In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke

girl who had been raped, tied to a tree in a fish camp at Lake Chicot, and shot at point-blank range; two waitresses who had gone off from their jobs without explanation and a few hours later had been thrown, bludgeoned to death, into irrigation ditches.
          Their bodies had all showed marks, in one way or another, of having been bound. They had all been young, working class, and perhaps unsuspecting when a degenerate had come violently and irrevocably into their lives and had departed without leaving a sign of his identity.
          My respect for Rosie Gomez's ability was appreciating.
          She walked back through the door, clipping two keys onto a ring.
          "You want to talk while we take a ride out to Spanish Lake?" I said.
          "What's at Spanish Lake?"
          "A movie director I'd like to meet."
          "What's that have to do with our case?"
          "Probably nothing. But it beats staying indoors."
          "Sure. I have to make a call to the Bureau, then I'll be right with you."
          "Let me ask you an unrelated question," I said.
          "Sure."
          "If you found the remains of a black man, and he had on no belt and there were no laces in his boots, what speculation might you make about him?"
          She looked at me with a quizzical smile.
          "He was poor?" she said.
          "Could be. In fact, someone else told me about the same thing in a less charitable way."
          "No," she said. She looked thoughtfully into space, puffed out one jaw, then the other, like a chipmunk might. "No, I'd bet he'd been in jail, in a parish or a city holding unit of some kind, where they were afraid he'd do harm to himself."
          "That's not bad," I said. Not at all, I thought. "Well, let's take a ride."
          I waited for her outside in the shade of the building. I was sweating inside my shirt, and the sunlight off the cement parking lot made my eyes film. Two of the uniformed deputies who had been grinning through my glass earlier came out the door with clipboards in their hands, then stopped when they saw me. The taller one, a man named Rufus Arceneaux, took a matchstick out of his mouth and smiled at me from behind his shades.
          "Hey, Dave," he said, "does that gal wear a Bureau buzzer on each of her boobs or is she just a little top-heavy?"
          They were both grinning now. I could hear bottleflies buzzing above an iron grate in the shade of the building.
          "You guys can take this for what it's worth," I said. "I don't want you to hold it against me, either, just because I outrank you or something like that. Okay?"
          "You gotta make plainclothes before you get any federal snatch?" Arceneaux said, and put the matchstick back in the corner of his mouth.
          I put on my sunglasses, folded my seersucker coat over my arm, and looked across the street at a black man selling rattlesnake watermelons off the tailgate of a pickup truck.
          "If y'all want to act like public clowns, that's your business," I said. "But you'd better wipe that stupid expression off your faces when you're around my partner. Also, if I hear you making remarks about her, either to me or somebody else, we're going to take it up in a serious way. You get my drift?"
          Arceneaux rotated his head on his neck, then pulled the front of his shirt loose from his damp skin with his fingers.
          "Boy, it's hot, ain't it?" he said. "I think I'm gonna come in this afternoon and take a cold shower. You ought to try it too, Dave. A cold shower might get the wrong thing off your mind."
    They walked into the shimmering haze, their leather holsters and cartridge belts creaking on their hips, the backs of their shirts peppered with sweat.
     
     
    ROSIE GOMEZ AND I TURNED OFF THE HIGHWAY IN MY PICKUP truck and drove down the dirt lane through the pecan orchard toward Spanish Lake, where we could see elevated