"You are late again."

Myron stood at rigid attention in the middle of the room, his hands knotted together at the buckle of his skinny black belt, his expression sour with disapproval.

"I'm sorry, Myron," Annie said, barely sparing him a glance as she entered his domain and went to the card drawer.

"Mr. Myron," he intoned. "I'll have you know, I've spoken with the sheriff about your poor performance since you were assigned to me as my assistant. You are chronically tardy and run off at your own whim. This is a records department. Records are synonymous with stability. I cannot allow chaos in my records department."

"I'm sorry," she mumbled as she flicked through the evidence cards.

Myron's face pinched tight as he leaned over her shoulder. "What are you doing, Deputy Broussard? Are you listening to me?"

Annie kept her eyes on her task. "I'm a goof-off. You're pissed off. You want Gus to take me off this job, but I'll try to do better. Honest."

She pulled the evidence card from the Nolan rape and ran a fingertip down the inventory. There, listed on the third line: HAIRS. The pubic hair Stokes had fished out of Jennifer Nolan's bathtub drain.

She tapped one foot impatiently. Myron moved into her field of vision again, looking a little uncertain at her lack of response to his tirade.

"What you looking at?" he asked. "What you think you're doing?"

"My job," she said simply, sliding the evidence card back in place.

Hairs had been logged in and checked back out to the lab. That didn't mean the hairs belonged to the rapist. Jennifer Nolan was a redhead. Her pubic hair would have stood out from any darker hair in the drain. Stokes could have picked out what he wanted and left the rest-left his own- to wash away.

Annie's stomach churned. She was on the verge of accusing a detective of being a serial rapist. If she was right, Chaz Stokes was not only a rapist but a murderer-either indirectly or directly. If she was wrong, he'd have her badge. She needed evidence, and he was in charge of every piece of it.

"Whatsa matter with you, Broussard?" Myron squawked. "You sick or something? You been drinking?"

"Yeah, you know, I'm not feeling very well," Annie mumbled, pushing the drawer shut. "I might be sick. Excuse me."

"I don't truck with drinkers," Myron warned as she walked away. "There ain't no place for that kind of thing in records. Alcohol is a tool of the devil."

Annie wound her way through the halls to her locker room, went in, and sat down on her folding chair beneath the dull glow of the bare lightbulb. Someone had drilled a new hole in the wall-breast height. She would need to break out the spackling compound, but what she needed now was a few moments to untangle the threads in her mind.

"Keep the threads separate or you end up with a knot, 'Toinette."

She had a knot all right, and she was trapped in the middle of it. Renard was sending her gifts. Donnie Bichon was in cahoots with Marcotte, who was in cahoots with the mob. Stokes was a bad cop at best and a killer at worst.

"You asked for it," she muttered. "You wanted to be a detective. You had to solve the mystery."

One mystery at a time. Stokes seemed the most pressing problem. If her suspicions about him were right, then other women would be in danger.

"I'll be in danger," she said, a flashback of last night coming to her in jarring black and white: the ink black of the night, the pale crushed shell of the parking lot, the white papers scattering at her feet as she dropped the files. The sharp crack of the rifle, the shattering of glass.

The memory bled back into another and another. The anger in Stokes's eyes as they had argued about the missing evidence. The fury on his face that night months ago when he had fought with her in the parking lot of the Voodoo Lounge because she wasn't interested in going out with him. The aggressive way he had moved toward her, as if he meant to strike her or grab her.

He was a man capable of instant, intense rage, which he covered with loose, easy charm. He was by turns irrational and coldly logical, depending on the subject. Unpredictable. A chameleon. These were traits that had formed over the course of his life, traits he had brought with him when he had come here from Mississippi four years ago. Coincidentally, not long before the Bayou Strangler had begun his reign of terror. He may have even worked one or both of the Partout Parish murders connected to the Strangler: Annie Delahoussaye and Savannah Chandler.

That could be easily checked out, though Annie didn't see the need. Despite the gossip that had run wild since Pam's death, she didn't believe the allegations that the cops had tampered with the evidence in the Strangler case. No, that evil had been burned out of Partout Parish… and a new one was taking root in the ashes.

What had brought Stokes here in the first place? she wondered. More important, what had he left behind? A good service record? Had his last supervisor been sad to lose him or glad to see the last of him? Had the city or county he worked in experienced a sudden drop in sex crimes after Stokes had gone? Had he left any victims in his wake?

It was rare for a man to become a sexual predator in his thirties. That kind of behavior generally started earlier-late teens or early twenties-and continued on throughout his life. Despite the claims of various tax-sponsored programs, true sexual predators were seldom if ever rehabilitated. Their heads were wired wrong, their malevolent attitudes toward women carved forever in stone hearts.

She needed to get into Stokes's personnel file, get the name of the last force he had served on in Mississippi. Personnel files were kept in the sheriff's offices under the ever-vitriolic, blue-shadowed glare of Valerie Comb.

A fist struck the door to the locker room with the force of a hurled rock, making Annie jump.

"Broussard? You in there?"

"Who wants to know?"

"Perez." He pulled the door open and stuck his head in. "Shit, I figured the least I could get out of this was to see you naked."

"Get out of what?" she said peevishly.

"The case. Your shooter. I'm your detective. Lucky fucking me. Come on. I need your statement and I ain't got all day."

Perez was as interested in her case as he was in the politics of Uruguay. He doodled on a yellow legal pad as Annie related not only the shooting incident but her run-in with the Cadillac Man the night before, since there was the possibility the two incidents were related.

"Did you get a tag number?"

"No."

"Did you see the driver?"

"He was wearing a ski mask."

"Know anybody with a big car like that?"

"No."

"Why didn't you call it in that night?"

"Would you have done anything?"

He gave her a flat look.

"I wrote it up the next day," she said. "Called around to the body shops looking for the car. Nothing. Checked the log sheets for reports of a stolen Caddy, or something like a Caddy. Nothing."

"And you didn't see the shooter last night?"

"No."

"Didn't see his vehicle?"

"No."

"Any ideas who it might have been?"

Annie looked at him for a long moment, knowing she couldn't name any of her prime suspects without revealing the mess she'd embroiled herself in, and certainly not without pissing Perez off by casting aspersions on two cops.

"I'm not very popular at the moment."

"What a news flash." He narrowed his eyes and stroked a finger across one side of his bushy mustache. "I figured you'd point the finger at Fourcade. He's gotta hate you more than anyone else. We all know how you feel about him."

"You don't know shit about me. It wasn't Fourcade."

"How do you know?"