Whytesburg was neither ready nor able to absorb the horror of Nancy Denton and Lieutenant Michael Webster.

Gaines put Webster in a cell. The man had not confessed to anything; nor had any evidence—damning or circumstantial—been isolated or identified that could attribute the death of Nancy Denton to Webster. Regardless, the very presence of the man was sufficient to instigate a sense of agitation and disturbance in the place. Gaines had Hagen, Chantry, and Dalton take Webster’s clothes from him. They gave him a pair of jeans, a white T-shirt, and a blue-and-white-striped shirt. His feet were left bare, and he was given no belt. Webster did not profess to understand what was happening, nor did he question their actions. They asked for his clothes. He stripped and handed them over. He did not complain, protest, or resist. When he stood there in his clean clothes, he seemed ageless, almost a child, the expression on his face one of bemused detachment.

Once his clothes had been bagged and tagged, Gaines went down there.

Webster was seated on the bed. Gaines stood outside the cell.

“You understand why you’re here, Mike?” Gaines asked.

“Because you think I did something to Nancy Denton that I shouldn’t have done.”

Gaines could not argue with that.

“But I know what I know, and I see what I see,” Webster went on, “and unless you knew what I knew, unless you had seen what I have seen, then there’s no way to understand what I did.”

“I don’t think I will ever understand what you did.”

Webster smiled. “Then you surprise me, Sheriff Gaines. I thought you, of all people, would appreciate what had to be done.”

Gaines restrained himself from asking a direct question.

Did you kill Nancy Denton?

Did you cut open her body and remove her heart, and did you put a snake inside her and bury her in the riverbank?

A confession was needed, but on record, on tape, and preferably in the presence of a lawyer. Gaines did not wish to exhaust whatever urge Webster might have to confess in a way that could not be admissible when pressing charges and seeking arraignment.

There was silence between them for some time. Gaines could hear Webster breathing. He could feel his own heartbeat—in his chest, in his temples, in his wrists. He felt electrified, a raw tension throughout his whole body, as if his skin had been stripped and he was being doused in salt water.

He had not felt this way for six years.

“And now?” Gaines asked.

“Now?” Webster asked. He raised his eyebrows and looked directly at Gaines. His expression was clear and uncomplicated, the expression of a curious infant, an intrigued child.

“Are you not concerned about what will happen to you now?”

Webster shook his head. He smiled ruefully. “We have done too many things, Sheriff. People like you and me are consigned to some dark place. I’ll say this now, and without any great concern for who hears it. If I wind up in heaven, well, I figure I’ll be the first of my kind. If you follow me, then you’ll be the second.” He smiled, looked away for a moment. “I did what I thought was best, as we all do. Most of us, anyway. I did what I believed was the right thing to do, and I prayed that good would come of it, and I have been praying for twenty years, but I knew, you see? I knew in my heart of hearts that she would never come back to me.” He closed his eyes, lowered his head. “I am sad. I am so desperately sad. She has gone, and had I chosen to go after her, then maybe we’d be together someplace now. I waited for her for twenty years, and now I am simply afraid that she was not able to wait for me.”

Gaines didn’t reply for a while, and then he stepped away from the bars. “You’re gonna stay here for a while, Mike, and then I’m gonna have some more questions, okay?”

“Sure thing, Sheriff. I ain’t fixin’ to go anyplace anytime soon.”

Gaines turned and headed for the stairs. He felt nauseous, lightheaded. He did not understand what was happening, but he did not like how Webster made him feel. It went beyond the fact that the guy might be a child killer. It went beyond the fact that the mere presence of the man dredged up memories that Gaines had long since committed himself to forgetting. It lay in the realm of something altogether more sinister and unsettling. There was something about it that possessed undertones of the occult. The murdered girl. The heart excavated and removed. The snake in the box. The riverbank burial. It carried with it images from the stories he’d heard as a child, stories of wanga charms filled with the poisonous roots of the figure maudit tree, of voodoo queen Marie Laveau, the rituals performed behind her cottage on St. Ann Street in the French Quarter, of Li Grand Zombi and Papa Limba, of the Dahoman spirit Legba, the guardian of crossroads. If Gaines’s mother got word of this, she would be in her element, her own childhood and upbringing rooted firmly in the wild collision of voodoo and Catholicism.

St. Peter, St. Peter, open the door,

I’m callin’ you, come to me!

St. Peter, St. Peter, open the door,

Papa Legba, open the gate for me, Ago-e

Ativon Legba, open the gate for me;

The gate for me, papa, so that I may enter the temple,

On my way back, I shall thank you for this favor.

Gaines paused at the top of the stairwell and looked back toward the cell. Webster was immobile, seated there on the bed, his regulation blues, his bare feet, his dirty hands, his unkempt hair.

From a distance, he seemed harmless. But then, from a distance, so did the devil.

Gaines understood what would happen if word got out about Webster. He didn’t know whether a lynching party would show up on the doorstep, but such a thing would not have surprised him. Sometimes the very worst solution for dealing with something like this was the only solution people could comprehend. But for this to be contained, Gaines needed a solid and sustainable case. He had nothing but a handful of words from Webster that there was a connection between himself and the girl.

I done what I had to do, and that’s all there is to the story.

And then later, the things he’d said as they’d arrived at the office, when he’d asked if he could see the girl again.

Gaines would have to go down to Webster’s room at the motel and search it, but for that he would need a warrant. And the likelihood of there being anything that had survived twenty years . . . unless, of course, Webster had kept some memento. Such a thing would be circumstantial, but anything that gave Gaines sufficient reason to further detain Webster would be appreciated. He would have to get a confession. That was the simplicity of it.

In those moments at Webster’s motel room, in the panic he felt, the rush of alarm that assaulted his senses, his primary concern had merely been to get Webster in a cell, to hold him down, to remove any possibility of flight. Now that that had been done, he had time to think, but given the time to think, he did not know which direction to take.

Getting some kind of basic training, winding up with a certificate to prove it, well, there was a little more to policing than that. City detectives and small-town sheriffs needed the same skills. Didn’t matter who or what you were investigating; the same basic tools were required. Seeing what no one else saw. Maybe just seeing the same thing but reading something different into it. That was it. That was the first thing you needed. And when everyone else had stopped looking, when everyone else has just up and quit because whatever the hell they were seeing wasn’t telling them what they wanted to hear, you were the one who just kept on looking, kept asking questions, kept nagging at it until the wrong-colored thread pulled loose. There was little more required than an open mind and an inexhaustible supply of patience. And part of that ability to persevere in the face of contradiction and contrariness had to come from experience. Life experience. Experience that told you there were always truths to be found, even in the company of liars.