A Thin Dark Line

point. We can only hope so for her sake. But asphyxiation wasn't the cause of death. Loss of blood from the primary stab wounds was the cause of death.' He moved his finger to a shot of the woman's savaged bare chest. 'Because of the pattern of the blood splatters, I believe she was stabbed several times in the chest while she was standing, then fell to the floor. The choking happened sometime after she went down but before she was dead. Otherwise you wouldn't have this kind of bruising.

'The Strangler, he used a white silk scarf around the throat to kill his victims-that was his signature. And he tied them down with strips of white silk. See here? No ligature marks on Bichon's wrists or ankles.'

'But the sexual mutilation-'

He shook his head. 'Similar, but not the same by any means. Danjermond tortured his victims extensively before he killed them. The mutilation of Bichon was largely postmortem, suggesting it was about anger, hatred, disrespect, rather than any kind of erotic sadism-which was the case with the Strangler. That boy got off on it in a big way. Renard was pissed.

'And then there's the victim profile,' he said. 'The Strangler hunted women who were easily accessible: women who hung out in bars, looking for men, liked to pass a good time. That wasn't Pam Bichon.

'No,' he declared. 'The cases are unrelated. The way I see it, Renard fixated on Pam when he thought she might become available to him-when she separated from Donnie. He probably built a whole fantasy around her, and when she refused to cooperate in turning the fantasy into reality, he went over the line to the dark side.'

He turned and his gaze swept down over Annie. 'And now he's lookin' at you, chere.'

'Lucky me,' Annie muttered.

Fourcade ignored the sarcasm. 'Oh yeah,' he said, moving closer. 'You're being presented with a rare opportunity, 'Toinette. You can get close to him, open him up, see what's in his head. He lets you close enough, he'll give himself away.'

'Or kill me, if your theory holds true. I'd rather come across a nice piece of evidence, thanks anyway. The murder weapon. A witness who could put him at the scene. A trophy.'

'We found his trophy-the ring. Don't expect to find another. We never even found the gifts Pam gave back to him. We never found the other things he'd taken from her. He's too smart to make the same mistake twice-and that's what we need, sugar: for him to make a mistake. You could be it.' He brushed her bangs with his fingertips, caressed her cheek. The pad of his thumb skimmed the corner of her mouth. 'He could fall in love with you.'

She didn't like the way her pulse was pounding. She didn't like the way she saw Pam Bichon's corpse from every angle-torn, ragged, bloody; the feather mask a grotesque contrast.

'I'm not bait for your bear trap, Fourcade,' she said. 'If I can get something out of Renard, I will, but I'm not getting close enough for him to lay a finger on me. I don't want to get under his skin. I don't want to get inside his head-or yours, for that matter. I want justice, that's all.'

'Then go after it, chere,' he said, too seductively. 'Go after it… every way you can.'

20

'They should be made to pay for what they've put us through,' Doll Renard declared. She moved around the dining room like a hummingbird, flitting here, flitting there, resting nowhere.

'You've said that ten times,' Marcus grumbled.

'Eight.' Victor corrected him automatically and without smugness. 'Eight times. Repetition, multiplication. Two times four times, eight times. Even. Equal, equals. Equals sometime equal, sometime odd.'

He shook his head disapprovingly at the trick of the language.

Doll shot him a look of disgust. 'I'll say it 'til I'm blue. The Partout Parish Sheriff's Department has ruined our lives. I can't go anywhere without people staring and whispering. And most of the time they don't bother to whisper. 'There's that Doll Renard,' they say. 'How can she show her face after what her boy did?' It's even worse than after your father betrayed us. Of course, you wouldn't remember that. You were just a little boy. People are hateful, that's all.'

'I didn't do anything wrong,' Marcus reminded her. 'I'm innocent until proven guilty. Tell them that.'

She sniffed and flitted from the sideboard to the corner china cupboard. 'I wouldn't give them the satisfaction. Besides, they would just throw up to me how everyone knows you panted after that Bichon woman and she didn't want you.'

'Throw up,' Victor said, rocking from side to side on his chair.

It had taken an hour to calm him from the fit Fourcade had brought on, and he was still agitated. He was supposed to be helping polish the silver, but had decided tarnish was bacteria and refused to touch any of it. Bacteria, he believed, would run up his arms and gain access to his brain through his ear canals. 'Vomit. Puke. Spew. Disgorge. Regorge. Discharge-like excrement.'

'Victor, stop it!' Doll snapped, her bony hand fluttering over her heart. 'You're making us nauseous.'

'Talk-vomit words. Sound and sound alike,' he said, his eyes glazing over as he looked at something inside his scrambled brain.

Marcus tuned them both out, staring at his hands. He rubbed a jeweler's cloth up and down the stem of a marrow spoon and contemplated the uselessness of the thing. People didn't eat bone marrow anymore. The practice suggested a voraciousness that had gone out of vogue. To devour a creature's flesh, then crack its bones to suck out the very marrow of its life seemed a rapacious act. The hunger to consume a being whole was frowned upon, repressed.

He wondered if a need repressed deeply enough, long enough, eventually went into a person's marrow, reachable only if the bones were broken open. He wondered what would drain out of his own marrow. His mother's would be black as tar, he suspected.

'He beat you,' she reiterated, as if he needed reminding of Fourcade's sins. 'You could be permanently disfigured. You could be disabled. You could lose your job. It's a pure wonder they haven't fired you after everything that's gone on.'

'I'm a partner, Mother. They can't fire me. '

'Who will come to you with work? Your reputation is ruined-and mine. I've lost every single costume order I've gotten for Mardi Gras. And that man has the gall to come here, to harass us, and the sheriff's department does nothing! Nothing! I swear, we could all be murdered in our beds, and they would do nothing! They should be made to pay for what they've put us through.'

'Nine,' Victor said.

He rose abruptly from his chair as the hall clock struck eight, and hurried from the room.

'There he goes,' Doll muttered bitterly, her features pinching tight. 'He'll sleep like the dead. I can't remember the last time I had a decent night's sleep. Every night now I dream about my Mardi Gras masks. All the joy of them has been robbed from me. You know what people say. They say the mask found on that dead woman was from my collection, and, even though I know it wasn't, even though I can account for every single one of them, even though I know people are motivated by jealousy because my collection has won prizes year after year during Carnival, it's just robbed the joy from me.'

If his mother had ever had a moment's joy in her life, Marcus had never heard about it until after it had been 'robbed' from her, as if she were aware of the emotion only after the fact. He set the marrow spoon down and folded the jeweler's cloth.

'I called Annie Broussard,' he said. 'Perhaps she can do something about Fourcade.'

'What could she possibly do?' Doll asked sourly, annoyed at having the attention shifted from her own suffering.

'She stopped him from killing me,' he pointed out. 'I need to lie down. My head is pounding.'

Doll clucked her tongue. 'It's no wonder. You could have a brain injury. A blood vessel could burst in your head months from now, and then where would we be?'

I would be free of you, Marcus thought. But there were simpler ways to escape than