of the blotter.
'Her mother died when she was twelve. She quit school in the ninth grade and ran away from her father a couple of times in Mamou. She was arrested for prostitution in Lafayette when she was sixteen. For the last year or so she lived here with her grandparents, out at the end of West Main. Her last job was waitressing in a bar about three weeks ago in St. Martinville. Few close friends, if any, no current or recent romantic involvement, at least according to the grandparents. She didn't have a chance for much of a life, did she?'
I could hear the sheriff rubbing his thumb along his jawbone.
'No, she didn't,' he said. His eyes went out the window then refocused on my face. 'Do you buy that about no romantic involvement?'
'No.'
'Neither do I. Do you have any other theories except that she probably knew her killer?'
'One.'
'What?'
'That I'm all wrong, that we are dealing with a psychopath or a serial killer.'
He stood up to leave. He was overweight, constantly on a diet, and his stomach protruded over his gunbelt, but his erect posture always gave him the appearance of a taller and trimmer man than he actually was.
'I'm glad we operate out of this office with such a sense of certainty, Dave,' he said. 'Look, I want you to use everything available to us on this one. I want to nail this sonofabitch right through the breastbone.'
I nodded, unsure of his intention in stating the obvious.
'That's why we're going to be working with the FBI on this one,' he said.
I kept my eyes flat, my hands open and motionless on the desk blotter.
'You called them?' I said.
'I did, and so did the mayor. It's a kidnapping as well as a rape and murder, Dave.'
'Yeah, that could be the case.'
'You don't like the idea of working with these guys?'
'You don't work with the feds, sheriff. You take orders from them. If you're lucky, they won't treat you like an insignificant local douche bag in front of a television camera. It's a great learning exercise in humility.'
'No one can ever accuse you of successfully hiding your feelings, Dave.'
Almost thirty minutes from the moment the attorney, Oliver Montrose, had left my office, I looked out my window and saw Elrod T. Sykes pull his lavender Cadillac into a no parking zone, scrape his white-walls against the curb, and step out into the bright sunlight. He wore brown striped slacks, shades, and a lemon-yellow short- sleeve shirt. The attorney got out on the passenger's side, but Sykes gestured for him to stay where he was. They argued briefly, then Sykes walked into the building by himself.
He had his shades in his hand when he stepped inside my office door, his hair wet and freshly combed, an uneasy grin at the corner of his mouth.
'Sit down a minute, please,' I said.
The skin around his eyes was pale with hangover. He sat down and touched at his temple as though it were bruised.
'I'm sorry about sending the mercenary. It wasn't my idea,' he said.
'Whose was it?'
'Mikey figures he makes the decisions on anything that affects the picture.'
'How old are you, Mr. Sykes?'
He widened his eyes and crimped his lips.
'Forty. Well, actually forty-three,' he said.
'Did you have to ask that man's permission to drive an automobile while you were drunk?'
He blinked as though I'd struck him, then made a wet noise in his throat and wiped his mouth with the backs of his fingers.
'I really don't know what to say to you,' he said. He had a peculiar, north Texas accent, husky, slightly nasal, like he had a dime-sized piece of melting ice in his cheek. 'I broke my word, I'm aware of that. But I'm letting other people down, too, Mr. Robicheaux. It costs ten thousand dollars an hour when you have to keep a hundred people standing around while a guy like me gets out of trouble.'
'I hope y'all work it out.'
'I guess this is the wrong place to look for aspirin and sympathy, isn't it?'
'A sheriff's deputy from St. Mary Parish is going to meet us with a boat at the Chitimacha Indian reservation, Mr. Sykes. I think he's probably waiting on us right now.'
'Well, actually I'm looking forward to it. Did I tell you last night my grandpa was a Texas ranger?'
'No, you didn't.' I looked at my watch.
'Well, it's a fact, he was. He worked with Frank Hammer, the ranger who got Bonnie and Clyde right up there at Arcadia, Louisiana.' He smiled at me. 'You know what he used to tell me when I was a kid? 'Son, you got two speeds- wide-open and fuck it.' I swear he was a pistol. He-'
'I'd like to explain something to you. I don't want you to take offense at it, either.'
'Yes, sir?'
'Yesterday somebody raped and murdered a nineteen-year-old girl on the south side of the parish. He cut her breasts off, he pulled her entrails out of her stomach, he pushed twigs up her vagina. I don't like waiting in my office for you to show up when it's convenient, I'm not interested in your film company's production problems, and on this particular morning I'd appreciate it if you'd leave your stories about your family history to your publicity people.'
His eyes tried to hold on mine, then they watered and glanced away.
'I'd like to use your bathroom, please,' he said. 'I'm afraid I got up with a case of the purple butterflies.'
'I'll be out front. I'll see you there in two minutes, Mr. Sykes.'
The sky was bright and hazy, the wind hot as a flame as we drove toward the Atchafalaya River. I had to stop the truck twice to let Elrod Sykes vomit by the side of the road.
It felt strange to go back into that part of the Atchafalaya Basin after so many years. In July of 1957, after the hurricane had passed through and the rains had finally stopped, the flooded woods and willow islands, the canals whose canopies were so thick that sunlight seldom struck the water, the stretches of beach along the bays had smelled of death for weeks. The odor, which was like the heavy, gray, salty stench from a decaying rat, hung in the heat all day, and at night it blew through the screen windows on the quarter-boat and awaited you in the morning when you walked through the galley into the dining room.
Many of the animals that did not drown starved to death. Coons used to climb up the mooring ropes and scratch on the galley screen for food, and often we'd take rabbits out of the tops of trees that barely extended above the current and carry them on the jugboat to the levee at Charenton. Sometimes at night huge trees with root systems as broad as barn roofs floated by in the dark and scraped the hull with their branches from the bow to the stern. One night when the moon was full and yellow and low over the willow islands, I heard something hit the side of the boat hard, like a big wood fist rolling its knuckles along the planks. I stood on my bunk and looked through the screen window and saw a houseboat, upside down, spinning in the current, a tangle of fishing nets strung out of one window like flotsam from an eye socket.
I thought about the hundreds of people who had either been crushed under a tidal wave or drowned in Cameron Parish, their bodies washed deep into the marshes along the Calcasieu River, and again I smelled that thick, fetid odor on the wind. I could not sleep again until the sun rose like a red molten ball through the mists across the bay.
It didn't take us long to find the willow island where Elrod Sykes said he had seen the skeletal remains of either an Indian or a black person. We crossed the wide sweep of the Atchafalaya in a sheriff's department boat with two outboard engines mounted on the stern, took a channel between a row of sandbars whose sun-dried crests looked like the backs of dolphin jumping in a school, crossed a long bay, and slid the boat onto a narrow strip of beach that bled back into a thick stand of willow trees and chains of flooded sinkholes and sand bogs.
Elrod Sykes stepped off the bow onto the sand and stared into the trees. He had taken off his shirt and he used it to wipe the sweat off his tanned chest and shoulders.
