Gaines directed his flashlight, and for a moment it seemed that Michael Webster had been buried up to his neck, only his head protruding from the dirt. He looked back at Gaines with blank and lifeless eyes. Gaines knew that he would never be able to blanch his mind of such a grotesque and strange image.

Their work was swift then, almost as if they wanted to be engaged in the task for as brief a time as possible. Preserving as much integrity as they could in the surrounding earth, they lifted the decapitated head from the ground and set it aside on some plastic sheeting that Hagen had brought from the trunk of the car. They would need to take pictures now, not wait until morning, so Gaines dispatched Hagen to get more lights, to bring the camera and flashbulbs from the office, and they would do the best they could.

After Hagen’s departure, Gaines and Powell stood back from the scene.

There was a tense and awkward silence between them for some minutes, and then Powell broke the deadlock with, “So, serious business or bullshit designed to scare you?”

Gaines shook his head. “It’s never what you believe, but what others believe.”

“But what do you believe?”

Gaines smiled resignedly. “I am a Louisianan. I was raised in New Orleans. This kind of thing has been there all through my life. Alice believed in it, and she saw things that she couldn’t even begin to explain, but . . .” He shook his head. “I am the eternal skeptic.”

“And it’s supposed to mean what?”

“The thing with the hand? It’s called a Hand of Glory. As far as I can recall, it’s supposed to be the dried and pickled hand of a hanged man. Usually the left hand, the sinister, unless the man was hanged for murder, in which case it’s the hand that he used to commit the murder. And fat is taken from the body and mixed with virgin wax and sesame oil to make a candle, and his hair is used for a wick. Whoever makes it is supposed to be able to render any person motionless and open any door. But I don’t think this is anything but a message.”

“And the message is what? That you should stay away? That you’ll be next to get your head buried in a field?”

“Maybe.”

“Any thoughts?”

“I’m pretty sure now that Webster did not kill Nancy. That he found her, just as he said. Why he did the thing with her heart, maybe we’ll never know. Now I’m starting to think that whoever killed Nancy also killed Michael and did this too. Or someone paid someone to do it.”

“Wade?”

“That’s what I’m thinking.”

“But you have nothing on him.”

“Right.”

“Except that he was the one who bailed Webster out, and he was the last person to see him.”

“Absolutely, yes. But I cannot arrest him for paying bail or giving the man a ride.”

“So what do you do when you have nothing probative?”

“You make something.”

“Meaning?”

Gaines turned at the sound of Hagen returning in the black-and-white.

“Right now? Hell, I don’t know. I need to get this out of here. I need to organize my mother’s funeral. I need to . . .” Gaines sighed audibly.

Victor Powell put his hand on Gaines’s shoulder.

“Maybe you should call State.”

“Maybe I will,” Gaines replied.

Hagen pulled up five yards away and got out of the car. Within minutes, they had erected lights, hooked them up to the car battery, and flooded the scene. From a distance, a bright ghost of illumination hovered in the field behind Gaines’s house, and Gaines busied himself taking shots of the dismembered hand, the hole in which the head had been buried, the head itself, the surrounding furrows where footprints had flattened the dirt.

Soon they were done, and Hagen and Gaines returned the lights to the car while Powell gently lifted the head and hand into separate containers and put them in the trunk of his vehicle.

“Don’t know what else I’ll be able to tell you aside from what we already know,” he told Gaines as he readied himself to leave.

“I’m not interested in what happened anymore,” Gaines replied. “Just who did it and why.”

“What I said earlier, about calling someone in State. I meant it. I don’t know about you, but I sure as hell feel out of my depth. With everything else that’s happened and with what you have to deal with personally . . .”

“No decisions until tomorrow,” Gaines said.

“Well, anything I can do, just let me know.”

Gaines thanked Powell, watched as he drove away, and stood there looking at the hole where they had found Webster’s head.

He could not help but be reminded of the pictures he had seen in Dennis Young’s office in St. Mary Parish, the shallow graves where Anna-Louise Mayhew and Dorothy McCormick had been found.

The crime and the circumstances were very different, but the feeling was very much the same.

Or perhaps it was simply a case of wanting it to be Matthias Wade because there was no one else.

“You gonna be okay?” Hagen asked. “You want me to stay?”

“No, you go on home,” Gaines said. “I’m not very good company right now.”

“Hey, if you want me to stay—”

“I’ll be better alone,” Gaines said. “Seriously.”

“Well, my door’s open, and if you want somewhere else to sleep, you know?”

“Thanks, Richard. I’ll be fine.”

Hagen hesitated for a moment, and then he nodded. He turned and walked to the car, started it up, and drove away.

After a minute or so, there was nothing—no light but a slim rind of moon above the trees, no sound but for cicadas and a cool breeze that ruffled leaves and carried a vague haunt of music from somewhere west—and John Gaines, once again, sat in the dirt of the field behind his house. Cross-legged, his head down, his hands clasped behind, his elbows on his knees, he rocked gently back and forth. He tried to picture all their faces—Nancy Denton in ’54, the little girls from ’68, Michael and Judith and his mother. He believed they could see him, every single one of them, as if the mere devotion of his attention to the circumstances and manner of their deaths brought them back to life, if not in this world, then in some other.

Gaines could not believe that a human being was simply a body. There was so much more to it than that. As far as voodoo was concerned, he did not know what he believed or what to believe. He believed in murder, however, and murder had been perpetrated in this time and place, also in Morgan City in 1968, also in the woods or down by the river in 1954.

And he believed that Matthias Wade was a liar, if only from the viewpoint that there were things he was not saying, and without some of those things—Gaines felt sure—the truth of what had taken place here would never be known.

At last he rose to his feet, and with the weight of the world on his shoulders, Gaines made his way back to the house. He stood once again on the veranda, looking toward the trees, the narrow rind of moon, the sky beyond, and he wondered if that truth would ever be revealed.

He would bury his mother, he would say his goodbyes, and then—whatever it took—he would dedicate himself to this task, if not for Webster and Nancy, then for the girls in ’68, and if not for them, then for himself. To leave this unresolved did not bear consideration.

And no, he would not call the State Troopers, nor the FBI. He would do this alone. Not out of pride or the concern that his reputation would be harmed, but because he did not wish to share with anyone the satisfaction of walking Matthias Wade into court. Also, in truth, he knew that there would be disciplinary action for his mishandling of the Webster search. He would face the music for that, of course, but he would face it when the investigation was over. And it would not be a matter of trying to placate anyone with a solved case, but merely that at this juncture he could not afford to be distracted.

On the day of his mother’s death, someone has invaded his thoughts with an act of cruelty and horror. Instead of giving him time to grieve, to let go, to be the best son he could be at such a time, his attention had been snatched from her by this terrible thing. It had become a personal issue, he had been delivered a personal message, and if this was the way it was going to be, then so be it.