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 gonna answer my question, Broussard?" he asked as he pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and picked up the bloody phone unit.
"She's my real estate agent," Annie said automatically. "I'm thinking of buying a house."
"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 runner. "He did her right here, huh?"
"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 Annie. "He did the other two in bed, tied them up."
"It looks to me like she heard him coming," Annie said; "He didn't get the chance to surprise her in bed. And he didn't have to tie her up because he knocked her out with the phone."
She squatted down beside the rug, her gaze zooming in on a patch of dark fibers embedded in the carpet runner where Faulkner's body had lain. She scratched at the spot gingerly with a fingernail and plucked at the loose end that came up, bringing it up close before her eyes.
"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.
Annie twitched. "Sorry, Myron."
"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," Annie muttered. To Myron she gave her earnest face and said, "I'll do my best."
Myron gave her the skunk eye and went back to his desk.
Annie let his presence fade from mind as she concentrated on the facts of Lindsay Faulkner's attack. She was tempted to think this attacker was a copycat of their rapist, who was a copycat of sorts of Pam Bichon's killer, someone who had taken advantage of the first two rapes to silence Faulkner for his own reasons. Perhaps it had been his intent to murder her. He may well have believed she was dead when he left her.
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? Donnie? It was no secret he disliked Lindsay. If she was standing in the way of a deal for the real estate company…
Could he kill her? Make it look like rape? If it was Donnie, then did that mean he was involved in Pam's murder? If he had murdered Pam, killing Lindsay would have been easy by comparison.
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?"
Annie gladly abandoned her filing and went to the counter. "Yeah, Chaz, we all got that joke the first ten times you made it. Is this Faulkner's? It took you long enough."
"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 gonna be anything on the swabs, and pubic hair all looks alike to me. This joker's good."
"He sure seems to know what we'll look for," Annie said. "I'll bet he's got a record. Have you checked with the state for known offenders? Run the MO past NCIC?"
Stokes switched his attitude up a notch. "I don't need you to tell me how to run an investigation, Broussard."
"I believe my remark was in the form of a question, Detective," she said with stinging sweetness. "I know how swamped you are dealing with these rapes and the Bichon homicide, and what all. I might have offered to make those calls for you."
Myron moved his head like an outraged banty rooster. "That ain't your job!"
Annie shrugged. "Just trying to be helpful."
"Just trying to stick your nose in where it don't belong," Stokes muttered. "I told you before, Broussard, I don't need your kind of help. You stay the hell away from my cases."
He turned to Myron. "I need to get this stuff logged in and back out again. I'm taking it down to New Iberia myself, personally, so they can rush it through the lab and tell me I ain't got squat, just like I ain't got squat on those two other rapes."
"Who's working them besides you?" Annie asked.
He glanced at her from under the brim of his fedora. "I don't need this shit from you. These are my cases. Quinlan's helping with the background checks on the other two women-who they worked with and like that. Is that acceptable to you, Deputy?"
Annie raised her hands in surrender.
"I mean, I know you don't think I'm acceptable," he went on with an edge in his voice. "But hey, who's in plain clothes here and who's going around town in a goddamn dog suit?"
Myron looked up from the paperwork to glare at her, clearly unhappy with her for bringing the stigma of the dog suit into his realm.
Coming down the hall, Mullen let out a hound-dog howl. Annie tried not to grind her teeth.
"I always said you should be wearing a flea collar, Mullen," she said, moving down the counter away from Stokes and Myron.
"You're moving down in the world, Broussard," he said with glee as he set a plastic pee-cup on the counter, full to the lid with some drunk's donation to forensic science. "Take a bite outta crime lately? You can wash it down with this."
Annie yawned as she pulled out an evidence card and began to fill it out. "Wake me up when you have something original to say. Does this urine belong to someone, or did you bring me this to impress me with your aim?"
Thwarted again, he momentarily stuck to facts. "Ross Leighton. Another five-martini lunch at the Wisteria Club. But you got him beat, don't you, Broussard? Nipping Wild Turkey on the way to work."