“I feel perfectlyhideous,” Doodlebug muttered.

Jules pulled alongside the curb in front of the Banks Street Bar and Grill, two blocks west of Jesuit High School. The tremendous crush of parents and potential enrollees who’d come out for the school’s open house prevented him from parking any closer. “Shaddup already. You got no reason to be whinin‘. I let you pick out your own outfit at Wal-Mart, didn’t I?”

“And a fat lot of good that freedom of choice did me. Ye gods… even their Women’s Department was filled with the most awful grotesqueries imaginable. But the Boys’ Department-that shapeless denim, those threadbare sports logo T-shirts-all I can say is, I pray it’ll beanother forty-eight years before I shop for boys’ clothing again. And must I wear this ridiculous baseball cap?”

Jules climbed out of the car onto pavement so broken and tilted it looked like the floor of a fun house. “It’s either that or chop off your hair, pal.”

“But plenty of boys wear their hair long nowadays.”

“Not at Jesuit they don’t.”

They walked toward the imposing three-story brick edifices that overwhelmed Banks Street. In contrast to the Catholic grandeur of the school buildings, the surrounding houses were tired and dingy, leaning wearily shoulder to shoulder like a police roundup of overworked hookers crowded into a freight elevator.

They walked into the main academic building and were immediately immersed in a sea of anxious parents, overfriendly faculty, and too-bored-for-words pubescents. Doodlebug stared coldly at the current Jesuit students, standing around nonchalantly in their light brown, paramilitary-looking uniforms.

“What a perfect bunch of Fascists-in-training,” he whispered harshly to Jules. “Cannon fodder for the next Nathan Knight campaign. And the Jesuits are supposedly theintellectuals of the Catholic Church? This descent into the inferno makes me evenmore grateful to you for making me miss high school.”

Jules spotted a nun in the crowd. He grabbed Doodlebug’s sleeve and pulled him over to her. “ ‘Scuse me, Sister. My boy and me wanna take a look at your library. Can you maybe point us in the right direction?”

“Oh, you must mean our Resource Center!”

“Yeah, I guess so. That where you got yer books and stuff?”

“Oh, sir, our Resource Center has much more than justbooks! It’s also our computer hub, audiovisual lab, and creative graphics shop. It’s one of the finest knowledge facilities of any high school in the South. We’re very,very proud of our Resource Center.”

“Yeah, I can see that. So where is it?”

“Just take those stairs at the end of the hall to the second floor, then turn right. Or we have an elevator just around that corner there.”

“We’ll take the stairs. Thanks, Sister. Have a swell summer.”

The short nun sniffed the air like a groundhog emerging from its hole on the first day of spring. “Say, do you smell somethingburning?”

Jules was already pulling his companion down the crowded hall. He grimaced, then cuffed the side of Doodlebug’s head. “D.B.! Put out that damn cigarette!”

They ducked into the stairwell. Both vampires sighed with relief. Jules headed straight for a water fountain tucked in the corner and splashed cold liquid down the neck of his shirt, dousing his smoldering skin.

“You justhad to chat up a nun, didn’t you?” Doodlebug said, fanning his burning arms. “I didn’t appreciate that whack to the head, by the way.”

Jules tossed handfuls of water in his friend’s direction. “Look, I found out where the library is, didn’t I?”

“Resource Center.”

“Whatever. Sorry about the wallop. I had to think fast.”

“Next time, let your brain do the thinking, not your hands.”

They climbed the stairs to the second floor. The Resource Center wouldn’t have looked out of place at a medium-sized university. The facility seemed to have more computers than books. After a few minutes of searching, they found the yearbook collection in a dimly lit, musty-smelling annex room.

The dusty wooden shelves were lined with thick, hardbound editions ofThe Jayson dating back to the 1920s. Jules scooped up ten of the big volumes, starting with the 1976-77 edition and ending with the one dated 1985-86. He set the stack of yearbooks on a nearby table with a heavy thud.

“According to what Mo told us, he coulda been here at Jesuit any of these years.”

“Let’s get cracking, then,” Doodlebug said. He looked around him, clearly uncomfortable, and hugged his arms to his sides. “The sooner we’re out of here and away from all these crucifixes, the happier I’ll be.”

“Amen to that, brother.”

“Are you sure you’ll be able to recognize him?”

“Oh, yeah,” Jules said, laying the first volume flat and skipping over the sections on Student Life and Athletics to the pages with portraits of freshman students. “I got his ugly puss memorized. Maybe he’s a little younger and a little browner in these yearbooks than he was when I saw him, but there’s no way I’d mistake him for anybody else.”

Ninety minutes later the multitude of crucifixes on the walls and in the pages of the yearbooks had begun taking their toll. Both vampires were sweating profusely. Jules was able to skim the first three or four yearbooks fairly quickly; the number of black students during those years was small, only four to six a page. As the years became more recent, the numbers of black students increased. He found himself having to concentrate more closely, matching the sharp chin and cold, cruel eyes of recent memory against a larger number of possible matches. Many of the faces were soft and relatively innocent; these he was able to discount pretty quickly. Others seemed warier, already cynical and hardened… even kids lucky enough to go to Jesuit weren’t immune to the tough influence of the streets, Jules had to remind himself.

He wiped his clammy forehead with his sleeve, then cracked open the 1981-82Jayson and flipped to the freshman photos and descriptions. In no time one portrait leapt off the page and drop-kicked him square on the nose.

“Holy shit… I found him.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure!” He quickly read the description beneath the photo. “Look at this-the little fucker was a member of thedebate team! No wonder he talked such a blue streak before pissin‘ on my coffin.”

“Let me see.” Doodlebug pulled the yearbook to his side of the table. Jules prodded the portrait with a thick forefinger. “Malik Raddeaux?That’s his name? I’m surprised. I wouldn’t have expected his real name to be so close to hisnom de guerre.”

“Talk English, would ya?”

“To his gang name. Itis pretty clever, though-substitutingRado forRaddeaux.”

Jules pulled the book back to his side and read the capsule description again. “Be sure and compliment him when you meet him.”

“That won’t be long in coming. Now that we have a name to feed to my contact at thePicayune, we should be able to land some solid leads.”

“Maybe we won’t even hafta bother with your pansy pal at the newspaper.”

Doodlebug frowned. “Why not? You have a better idea?”

Jules smiled triumphantly. “You didn’t read the whole description, did you? TheseJayson‘s, they’re pretty thorough. Didya notice how they list the names of siblings who attend other Catholic schools? Our boy Malik’s got himself a sister.”

The first Elisha Raddeaux listed in the phone book turned out to be a fifty-eight-year-old great-grandmother raising two generations of children in a three-room New Orleans East apartment. The second Elisha Raddeaux had left town, leaving no forwarding address with her former landlord or neighbors. The third and final Elisha Raddeaux lived in a modest but well-kept camelback shotgun on Laurel Street, a couple of blocks from Tipitina’s Uptown Music Club.