In the end, Fourcade had pushed past them through the doorway and let himself into Interview B.

The sheriff stalked past Annie and out the door. She hustled after him, a choke hold on her temper. If she'd hauled in a civilian, no one would have questioned her judgment or her perception of facts.

The door to the interview room was wide open. Rodrigue stood with one hand on the frame and one eye on his abandoned desk, grinning as he traded comments with someone inside the room, his mustache wriggling like a woolly caterpillar on his upper lip.

"Hey, Sheriff, we're thinking maybe Nick oughta get a ticker-tape parade."

"Shut up," Gus barked as he bulled his way past the desk sergeant and into the room where Degas and Pitre had sprawled into chairs. Coffee cups sat steaming on the small table. Fourcade sat on the far side, smoking a cigarette and looking detached.

Gus cut a scathing look at his deputies. "Y'all don't have nothing better to do, then why are you on my payroll? Get outta here! You too!" he snapped at Annie. "Go home."

"Go home? But-but, Sheriff," she stammered, "I was there. I'm the-"

"So was he." He pointed at Fourcade. "I talked to you, now I'm gonna talk to him. You got a problem with that, Deputy?"

"No, sir," Annie said tightly. She looked at Fourcade, wanting him to meet her eyes, wanting to see… what? Innocence? She knew he wasn't innocent. Apology? He didn't owe her anything. He took a drag on his cigarette and focused on the stream of smoke.

Gus planted his hands on the back of a vacant chair and leaned on it, waiting to hear the door close behind him. And when the door closed, he waited some more, wishing he would come to in his own cozy bed with his plump, snoring wife and realize this day had all been a bad dream and nothing more.

"What do you have to say for yourself, Detective?" he asked at last.

Nick stubbed out the butt in the ashtray Pitre had obligingly fetched him. What was he supposed to say? He had no explanation, only excuses.

"Nothing," he said.

"Nothing. Nothing?" Noblier repeated, as if the word were foreign to his tongue. "Look at me, Nick."

He did so and wondered which was the better choice: to allow himself an emotional response to the disappointment he saw or to block it. Emotion was what unfailingly landed him in trouble. He had spent the last year of his life learning to hold it in an iron fist deep within him. Tonight it had broken free, and here he sat.

"I took a big chance bringing you on board here," Gus said quietly. "I did it because I knew your papa, and I owed him something from way back. And because I believed you about that business in New Orleans, and I thought you could do a good job here.

"This is how you pay me back?" he asked, voice rising.

"You screw up an investigation and beat the hell out of a suspect? You better have something more than nothing to say for yourself, or, by God, I'll throw your ass to the wolves!

"Why'd you go near Renard when I told you not to? Why'd you have to get in his face? Jesus Christ, do you have any idea what him and that anorexic lawyer of his are gonna do to this office? Tell me you had some kind of cause to go near him. What were you even doing in that part of town?"

"Drinking."

"Oh, great! Good answer! You left my office in a flaming temper and went and threw alcohol on it!"

He shoved the chair into the table. "Damage control," he muttered. "How the fuck do we spin this? I can say you were on surveillance."

"You told the press you pulled the surveillance."

"Fuck the press. I tell ' em what I want 'em to think. Renard is still a suspect. We got reason to watch him. That gives you cause to be there, and it shows I believe in your innocence on that evidence-tampering bullshit Kudrow's trying to stir up. So then what? Did he provoke you?"

"Does it matter?" Nick asked. "Never mind that he's a murderer, and the goddamn court shoulda punched his ticket for him-"

"Yeah, the court should have, but it didn't. Then Hunter Davidson tried to and you stopped him. It looks like you just wanted the job all for yourself."

"I know what it looks like."

"It looks like assault, at the very least. Broussard thinks I should throw your ass in jail."

Broussard. Nick pushed to his feet, the anger stirring anew. Broussard, who hadn't said ten words to him in the six months he'd been in Bayou Breaux. Who suddenly sought him out at Laveau's. Who appeared out of nowhere with a gun and the power to arrest him.

"Will you?" he asked.

"Not if I don't have to."

"Renard'll press charges."

"You bet your balls he will." Gus rubbed a hand over his face and secretly wished he'd stayed in geology all those years ago. "He's no shit-for-brains lowlife you can stick his head in a toilet and flush a confession outta him and won't nobody listen to him when he screams about it. Kudrow's been threatening a lawsuit all along. Harassment, he says. Unlawful arrest, he says. Well, I sure as hell know what he'll say about this."

He dropped down onto a chair. "All in all, I think I'm gonna wish you'd finished the job and fed Renard to the gators."

"What you hanging around for, Broussard?" Rodrigue asked. Blocky and nearly bald, he stood behind his desk shuffling papers with an air of false importance, as if he hadn't been kicked out of the interview room himself.

Annie gave the sergeant a defiant glare. "I'm the arresting officer. I've got a suspect to book, a report to file, and evidence to log in."

Rodrigue snorted. "There ain't gonna be no arrest, darlin'. Fourcade, he didn't do nothing ever'body in this parish hasn't wanted to do."

"Last time I looked, assault was against the law."

"Dat wasn't no assault. Dat was justice. Oh, yeah."

"Yeah," Degas chimed in. "And you interrupted it, Broussard. There's the crime. Why didn't you let him finish the job?"

Because that would have been murder, Annie thought. That Renard deserved killing didn't enter into it. The law was the law, and she was sworn to uphold it, as were Fourcade and Rodrigue and Degas, and Gus Noblier.

"That's right," Pitre said, swaggering toward her, pulling the handcuffs off his belt. "Maybe we oughta be arresting you, Broussard. Obstruction of justice."

"Interfering with an officer in the performance of his duty," Degas added.

"I think a strip search is in order here," Pitre suggested, reaching for her arm.

"Fuck you, Pitre," she snapped, jerking away from him.

A salacious sneer lit his face. "I'm up for it, sugar, if you think it'll help your case."

"Go piss up a rope."

"The sheriff told you to go home, Broussard," Rodrigue said. "You're disobeying an order. You wanna go on report?"

Annie shook her head in disbelief. He would condone brutality, and write her up for loitering. She looked at the door to the interview room, uncertain. Procedure dictated one course of action, her sheriff had ordered another. She would have given anything to know what was being said on the other side of that door, but no one was going to let her in either literally or figuratively. Gus had taken over, and Gus Noblier was absolute ruler of the Partout Parish Sheriff's Office, if not of Partout Parish itself.

"Fine," she said grudgingly. "I'll do the paperwork in the morning."

She felt their eyes burning into her back all the way to the door, their hostility a tangible thing. The sensation made her feel ill. These were men she had known for two years, men she had joked with.

The mist had evolved into a steady, cold rain. Annie pulled her denim jacket up over her head and ran to the Jeep, where her ice cream had melted and was seeping through the carton into a milky puddle on the driver's side floor. A fitting end to her evening.

She sat behind the wheel, trying to imagine what would happen tomorrow, but nothing came. She had no frame of reference. She had never arrested a fellow officer.