Kenner straightened, still swearing half under his breath. He couldn't believe this was happening in his parish. He ruled with an iron fist and an eagle eye. How could this have happened? He felt like a cleanliness fanatic who had turned a light on only to find roaches in his kitchen.

"I'm impounding the car," he declared, stalking across the room in search of a telephone. "We'll dust it for prints, have the lab boys from New Iberia go over it for trace evidence. And I'll take the handbag too."

Laurel nodded.

He snarled and turned to Caroline. "I need to use a phone, and I need to bag this jewelry as evidence. Have you got any Ziploc bags?"

"I don't know," she murmured, rising, shaken anew by this bizarre turn of events. She fussed with the black beads she wore, trying without success to think clearly. "They would be in the kitchen, I suppose," she mumbled, her gaze darting nervously to Laurel, to Kenner, to Danjermond, and back, as if one of them might have the answer. "Pearl would know. We'll ask Pearl."

They went out and down the hall. As the parlor door swung open then shut, the sound of Mama Pearl's wailing rose and fell. Laurel stood staring down at the cheap, gaudy earring with its chips of colored glass. Some woman had thought it was pretty, had worn it to feel special, had died wearing it. Had she died a brutal death, as Savannah had, suffering horribly, alone with her tormentor, begging for death? Tears rose in her eyes, in her throat. She held them at bay with sheer willpower.

"Why you, Laurel?" Danjermond's voice flowed over her like silk, the question burned like acid.

"I don't know," she whispered.

"Why would he single you out? Is he someone you know? Are you someone he wants?"

She flinched at the thought, struggled to hang on to her logic. "I-I d-don't fit the pattern."

"No, you don't." He hooked a finger beneath her chin and lifted her face, as if he thought he might see the answers in her eyes. "Does he want you to catch him, Laurel? Or does he want to show you he can't be caught?"

She met his steady green gaze, felt it probing, felt its power. She backed away from it, from him, shaking her head, feeling too raw for this kind of cross examination. "I don't know. I don't want to know."

He arched a brow. "You don't want to see him caught?"

"Of course I do," she said vehemently. She paced away from him again, raking a hand back through the hair she hadn't even combed yet today. "I want him caught," she said, her voice trembling with the need for it. "I want him tried and convicted and sentenced to a death worse than anything the courts would allow." She stopped and glared up at him, hating him for his calm control. "If I could, I'd be the one to drive the stake through his heart with my own two hands."

"You have to catch him first."

"That's Kenner's job, your job," Laurel said, backing down again mentally and physically. "Not mine."

Danjermond lifted the earring on the end of his fine gold pen, watching as it twisted in the air and caught the light like a Christmas ornament. "I don't think he would agree, Laurel."