A Thin Dark Line

'Whose trust?' she demanded. 'You're giving me the goddamn third degree! One minute you claim to be my best friend and the next you're wondering why I didn't give you something you can use in court. You tell me we can separate who we are from what we do, but only when it's convenient for you. I've had it, A.J. I don't need this bullshit and I sure as hell don't need you taking potshots at my psyche!'

'Annie-'

He reached for her arm as she started for the door and she jerked away from him. The secretaries in the outer office watched with owl eyes as she stormed past.

The outer hall was dark and cool. Voices floated down from the third floor. The last of the day's court skirmishes had been fought, and the last of the warriors lingered in the hall, swapping stories and making deals. Annie headed for a side exit, letting herself out into sunshine that hurt her eyes. She fumbled with her sunglasses, then nearly ran into a man standing at the edge of the sidewalk.

'Deputy Broussard. This is serendipitous, I must say.'

Annie groaned aloud. Kudrow. He stood leaning against a Times- Picayune vending machine, his trench coat belted tightly around him despite the unseasonable heat and choking humidity of the afternoon. His posture suggested pain rather than laziness. His emaciated face was the color of a mushroom and glossed with perspiration. He looked as if he might die on the spot, draped over a headline heralding the approach of Mardi Gras.

'Are you all right?' Annie asked, torn between concern for him as a human and dislike of him as a person.

Kudrow tried to smile as he straightened. 'No, my dear, I am dying, but I won't be doing it here if that's what concerns you. I'm not quite ready to go just yet. There are still injustices to be corrected. You know all about that, don't you?'

'I'm not in the mood for your word games, lawyer. If you have something to say to me, then say it. I've got better things to do.'

'Like searching for Marcus's alibi witness? Marcus has told me you've taken an interest in his plight. How fascinating. This falls outside the scope of your duties, doesn't it?'

How much damage could he do with that knowledge? Sweat pooled between her shoulder blades and trickled down the valley of her spine. 'I'm looking into a couple of things out of curiosity, that's all.'

'A thirst for the truth. Too bad no one else in your department seems to share that quality. There's no evidence anyone is so much as looking into last night's shooting incident at the Renard home.'

'Maybe there's nothing to find.'

'Two people have openly tried to do Marcus harm in a week's time. Numerous others have threatened him. The list of suspects could read like the phone book, yet to my knowledge no one has been questioned.'

'The detectives are very busy these days, Mr. Kudrow.'

'They'll have another homicide on their hands if they let this go,' he warned. 'This community is wound tighter than a watch spring. I can feel the air thickening with anger, with fear, with hate. That kind of pressure can only be contained to a point, then it explodes.'

A tight, rattling cough shook him and he leaned against the vending machine again, his energy spent, his eyes growing dull; an ill spectre of doom.

Annie walked away from him knowing he was right, feeling that same heaviness in the air, the same sense of anticipation. Even in the sunshine everything looked rimmed in black, like in a bad dream. Down the side street she could see city workers hanging pretty spring flags on the light poles, sprucing up the town for the Mardi Gras Carnival, but the sidewalks seemed strangely empty. There was no one in the park south of the law enforcement center.

Three women had been attacked in a span of a week. Cops were acting like criminals, and a suspected murderer had gone free. People were terrified.

Annie thought back to the summer the Bayou Strangler had hunted here, and remembered having the same uneasy feeling, the same irrational fear, the same sense of helplessness. But this time she was a cop, and all the other emotions were being compressed by the weight of responsibility.

Someone had to make it stop.

Myron welcomed her back to the records office with a pointed stare he directed from Annie to the clock.

'This gentleman from Allied Insurance needs a number of accident reports,' he said, nodding to a round mound of sweating flesh in rumpled seersucker on the opposite side of the counter. 'You will get him whatever he needs.'

On that order he took up his Wall Street Journal and marched off to the men's room.

'That's the best dang thing I've heard all day!' the insurance man chortled. He stuck out a hand that looked like a small balloon animal. 'Tom O'Connor. Easy to remember,' he said with a smarmy wink. 'Tomcat O'round the Corner. Get it?'

Annie passed on the handshake. 'I get it. What reports did you need?'

He pulled a crumpled list from his coat pocket and handed it to her. 'Hey, aren't you cute in that uniform! You look like a little lady deputy.'

'I am a deputy.'

His eyes popped and he let loose another volley of chuckles. 'Well, shoot me dead!'

'Don't tempt me,' Annie said. 'I'm armed and it's been a very bad day.'

She looked up to heaven as she took the list to the file cabinets. 'Purgatory is a clerical department, isn't it?'

As she sent Tom O'Connor on his way with his reports, the fax machine rang and kicked on. Annie watched the cover sheet roll out, her interest piquing at the letterhead- the regional crime lab in New Iberia. The transmission was addressed to Det. Stokes, but the fax number was for records instead of for the detectives' machine-one digit off.

She watched the sheets roll into the tray, plucking them up one at a time. Preliminary lab results on the meager physical evidence collected at Lindsay Faulkner's crime scene and from Lindsay Faulkner's person. Negative. Nothing from the rape kit-no semen, no hair, no skin from under her nails, though they knew she'd put up a fight. Blood samples from the carpet runner appeared to be hers. Same type, at least. More sophisticated tests for DNA would take weeks.

Just as Stokes had predicted, they had nothing, just as they had nothing from the Jennifer Nolan rape or the Kay Eisner rape. Lack of evidence was the one thing tying the cases together. And the black feather mask-if the fragment Annie had picked off Faulkner's rug matched the one she'd found at Nolan's trailer park. Nolan and Eisner had both seen their assailant, had both seen the mask. So far, Lindsay Faulkner remembered nothing. If that situation didn't improve, then the feather from the mask could be the only link to the other attacks.

She looked back through the transmission for mention of the feather, finding none. There should have been a note, at least.

Annie glanced at the clock. Myron would be another five minutes in men's room seclusion. The world's official timekeepers could have set their watches by Myron's bowels. She dialed the number for the lab from her desk and connected with the person she needed, rattling off the case number and what she was after.

She waited, scanning through the fax pages, frustrated by the lack of evidence. They had to be dealing with a pro, someone savvy enough and cold enough to force the women to wash away all trace evidence or, in the case of Lindsay Faulkner, to wash it away himself. He knew everything they would look for, down to pubic hairs and skin under the fingernails.

She wondered if the task force had gleaned anything from the old files, wondered if Stokes had heard back from the state pen, wondered if the NCIC or VICAP computers would come up with anything. She wished she was the person who would be finding out instead of the person waiting on sweaty insurance guys in the records department.

'Excuse me?' the woman's voice came back on the line. 'You said a black feather, didn't you?'

'Yes. There was one with the Nolan case, and what might have been a fragment of a black feather with the Faulkner case.'

'Not here, there isn't.'

'What do you mean?'