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The wail of approaching sirens penetrated the silence of the house. The EMTs stormed the place first, followed closely by Sticks Mullen. He scowled at A
"What the hell are you doing here, Broussard?"
"I could ask you the same thing," A
She stepped back into the living room, out of the way of the EMTs, one eye on the paramedics as they worked.
"It looks to me like the attacker cracked her head with the base unit of the phone." She pointed to where it lay bloody on the floor among scattered broken picture frames. "She put up a fight."
"For all the good it did her," Mullen muttered.
"Hey, some jerk comes after me, I go down swinging," A
"There's plenty of that going around anyway."
"Don't start with me," A
She dared him with a glare, then started for the dining area. "He came in here through the patio door. She must have heard him, came out of her bedroom, and confronted him."
"Should have stayed put and called 911."
"Wouldn't have done her any good. The phone's dead. You'll find the line cut, I imagine. Just like the others."
The EMTs hefted up their stretcher and rolled it out the front door with Lindsay Faulkner motionless beneath the blanket. As they left, Stokes walked in, a gray fedora sitting back on the crown of his head, a slip of toilet paper glued to his left cheek with a dot of blood. His light eyes were shot through with red.
"Man, I hate these early calls," he grumbled.
"Yeah, how inconsiderate of people to be attacked during your off-hours," A
Stokes scowled at her. "What're you doing here, Broussard? Somebody call for McGruff?"
"I found her."
He took a moment to digest that, his gaze sharpening. "And I say again, what are you doing here? How'd you know her? You two playing 'Bump the Doughnut' or something?"
Mullen snickered. A
"You know, Chaz, I hate to break it to you, but just because a woman won't have sex with you doesn't mean she's a lesbian. It just means she has standards."
"Stop. You're spoiling my fantasies." He nodded to Mullen. "Go see if the phone line's cut. And see if there's any good footprints in the yard. Ground's soft. Maybe we can get a cast."
Mullen went out the front. Stokes hiked up his baggy brown trousers and squatted down amid the junk that had toppled from the hall table.
"You go
"She's my real estate agent," A
"Is that right?" he said flatly. "So why come all the way out here to see her when her office is-what?-all of four blocks from the department?"
"She wanted to show me something out this way."
"This neighborhood's a little out of your price range, isn't it, Deputy?"
"A girl can dream."
"Uh-huh. And when did y'all set this up?"
"Lindsay called me last night and left a message on my machine." Her eyes went to Faulkner's answering machine. Her own voice would be on the tape. Thank God she'd left nothing more than her name and number.
"I tried to call her back about ten-thirty, but the machine answered. Why all the questions?" she asked, turning it back around on him. "You think I raped her and beat her head in?"
"Just doing my job, McGruff." He narrowed his eyes as if he were visualizing Lindsay Faulkner's body on the floor. He rubbed his goatee and hummed a note. The puddle of blood that had leaked from her skull had dried dark on the honey-tone oak. Spatters and smears had soaked into the off-white Berber ru
"Looked that way. Her nightgown was pulled up around her shoulders. There was a lot of bruising on her body."
"So is this the work of our friendly neighborhood serial rapist?" Stokes said more to himself than to A
"It looks to me like she heard him coming," A
She squatted down beside the rug, her gaze zooming in on a patch of dark fibers embedded in the carpet ru
"Looks to me like a piece of black feather," she said, looking at Stokes as she held it out toward him. "That answer your question for you?"
"Don't you bend them papers shoving them in that way," the records clerk snapped, his voice at a pitch that rivaled screeching chalk on a blackboard.
A
"That's Mr. Myron. You on the other side of my counter, you call me Myron. You on my side of my counter, you call me Mr. Myron. You are in my domain. You are my assistant."
Myron jammed his hands at his belt and nodded sharply. A slight, prim black man, he wore a clip-on polyester tie every day and had his gray hair trimmed like a shrub every other Friday. He had worked records and evidence for twenty years and saw the presence of a uniform behind his counter as a direct threat to his kingdom.
"Don't let it go to your head," A
Myron gave her the skunk eye and went back to his desk.
A
But if that was the case, then who was this copycat? Renard would seem to be free from suspicion. Debilitated by the pounding Fourcade had given him, he couldn't have had the strength or the mobility to attack a strong, healthy woman like Lindsay. If not Renard, then who? Do
Could he kill her? Make it look like rape? If it was Do
The fragment of black feather was the sticking point for the copycat theory. That feather had been no plant left to implicate someone else. It appeared to be just the opposite, in fact. Something left behind by accident, hidden by his victim's unconscious body. Their boy had certainly left nothing else behind to incriminate himself.
Then again, the feather may not have come from a mask. It could have been part of a cat toy. It could have been tracked in by a visitor. They wouldn't know whether or not they had a match to the feather in the Nolan case until they heard back from the lab in New Iberia.
"Hey, Myron, what'd you do to deserve this, man?" Stokes asked, snickering as he set the rape kit on the counter. "Who sicced the crime dog after you?"
A
"Hey, it takes how long it takes, you know what I'm sayin'. The doctors had to get her stabilized. Don't matter nohow. We got nothing from it. There was nothing under her nails. There's not go