When I had finished, the list included a voice synthesis program or unit; the Book of Enoch; a knowledge of Greek myths / early medical texts; a knowledge of police procedures and activities, based on what Rachel had said following the deaths of Jennifer and Susan, the fact that he had known that the feds were monitoring my cell phone, and the killing of Remarr. Initially I thought that if he had seen Remarr at the Aguillard house, then Remarr would have died there and then, but I reconsidered on the basis that the Traveling Man would have been reluctant to remain at the scene or to engage an alert Remarr, and had decided to wait for another chance. The other option was that the killer had found out about the fingerprint and, somehow, the killer had also later found Remarr.

I added other elements based on standard assumptions: white, male killer, probably somewhere between his twenties and forties; a Louisiana base from which to strike at Remarr and the Aguillards; a change of clothing, or coveralls worn over his own clothes, to protect him from the blood; and access to and knowledge of ketamine.

I drew another line from Trav Man to the Aguillards, since the killer knew that Tante Marie had been talking, and a second line connecting him to Remarr. I added a dotted line to Jennifer and Susan, and wrote Edward Byron’s name with a question mark beside it. Then, on impulse, I added a third dotted line and wrote David Fontenot’s name between those of the Aguillards and Remarr, based only on the Honey Island connection and the possibility that, if the Traveling Man had lured him to Honey Island and tipped off Joe Bones that David Fontenot would be there, then the killer was someone known to the Fontenot family. Finally, I wrote Edward Byron’s name on a separate sheet and pinned it beside the main diagram.

I sat on the edge of Rachel’s bed and breathed in the scent of her in the room as I looked at what I had written, shifting the pieces around in my head to see if they would match up anywhere. They didn’t, but I made one more addition before I returned to my own room to wait for Angel and Louis to return from Baton Rouge: I drew a light line between David Fontenot’s name and the question mark representing the girl in the swamp. I didn’t know it then, but by drawing that line I had made the first significant leap into the world of the Traveling Man.

I returned to my own room and sat by the balcony, watching Rachel in her uneasy sleep. Her eyelids moved rapidly and once or twice she let out small groans and made pushing movements with her hands, her feet scrambling beneath the blankets. I heard Angel and Louis before I saw them, Angel’s voice raised in what seemed to be anger, Louis responding in measured tones with a hint of mockery beneath them.

Before they could knock, I opened the door and indicated that we should talk in their room. They hadn’t heard about the shootings at Metairie since, according to Angel, they hadn’t been listening to the radio in the rental car. His face was red as he spoke and his lips were pale. I don’t think that I had ever seen him so angry.

In their room, the bickering started again. Stacey Byron, a bottle blonde in her early forties who had kept her figure remarkably well for a woman of her age, had apparently come on to Louis in the course of their interrogation of her. Louis had, in a manner, responded.

“I was pumping her for information,” he explained, his mouth twitching in amusement as he looked sideways at Angel. Angel was unimpressed.

“Sure you wanted to pump her, but the only information you were after was her bra size and the dimensions of her ass,” he spat. Louis rolled his eyes in exaggerated bafflement and I thought, for a moment, that Angel was going to strike him. His fists bunched and he moved forward slightly before he managed to restrain himself.

I felt sorry for Angel. While I didn’t believe there was anything in Louis’s courting of Edward Byron’s wife, beyond the natural response of any individual to the favorable attentions of another and Louis’s belief that, by leading her on, she might give away something about her ex-husband, I knew how much Louis mattered to Angel. Angel’s history was murky, Louis’s more so, but I remembered things about Angel, things that I sometimes felt Louis forgot.

When Angel was sent down to Rikers Island, he attracted the attentions of a man named William Vance. Vance had killed a Korean shopkeeper in the course of a botched robbery in Brooklyn and that was how he ended up in Rikers, but there were other things suspected of him: that he had raped and killed an elderly woman in Utica, mutilating her before she died; that he may have been linked to a similar killing in Delaware. There was no proof, other than rumor and conjecture, but when the opportunity came to put Vance away for the killing of the Korean, the DA, to his credit, seized it.

And for some reason, Vance decided that he wanted Angel dead. I heard that Angel had dissed him when Vance had tried to get it on with him, that he had knocked out one of Vance’s teeth in the showers. But there was no telling with a man like Vance: the workings of his mind were obscure and confused by hatred and strange, bitter longing. Now Vance didn’t just want to rape Angel: he wanted to kill him, and kill him slowly. Angel had pulled three to five. After one week in Rikers, the odds of him surviving his first month had plummeted.

Angel had no friends on the inside and fewer still outside, so he called me. I knew that it pained him to do so. He was proud and I think that, under ordinary circumstances, he would have tried to work out his problems for himself. But William Vance, with his tattoos of bloodied knives on his arms and a spider’s web over his chest, was far from ordinary.

I did what I could. I pulled Vance’s files and copied the transcripts of his interrogation over the Utica killing and a number of similar incidents. I copied details of the evidence assembled against him and the account of an eyewitness who later retracted after Vance made a call and threatened to fuck her and her children to death if she gave evidence against him. Then I took a trip to Rikers.

I spoke to Vance through a transparent screen. He had added an india ink tattoo of a tear below his left eye, bringing the total number of tattooed tears to three, each one representing a life taken. A spider’s silhouette was visible at the base of his neck. I spoke to him softly for about ten minutes. I warned him that if anything happened to Angel, anything at all, I would make sure that every con in the place knew that he was only a hair’s breadth away from sexual homicide charges involving old, defenseless women. Vance had five years left to serve before he became eligible for parole. If his fellow inmates found out what he was suspected of doing, there were men who could ensure that he would have to spend those five years in solitary to avoid death. Even then, he would have to check his food every day for powdered glass, would have to pray that a guard’s attention didn’t wander for an instant while he was being escorted to the yard for his hour’s recreation, or while he was being brought to the prison doctor when the stress began to take its toll on his health.

Vance knew all this and yet, two days after we spoke, he tried to castrate Angel with a shank. Only the force of Angel’s heel connecting with Vance’s knee saved him, although Angel still needed twenty stitches across his stomach and thigh after Vance slashed wildly at him as he fell to the ground.

Vance was taken in the shower the next morning. Persons unknown held him down, used a wrench to hold his mouth open, and then pumped water mixed with detergent into his body. The poison destroyed his insides, tearing apart his stomach and almost costing him his life. For the remainder of his life in prison he was a shell of a man, racked by pains in his gut that made him howl in the night. It had taken one telephone call. I live with that too.