I had believed that my will alone could solve the problem in our lives. As I lay beside her on top of the sheets, I realized that, as usual, I was wrong. But at a moment like that, who cares where gifts come from?

At five the next morning Clete Purcel knocked on my back screen. He wore canvas boat shoes without socks, a pair of baggy safari shorts covered with snap-button pockets, his porkpie hat, and a sleeveless purple and gold Mike the Tiger jersey wash-faded to the thinness of cheesecloth. His face was unshaved and bright with fresh sunburn.

'You're not going to dime me, are you, Streak?'

'What do I know about warrants in Orleans Parish?' I stepped outside into the blue coolness of the morning and eased the screen shut behind me. 'Bootsie and Alf are still asleep. Let's walk down to the dock.'

We went down the slope through the deep shadow of the trees, stepping over the trip wire I had strung for Buchalter. Clete kept cracking his knuckles, as though they were big walnut shells. His eyes were red and irritated along the rims, as though he were hungover, but I could smell no alcohol on him.

'You look like you're getting a lot of sun,' I said.

'Why not? Life in the Quarter was turning me into a fat slug, anyway.'

Inside the shop I poured coffee and hot milk for both of us, and we took it out on one of the spool tables by the water. He unsnapped a pocket on his shorts and unfolded a nautical chart on the table.

'Can you show me where that sub is?' His eyes looked at the chart and not at me.

'What are you up to?'

'What do you care?'

'You look wired, Clete. What's wrong?'

'I've got a warrant on me, my business is in the toilet, Nate Baxter's trained shitheads'll probably try to smoke me on sight, and you ask what's wrong?'

I smoothed the chart flat with my palm. The marsh was emerald green after last night's rain, and the cypress knees along the bayous were grained and dark and shining with water from a passing boat's wake.

'Don't get in any deeper,' I said.

'In for a penny, in for a pound. You going to show me where it is or not?' He lit an unfiltered cigarette and flicked the match hard into the air.

I took a mechanical pencil from my shirt pocket and made three marks on the chart.

'These are the places where either I saw it or Hippo's friend pinged it. You can see the pattern. There's probably a trench that bleeds back off the continental shelf. A guy with a depth finder could set up a zigzag pattern and probably locate it. Unless it drops off the shelf and only gets blown back in by a storm.'

He stared down at the chart, his hat cocked over one eye.

'What are you going to do?' I asked.

'Maybe I should remodel it with some C-4.'

'Is the preacher mixed up in this?'

'Not yet. But he was sure beautiful on the radio last night, you know, that call-in show where the geek in the street gets to express his opinion. Brother Oswald is telling people the Beast is about to rise from the sea.' He looked at me and tried to smile. 'Maybe he's talking about my ex.'

'What are you hiding from me, partner?'

He arched his cigarette out on the bayou and watched it hiss in the water and float downstream.

'I've got to quit this. My lungs feel like they've got battery acid in them,' he said.

'What's the gig, Clete?'

'I got to boogie, noble mon,' he said.

'Eat some breakfast.'

'Got to make it happen, Streak. Like you used to say, miles before I sleep and all that stuff. Hang loose.'

'How's Martina?'

He walked toward his convertible without answering, then turned, winked, and gave me the thumbs-up sign.

Just before noon, Ben Motley called me at the office.

'We got the trowel,' he said.

'Go on…'

'The blade was clean, but there was dried blood in a crack between the handle and the shaft. The lab says it's human.'

'What else?'

'Two types. One match. With a guy who had his heart taken out against the wall of the St. Louis Cemetery.'

'Why not two matches?'

'You're assuming we've found all the victims.'

'Where's Manuel?'

'In custody… This one doesn't make me feel too good, Robicheaux. The guy's got strained carrots for brains. The interpreter says he speaks some Indian dialect from down in the fucking Amazon.'

'You think it's too easy?'

'I think maybe we're talking patsy here. Hey, Lonighan's a prick but he was genuinely upset, like in a personal way, when he found out we were charging the kid with murder. Does that sound like Tommy Bobalouba to you?'

Not bad, Mots, I thought.

'Have you had any contact with Clete Purcel?' I said.

'Who?'

'He found a videotape on South American Indians, a documentary of some kind, in Max Calucci's house.'

'There's static on the line. I couldn't hear what you said. You got me? I didn't fucking hear that, Robicheaux.'

'Lonighan borrowed two hundred thou for his casino from the Calucci brothers. I have a feeling he was paying the debt by helping them set up the brown scag trade in the projects.'

'You tell Purcel he tries to put turds in the punch bowl on this one, he won't have to worry about Nate Baxter. I'll send his butt to Angola myself.'

'Rough words, Mots.'

'What you don't understand is Purcel doesn't take a guy down because the guy broke the law. He takes him down because he doesn't like the guy. That's why he'll never carry a shield again.'

'How do you think the case against the Indian is going to stand up?'

'Circumstantial evidence, a retard on the stand, a defense attorney who lets the jury know the retard is a grunt for a rich gangster who actually drowned somebody with a fire hose and got away with it. Take a guess how the jury might vote.'

'Thanks for all the good news.'

'It's not all bad. The word on the street is Lonighan's dying.'

'For some reason that doesn't fill me with joy, partner.'

'Lonighan's mixed up with the Caluccis and the dope trade in the projects. Those black kids we bust all the time, they weren't addicts when they came out of their mamas' womb. Believe it or not, even those dead dealers had families, Robicheaux.'

Why argue with charity? I eased the receiver down in the cradle and stared out i the window at the palm trees rattling in the wind. The bottom of the sky looked green over the gulf.

What was Clete Purcel doing?

I went home for lunch. When I came back the sheriff stopped me at the watercooler.

'The FBI just relayed some stuff to us from Interpol. They've got a fix on the woman,' he said.

'What?'

'Read it. It's on your desk. I thought stuff like that only went on in the Barker family.' He walked away and left me staring after him.

The statement from Interpol consisted of four paragraphs. There was nothing statistical or demonstrable about the information in them. As with all the other documents in the case, it was as though the writer were trying to describe an elusive presence that had been mirrored only briefly in the eyes of others.

But the images he used weren't those of the ordinary technical writer; they remained in the memory like splinters under the skin.

Two undercover antiterrorist agents in Berlin believed that the man known as William Buchalter and Willie Schwert and other variations operated inside a half dozen neo-Nazi groups with a half sister named Marie. A skinhead in a beer garden told a story of an initiation into a select inner group known in England and the United States as the Sword. A kidnapped Turkish laborer had knelt trembling on the dirt floor of a potato cellar, his wrists wired behind him, a burlap sack pulled over his face, while the initiates pledged their lives to the new movement. Then the woman named Marie had set the kidnapped man on fire.