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they raped her.”
    Bobby grimaced. “So she could have been killed anywhere?”
    “That’s right, son. We need to find that truck and search it good for trace evidence. And, Bobby, I need you to keep your ears open. Spend a few hours at Bubba’s tonight, see what you hear.”
    “Yessir.” Bobby paused, placed a hand on the back of the chair facing his boss’s desk. The sheriff nodded. Sitting, the deputy said, “What about the old codger, Kincaid? Anything to follow up with there? He mentioned the refinery …”
    “I’m sure that joker thinks the killing has to do with Ms. Bordelon’s research—or the critters, as he put it. But I met with her boss and that Dallas lawyer they worked for this morning. There’s nothing there …”
    Seastrunk had trailed off. Now he tugged at his lip. Bobby said, “What is it, Sheriff?”
    Gazing into the middle distance, Seastrunk shook his head with a rhythmic slowness, like a man doubting his own memory. “I just keep thinking about that boy out there on the lake, Kincaid’s grandson. Poor little fella.”
    “Kid’s probably going to have some nightmares.”
    “Shoot, son, I know that’s right.”
    •
     
    Sheriff and deputy mounted the marble steps of the concrete and stucco monolith, its sharp angled gray walls stained black at the top by seven decades of East Texas rains. A stylized carved eagle perched above the ten-foot doors of modernist cut glass. Inside the vaulted lobby, the angled light illuminated a chronological mural in the socialist-realism style of that lost, populist-progressive era. The scenes depicted generations of workers building toward modernity, from Caddo Indians carving dug-out canoes in the cypress swamp; to black men, women and children toiling in the cotton fields; to white roughnecks putting up oil derricks. The sheriff often spoke of his boyhood memories of the previous courthouse, a sinister Victorian-gothic castle, which came down to make room for this imposing gray monument to the 1930’s oil boom. The county had not been immune to the impoverishment of the Great Depression, but here great wealth existed beside the poverty, and the county coffers floated, for a while, on that oil money—all the more so after war broke out in Europe. Seastrunk had told Bobby on more than one occasion,
World War II was won on a sea of East Texas oil
.
    A brass elevator took them to the district attorney’s office near the top. DA Ben Hargrave greeted them with moist handshakes, a Baylor University class ring overwhelming his pale narrow fingers. Leaving the jacket of his dark, tailored suit buttoned, he took his seat behind his desk.
    “Gentlemen, meet Assistant DA Tasha Carter.”
    “Tasha,” the sheriff said, taking her hand. “Now I reckon I met you at your great-uncle’s house years ago, as a teenager in braids.”
    The young woman smiled. “A scrawny awkward little thing. I remember, Sheriff. You were campaigning. Uncle Mose has always spoken highly of you.”
    Mose Carter.
Bobby recognized the name of the town’s most prominent black minister, a local icon who had marched with Martin Luther King.
    Hargrave frowned. “Ms. Carter’s just recently moved home from Houston, where she clerked for a federal judge before spending a few years in private practice. We’re blessed to have her. I’ll be handling the Bordelon case personally, with Tasha second chair.”
    “Well, that’s fine,” Seastrunk said.
    “Any contact with the press yet, Sheriff?”
    Bobby chewed his lip and wagged his foot as listened as Seastrunk recounted his interview; it did not surprise the deputy that the DA would start by talking about the media rather than the status of their investigation—both Seastrunk and Hargrave were politicians first and foremost—but it tried his patience nonetheless.
    “Okay,” Hargrave said, folding his soft-looking, pinkish hands before him. “The way this is going to work is, you’ll make an arrest fast. I’ll ask for the