He wet his lips, his hand knotting my shirt. "I don't know. She burned some people for a lot of money. You and your brother took her out of a cathouse. So they snatched her up."

I could feel my heart thumping in my chest. "Your uncle and who?" I asked.

He shook his head. "Cops and a pimp. She had a mandolin. They busted it up."

"Did they kill her?"

"I don't know. I saw blood on a chair. I was just a kid. Just like you and Jimmie. What's a kid s'pposed to do? I took off. My uncle's dead now. Nobody probably even remembers that girl now 'cept me."

He was the saddest-looking human being I think I had ever seen. His eyes were liquid, receded in his face. His body was encased in beer fat that seemed to be squeezing the breath out of his lungs. He let go of my shirt and waited for me to speak, as though my words could exorcise the succubus that had probably fed at his heart all his life.

"That's right, we were all just kids back then, Troy," I said, and winked at him.

He tried to smile, his skin puckering around his mouth. Without his consent, the nurse fitted the oxygen mask back on his face. Through the window I saw a TV news van in the parking lot, with the call letters and logo of an aggressive Shreveport television station painted on the side. But if the news crew was there to cover some element in the passing of Troy Bordelon, it was of little import to Troy. He looked out the window at the sun's last red ember on the horizon. A flock of crows rose from the limbs of cypress trees in a lake, lifting into the sky like ashes off a dead fire. The look in his eyes made me think of a drowning man whose voice cannot reach a would-be rescuer.

Outside, I walked toward my truck, my head filled with nightmarish images about what may have been Ida Durbin's last moments. How had Troy put it? He had seen "blood on a chair."

"Hold on there, Robo," a voice called out behind me.

Robo?

There were two of them, angular in build, squared away, military in bearing, their uniforms starched and creased, wearing shades, even though it was almost dark, their gold badges and name tags buffed, their shoes spit-shined into mirrors. I had seen them at various times at law enforcement gatherings in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. I didn't remember their names, but I remembered their manner. It was of a kind every career lawman or military officer recognizes. These were men you never place in situations where they have unsupervised authority over others.

I nodded hello but didn't speak.

"On the job?" one of them said. His name tag read Shockly, J. W. He tilted his head slightly with his question.

"Not me. I hung it up," I replied.

"I saw you go into Troy Bordelon's room. You guys were buds?" he said.

"I went to school with him," I said.

The second deputy was grinning from behind his shades, as though the three of us were in a private club and the inappropriateness of his expression was acceptable. The name engraved on his tag was Pitts, B. J. "Poor bastard was a real pistol, wasn't he? Half the blacks in the parish are probably drunk right now," he said.

"I wouldn't know," I said.

"Ole Troy didn't want to unburden his sins?" the second deputy, the one named Pitts, said.

Shockly pulled on his nose to hide his irritation at his friend's revelation of their shared agenda.

"Nice seeing you guys," I said.

Neither one of them said good-bye as I walked away. When I glanced in my rearview mirror, they were still standing in the parking lot, wondering, I suspect, if they had said too much or too little.

I decided I needed to talk to Troy again, when the two sheriff's deputies were not around. I checked into a motel in the next town, then returned to the hospital at sunrise, but Troy had died during the night.

I was a widower and lived by myself in New Iberia, a city of twenty-five thousand people on Bayou Teche in the southwestern part of the state. For years I had been a detective with the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department and also the owner of a bait shop and boat rental business outside of town. But after Alafair, my adopted daughter, went away to college and the home my father built in 1935 burned to the ground, I sold the baitshop and dock to an elderly black man named Batist and moved into a shotgun house on East Main, on the banks of the Teche, in a neighborhood where the oak and pecan trees, the azaleas, Confederate roses, and philodendron managed to both hide and accentuate the decayed elegance of a bygone era.

After I returned from my visit to Troy's bedside, I could not get Ida Durbin out of my head. I tried to convince myself that the past was the past, that Ida had involved herself with violent and predatory people and that her fate was neither my doing nor Jimmie's.

But over the years I had seen the file drawer slammed on too many unsolved disappearances. These cases almost always involved people who had no voice and whose families had no power. Sometimes a determined cop would try to keep the investigation alive, revisiting his files and chasing leads on his own time, but ultimately he, too, would make his separate peace and try not to think, as I was now, about voices that can cry out for help in our sleep.

I had no demonstrable evidence that a crime had actually been committed, nothing except the statement of a guilt-driven man who said he had seen blood on a chair decades ago. Even if I wanted to initiate an investigation, where would I start? In a Texas coastal town where most of the players were probably dead?

I had another problem, too. For a recovering alcoholic, introspection and solitude are the perfect combination for a dry drunk, a condition that for me was like putting a nail gun in the center of my forehead and pulling the trigger.

I mowed the grass in the front yard and began raking up layers of blackened leaves on the shady side of the house, burning them in a rusty oil barrel under the oak trees down by the bayou. A speedboat went by with water-skiers in tow, churning a frothy yellow trough down the center of the bayou. On the far bank, in City Park, the camellias were in bloom, kids were playing baseball, and families were fixing lunch in the picnic shelters. But I couldn't shake the gloom that had clung to me like cobwebs since I had listened to Troy Bordelon's deathbed statement.

I went back in the house and read the newspaper. The lead story was not a happy one. Thirty miles from New Iberia, the body of a young black woman, bound at the wrists and ankles, had been found in a cane field, not far from the convent in Grand Coteau. Her car was discovered only two miles away, at a rural cemetery where she had been visiting her brother's grave site, the driver's door ajar, the engine still idling.

In the last six months two women had been abducted in Baton Rouge and their bodies dumped in wetlands areas. The murder of the black woman in Grand Coteau bore similarities to the homicides in Baton Rouge, except this was the first time the killer, if indeed the same perpetrator murdered all three women, had struck in the area we call Acadiana.

A one-paragraph addendum to the wire-service story mentioned that over thirty women in the Baton Rouge area had been murdered by unknown perpetrators in the last decade.

Clete Purcel, my old friend from NOPD, had opened a branch of his P.I. business in New Iberia, and was now dividing his time between here and his office on St. Ann in New Orleans. He claimed he was simply expanding his business parameters, but in truth Clete's shaky legal status and his penchant for creating chaos and mayhem wherever he went made instant mobility an imperative in his day-to-day existence.

How many cops have longer rap sheets than most of the criminals they put in the can? Over the years, some of Clete's antics have included the following: forcing an entire dispenser of liquid hand soap down a button man's mouth in the men's room of the Greyhound bus depot; leaving a drunk U.S. congressman handcuffed to a fire hydrant on St. Charles Avenue; filling a gangster's convertible with cement; dangling a gang-banger by his ankles off a fire escape five stories above the street; driving an earthmover back and forth through Max Calveci's palatial home on Lake Pontchartrain; stuffing a billiard ball inside the mouth of a child molester; parking a nine-Mike round in the brainpan of a federal snitch; and, top this, possibly pouring sand in the fuel tank of an airplane, causing the deaths of a Galveston mobster by the name of Sally Dio and a few of his hired gumballs.