"I'm not gonna want pizza any time soon," Pitre muttered, then looked up at the source of the footfalls. "Broussard, what the hell are you doing here? You're not on tonight. Hell, you're barely on the force at all."
Annie ignored him, turning to look at the dead man. He wasn't her first. He wasn't even her first by shotgun. But he was the first hit at close range, and the sight was by no means pretty.
The rapist lay on the floor, arms outflung. He was dressed in black, covering every inch of his body, including his hands. He could have been black, white, Indian-there was no telling. There was virtually nothing left of his face. The flesh-and-bone mask that set one human being apart from the next had been obliterated. The raw meat, shattered bone, and exposed brain matter could have belonged to anyone. The hair was saturated with blood, its color indistinguishable. A fragment of the black feather mask was stuck to a jagged piece of cranium. The stench of violent death was thick in the air.
"Oh my Lord," Annie breathed, her knees wilting a bit. The Snickers bar threatened a return trip, and she had to steel herself against spewing it all over the crime scene.
Scraps and chunks of the assailant's face had been sprayed up onto the ceiling and on the pale yellow wall. The sawed-off shotgun lay abandoned on the bed.
"If you can't take it, leave, Broussard. Nobody asked you here," Pitre said, moving around the bed to check out the shotgun. "Stokes won't be amused to see you."
"Yeah? Well, maybe the joke's on him," Annie muttered, trying to think ahead. Should she pull Quinlan aside when he arrived and tell him about the possibility? Or should she just step back and let the thing unravel on its own? No one would thank her for having suspected Stokes.
"Hey," Pitre said with the delighted surprise of a child finding the hidden prize in Cracker Jack. "We know the guy had one blue eye."
"How's that?"
A nasty grin lit his face as he leaned over the bed and stared at his find. " 'Cause here it is. Would you look at that! That sucker musta popped clean out of his head when she shot him! It's just sitting here like a little egg!"
Stokes's turquoise blue orbs came clearly into focus in Annie's mind as she stepped around the body. But before she could get a look at Pitre's prize, a familiar voice sounded behind her.
"Man Without a Face. Anybody see that movie? This guy's uglier. If I'm lyin', I'm dyin'."
Annie swung around, stunned. Stokes stood looking down at the body, chewing on a stick of boudin sausage, a Ragin' Cajuns ball cap backward on his head. He glanced over at her and made a face.
"Man, Broussard, you are like the goddamn clap-unwanted, unwelcome, and impossible to get rid of."
"I'm sure you're the voice of experience," Annie managed. She hadn't quite realized just how set she had been on Stokes's guilt until that moment. A mix of emotions swept over her as she watched him step around the body-disappointment, relief, guilt.
"Who asked you to the dance, anyway?" Stokes asked. "We don't need any secretaries here, don't need any crime dogs."
"I thought the victim might appreciate having another woman here."
"Yeah, he probably would have if he wasn't dead."
"I meant the woman."
"Then go find her and get the hell outta my crime scene." He looked right at her and said straight-faced, "Can't have you messing up any evidence."
As Annie went into the hall, Stokes leaned over the bed and looked at the shotgun. "Man, that's what I call birth control. You know what I mean?"
Pitre laughed.
The victim, Kim Young, was in her neat little yellow kitchen, leaning back against the counter, trembling as if she had just walked out of a freezer. The pale blue baby-doll nightgown she wore barely cleared the tops of her thighs and was liberally flecked with blood and tissue. The mess had sprayed across her face and into her dishwater blond curls.
"I'm Deputy Broussard," Annie said gently. "Would you like to sit down? Are you feeling all right?"
She looked up, glassy-eyed. "I-I shot that man."
"Yes, you did."
From where she stood, Annie could see the open patio door in the dining room, where the assailant had gained entry. A neat half-moon of glass had been cut out beside the handle.
"Did you get a look at him before you pulled the trigger?"
She shook her head, dislodging a bone fragment from her hair. It fell to the tile floor next to her bare foot. "It was too dark. Something woke me up and-and-I was so scared. And then he was right there by the bed and I-I-"
Tears choked her. Her face reddened. "What if it had been Mike? It could have been Mike! I just shot-"
Ignoring the blood and gore, Annie put an arm around Kim Young's shoulders as the realization dawned in the woman's mind-that she might have killed a loved one by mistake. Then, instead of being a hero, as she would certainly be touted when the press caught up with the story, she would have been portrayed as stupid and hysterical, a misguided vigilante forced to pay a terrible price. The difference was the outcome, not the action. Just another one of life's little object lessons.
The assailant's name was Willard Roache, known affectionately by his old pals in the penal system as "Cock" Roache. He had a long, ugly history of sexual assault charges and two convictions. He'd done his last jolt in Angola and had been released in June 1996. His last address listed with the state correctional system was in Shreveport, where he had dumped his parole officer and his identity.
Calling himself William Dunham, he had moved to Bayou Breaux in late December and secured a job as a technician at KJUN Radio, using a fake resume no one had bothered to check. Working the evening shift with Owen Onofrio, Roache had answered the phones and recorded the names and addresses of callers for the giant jackpot giveaway. It was from this list he had chosen his victims.
Evidence obtained at Roache's home included photocopies of the lists with his personal notes scrawled in the margin. Next to Lindsay Faulkner's name he had written the words "Sexy bitch." Also found in his home was a box containing half a dozen black feather Mardi Gras masks that had come from a novelties wholesaler in New Orleans.
The information came in piece by piece throughout the day, starting with the discovery of Roadie's car parked a short distance from Kim Young's home. At the sheriff's instruction, Roache's corpse was fingerprinted at the scene and the prints sent through the state automated fingerprint system with a rush order-the rush being a press conference set for four o'clock in the afternoon. Noblier wanted the case tied up with a ribbon before the start of Carnival for maximum PR benefit.
Annie prowled the records office all day like a caged animal, wanting to be a part of the team of deputies and detectives going through Roache's trailer, running evidence to the regional lab in New Iberia, making calls to map out the rapist's background. Myron barely allowed her to help catalog the evidence that was brought into their own lockup for safekeeping.
The frustration was almost unbearable. She wanted to see the proof for herself, go through the process of identifying the components of Roache's guilt, so that she could exorcise the last of the theory that had taken root in her own mind: that Chaz Stokes could have committed the crimes and that those crimes might have led them back to Pam's murder.
A theory was all it had been. As Fourcade had pointed out to her, she had no evidence, nothing but hunches, conjecture, speculation. A detective's job was to find irrefutable proof, to build the case solid and airtight-which Stokes might have done with Willard Roache before he had the chance to attack Kay Eisner and Lindsay Faulkner and Kim Young, had Stokes been inclined to work a little harder after Jennifer Nolan's attack.
Instead, Stokes did the research on Roache after the fact and readily accepted congratulations on his detective work. Because everyone was so happy to have the terror of this man stalking the parish over and done with, so far people were choosing to ignore the fact that Roache had lived in the same trailer park as Jennifer Nolan and had not been interviewed the day of her rape. He hadn't been home the morning the investigation had begun. Annie had knocked on his door herself and reported to Stokes that he wasn't home. Neither Stokes nor Mullen had bothered to go back. If they had, they might have recognized him later, when the state had faxed in descriptions and mug shots of sex offenders released from the system in the past year.