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"You don't understand. I checked down at Poteet's first. Then I saw Tripod running loose on his chain in the road."
"What was she wearing?"
"A yellow raincoat and a baseball cap."
"Where's Bootsie?"
"Still in town."
"All right, stay by the phone and I'll be there in a few minutes."
"Dave, I'm sorry, I don't know what to say, I—"
"It's not your fault." I replaced the phone receiver in the cradle, my ears whirring with a sound like wind inside a sea shell, the skin of my face as tight as a pumpkin's.
Before Rosie and I left the office I told the dispatcher to put out an all-car alert on Alafair and to contact the state police.
All the way to the house I tried to convince myself that there was an explanation for her disappearance other than the one that I couldn't bear to h
old in the center of my mind for more than a few seconds. Maybe Tripod had simply gotten away from her while she was in the bait shop and she was still looking for him, I thought. Or maybe she had walked down to the general store at the four-corners, had forgotten to lock the door, and Tripod had broken loose from the clothesline on his own.
But Alafair never forgot to lock up the bait shop and she wouldn't leave Tripod clipped to the clothesline in the rain.
Moments after I walked into the bait shop, all the images and fears that I had pushed to the edges of my consciousness suddenly became real and inescapable, in the same way that you wake from a nightmare into daylight and with a sinking of the heart realize that the nightmare is part of your waking day and has not been manufactured by your sleep. Behind the counter I saw her Astros baseball cap, where it had been flattened into the Buckboards by someone's muddy shoe or boot. Elrod and Rosie watched me silently while I picked it up and placed it on top of the counter. I felt as though I were deep under water, past the point of depth tolerance, and something had popped like a stick and pulled loose in my head. Through the screen I saw Bootsie's car turn into the drive and park by the house.
"I should have figured him for it," I said.
"Doucet?" Rosie said.
"He was a cop. He's afraid to do time."
"We're not certain it's Doucet, Dave," she said.
"He knows what happens to cops inside mainline jails. Particularly to a guy they make as a short-eyes. I'm going up to talk to Bootsie. Don't answer the phone, okay?"
Rosie's teeth made white marks on her bottom lip.
"Dave, I want to bring in the Bureau as soon as we have evidence that it's a kidnapping," she said.
"So far nothing official we do to this guy works. It's time both of us hear that, Rosie," I said, and went out the screen door and started up the dock.
I hadn't gone ten yards when I heard the telephone ring behind me. I ran back through the rain and jerked the receiver out of the cradle.
"You sound out of breath," the voice said.
Don't blow this one.
"Turn her loose, Doucet. You don't want to do this," I said. I looked into Rosie's face and pointed toward the house.
"I'll make it simple for both of us. You take the utility knife and the photo out of the evidence locker. You put them in a Ziploc bag. At eight o'clock tomorrow morning you leave the bag in the trash can on the corner of Royal and St. Ann in New Orleans. I don't guess you ought to plan on getting a lot of sleep tonight."
Rosie had eased the screen door shut behind her and was walking fast up the incline toward the house in the fading light.
"The photo's a bluff. It's out of focus," I said. "You can't be identified in it."
"Then you won't mind parting with it."
"You can walk, Doucet. We can't make the case on you."
