her genital area. I'll bet the lab will show it was left there by a relative. My guess is it belongs either to the father or the brother."

But I had already lost her attention. "I must have had two dozen calls this morning," she said. "They want you skinned, salted, and hung in a gibbet."

"Am I suspended?"

"Suspension might be the least of it."

"What do you want me to do, Helen?"

"Lose the nun."

"Can't do it."

"Then please go somewhere else for a while."

And that's what I did. As far as the water cooler, my face burning as though I had been slapped. Then I went back into her office, the door hanging open behind me.

"You want my shield, just say it."

"You're always psychoanalyzing other people. Why don't you look inside your own head for a change?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Bootsie died on you and it made you madder than hell. Your daughter is gone and every day you wake up, you're scared you'll drink again. So you figured out a way to climb on a cross, a place where it's safe and people can't do anything else to you. I don't think you're going to like it up there, bwana."

The week was not going well. Worse, Clete had called early the previous morning and, without thinking, I told him Jimmie had gotten a lead on Lou Kale and that Kale might be running an escort service out of Miami. That was a mistake.

By Tuesday afternoon Clete was standing at the registration desk in the lobby of an old ten-story stucco hotel on the beach in Hollywood, Florida, decked out in shades, his pale blue porkpie hat, a tropical shirt printed with bare-breasted hula girls, white polyester Bermuda shorts, and blue tennis shoes threaded with brand-new white laces. He carried a set of golf clubs on one shoulder, a flight bag on the other, registered as C. T. Perkins from Gulfport, Mississippi, and paid cash for his room.

The walls of the hotel were spiderwebbed with cracks, the patio in the center of the building spiked with weeds, the potted jacaranda dying from lack of water. But the view of the ocean from his open window on the top floor was magnificent, the overhead fan adequate to cool the room, the salt air wonderful. Clete propped his feet on the windowsill and punched in the telephone number of the Sea Breeze Escort Service. Down below, the tide was sliding high up on the sand and children were running into the waves, leaping in the froth that sucked back over their tanned bodies. On the third ring Clete found himself talking to a man who called himself Lou Coyne.

"You got the referral where?" Coyne said.

"Stevie Giacano, in New Orleans," Clete replied.

"Oh yeah, Stevie Gee. In the Teamsters, right? How's ole Stevie doin'?"

"Not too good. He's dead. But he always said your service was tops."