Tami Hoag - A Thin Dark Line

Fourcade looked impatient. "It doesn't matter what she thinks. It matters what he did. It matters that he might have killed her. It matters that he might have had that kind of rage in him before and that he might have killed out of that rage.

"Look at this murder," he said, gesturing to the photos.

"Rage, power, domination, sexual brutality. Not unlike your Bayou Strangler."

"Are you saying you think maybe Renard did those women four years ago?" Annie asked. "He moved back here in '93. You think he was the Bayou Strangler?"

Fourcade shook his head. "No. I've been over those files. I've talked to the people who ended up pinning it on Danjermond: Laurel Chandler and Jack Boudreaux. They live up on the Carolina coast now. Too many bad memories 'round here, I guess, with her losing her sister to the Strangler and all. They tell a pretty convincing tale. The investigation backed them up."

He stopped to stare at the crime scene photos. "Besides, there are differences in the murders. Pam Bichon wasn't strangled to death."

He touched a finger to one of the photos, a close-up of the bruising on the throat. "She was choked manually- these bruises are thumbprints-and her hyoid bone was cracked. He probably choked her unconscious at some 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, chère."

"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, chère," he said, too seductively. "Go after it… every way you can."

"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."