“We’ve been looking in the wrong places for information on Ronald Bledsoe. We’ve been looking for a criminal record that doesn’t exist and faulting ourselves for not finding it. The real story on a guy like Bledsoe is in the façade of normalcy.”

“I don’t follow.”

“The reason guys like BTK and John Wayne Gacy and the Green River guy, what’s-his-name, Gary Ridgway, can kill people for decades is they’re protected. Their family members live in denial because they can’t accept the fact they’re related to a monster, or that they’ve slept with him or had children with him. How would you like to find out your father is Norman Bates?”

“I got the point. What do you need?”

“Everything I can get on a guy by the name of Tom Claggart. He has a house next door to Otis Baylor’s place in New Orleans.”

“What’s his tie-in?”

“He’s an export-import man. Baylor said Claggart attended either Virginia Military Institute or the Citadel. The Citadel is in South Carolina. That’s where Bledsoe seems to be from.”

“How soon do you need this?”

“Right now.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Betsy, Bledsoe sent Bobby Mack Rydel after my daughter. She came within inches of being killed. We’ve been square with you guys. You owe me.”

There was a beat. “I think we do,” she replied.

THE SKY HAD SOFTENED to a dark blue when Molly and Alafair parked their automobile next to Burke Hall, the old drama and arts building hard by a lake that was thick with flooded cypress. Molly had a guest-faculty sticker on her car and almost always used the same parking area when she visited the university because there were no evening classes in Burke Hall and the spot between the building and the lake was secluded and usually empty. She put her purse under the seat and locked the car, then she and Alafair walked across the campus to the library.

The grass in the quadrangle had just been mowed, and the air smelled like flowers blooming and wet hay, and leaves and pecan husks someone was burning in a damp pile. The roofed walkways that enclosed the quadrangle were full of students, the moss in the live oaks limned by the glow of the lighted windows in classroom buildings and student dorms. A sorority was conducting a bake sale in front of the library entrance, the girls wearing sweaters because of the chill, an aura of innocence about them that one would associate with a 1940s movie. The scene I describe is not one of nostalgia. It’s one that existed. It’s one in which we either believe or disbelieve. It represents I think to all of us the kind of moment that should be inviolate.

Unfortunately it is not.

After Molly and Alafair entered the building, a man in a raincoat paused at the bake-sale table and bought a pastry. He wore a rain hat that seemed too large for his head and cupped his ears, like an oversize bowler sitting on a manikin. He also wore a mustache with streaks of white in it. He seemed to be a nervous man, and he gave off a smell that was like a mixture of deodorant and moldy fabric or socks left in a gym locker.

He paid for the pastry with a five-dollar bill and wanted no change. When he pushed the pastry into his mouth, his eyes were fastened on the interior of the library. The coed who had sold him the pastry offered him a napkin. He took it from her and entered the building, wiping his mouth. In his right hand he still held the napkin the coed had given him and the cellophane the pastry had come wrapped in. A trash receptacle was less than three feet from him. But he balled the cellophane and napkin in his palm and shoved them in his coat pocket. Then he walked up the stairs to the second floor of the library, his face lifted, like a hunter glancing upward into the canopy of a forest.

I DIDN’T WAIT for Betsy Mossbacher to call me back with information about Tom Claggart. I used my cell phone, in case Betsy called on the landline, and talked to the state police in both Virginia and South Carolina, but the people on duty were all after-hours personnel and had the same problem I did, namely that all the state offices that could give answers about Tom Claggart were closed.

Then I used the most valuable and unlauded investigative resource in the United States, the lowly reference librarian. Their salaries are wretched and they receive credit for nothing. Their desks are usually tucked away in the stacks or in a remote corner where they have to shush noisy high school students or put up with street people blowing wine in their faces or snoring in the stuffed chairs. But their ability to find obscure information is remarkable and they persevere like Spartans.

The tidewater accent of the one I spoke with at the Citadel library in Charleston was a genuine pleasure to listen to. Her name was iris Rosecrans and I had the feeling she could read aloud from the telephone directory and make it sound like a recitation of Shakespearean sonnets. I told her who I was and asked if she could find any record of a past student by the name of Tom Claggart.

“As you probably have already gathered, Mr. Robicheaux, the registrar’s office is closed until tomorrow morning,” she said. “However, that said, I think I can go back through some of the yearbooks and be of some service to you.”

“Ms. Rosecrans, I need every bit of information I can get regarding this man. It’s extremely urgent. I don’t want to burden you with my situation or to seem melodramatic, but someone tried to kill my daughter and I think the man responsible is named Ronald Bledsoe. I think Ronald Bledsoe may have some relationship to Tom Claggart.”

She paused a moment. “Spell ‘Bledsoe’ for me, please.”

Twenty minutes later she called back. “Thomas S. Claggart was a freshman and sophomore student here in 1977 and ’78. His hometown is listed as Camden. He’s not included in the yearbooks after ’78. Ronald Bledsoe appears never to have been a student here.”

“Well, I appreciate your-”

I heard a piece of paper crinkle, like a sheet on a tablet being folded back. “I do have other information, Mr. Robicheaux,” she said.

“Please, go ahead.”

“I talked to the reference librarian in Camden. She checked the old telephone directories and found a T. S. Claggart listed during the years ’76 to ’79. I called the police station there, but no one had heard of a Claggart family. The officer I spoke with was kind enough to give me the number of the man who was police chief at the time. So I called him at his house. Would you like his name?”

“No, no, what did he tell you?”

“He remembered the senior Claggart quite well. He said he was a United States Army sergeant stationed at Fort Jackson. His wife had died several years earlier, but he had a son named Tom Junior, and perhaps a stepson. The stepson was named Ronald.”

“Bledsoe?”

“The retired police chief wasn’t sure of the last name. But it was not Claggart. He said the boy was peculiar-looking and strange in his behavior. He had the feeling the boy had been in foster homes or a place for disturbed children.

“That’s all I was able to gather. We’re about to close. Would you like for me to search a little bit more tomorrow? I don’t mind.”

“What I would like, Ms. Rosecrans, is to buy you an island in the Caribbean. Or perhaps to ask the Vatican to grant you early canonization.”

“That’s very nice of you,” she said.

I told Clete what I had just learned from Ms. Rosecrans. He was eating a sandwich in the living room, watching the History Channel.

“You think Claggart has been covering Bledsoe’s ass all these years?” he said.

“Probably. Or maybe they work as a team. You remember the Hillside Strangler case in California? The perps were cousins. Explain how one family can have two guys like that in it.”

He started to reply, but I opened my cell phone and began punching in numbers.