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surprised him, she reached for the small pot and poured out the excess water, carried it back to the coffeemaker. “What do you want to know, Sheriff? ”
    Sarcasm wasn’t supposed to slip like a caress. “Everything.” Where she’d been. Why she’d come home…why she’d inserted herself in Lambert’s crosshairs.
    “Which came first?” He looked back at the crude handwriting. “The note or your car being broken into?”
    She tore open a little foil packet—dark roast. “The break-in.”
    Which meant there’d been time for someone to access her files, see something they didn’t like. “Where did the note come from?”
    With a laissez-faire that burned, she poured the grinds into the filter. “Slipped under my door sometime after midnight.”
    When she’d been alone. Probably in bed. “And you didn’t call me?”
    Now she turned, rested her hip against the chair. “Would that have made you happy, Jack? If I’d called you?”
    His chest tightened, but before he could continue the interrogation, his cell phone rang. He grabbed his phone and glanced at caller ID, jabbed the talk button. “Savoie.”
    “Sheriff.” The voice belonged to the youngest deputy on his force, Russ Melancon…and it was shaken. There’s been an accident.”
     
    Two sets of skid marks veered off the narrow, canal-lined highway. One went right. The other went left.
    Both ended in murky water.
    Lights flashed and sirens screamed. Cars were every where. Some people ran; others stood and gaped. Margot Landry held her two grandchildren—and cried.
    Jack closed in on the scene, refused to let himself run. To limp. The leg itself had healed, but the doctors had warned the nerve damage was likely permanent. With effort he kept his stride brisk, his expression unreadable, his voice authoritative. Everything was under control. Janelle and her kids had been pulled from their minivan. The little girl was crying, but their grandmother was with them. The paramedics were with Janelle. She was hurt—hurt bad. But she was alive.
    So was the driver of the little muscle car who’d gunned his engine after a deputy had turned on his siren and signaled for the driver to pull over….
    “Name’s Hebert,” Russ said. “Billy. License lists an address in Bunkie.”
    Jack glanced at the stretcher alongside the shoulder, where two paramedics tended the motionless man. Mid-thirties, Jack would guess. Thin. Track marks on his arms. “Find anything else?”
    “Not yet. Just his wallet and the envelope.”
    Against the folder found on the front seat, Jack’s fingers tightened. Hank had spotted the black sports car just outside town and had immediately linked it to the description of a car seen in the vicinity of the savings and loan break-in. He’d turned on his lights and signaled for the driver to pull over, but the bastard had floored the engine instead. Like a coward, he’d tried to run, to get away, tearing down the highway at a ridiculous rate of speed. He’d seen the minivan too late.
    Grimly, Jack glanced toward the growing crowd on the other side of the highway—and saw her.
    And the edges of his vision blurred.
    Dressed now in low-riding jeans and a soft peach poet’s shirt, she stood with Margot Landry. He couldn’t see her face, just the way she lifted a hand to stroke the little girl’s hair from her tear-streaked face.
    And the slow boil worked from his gut to his chest.
    “Sheriff, you want me to—”
    “Go on home,” he said as he twisted toward Hank, the deputy who’d initially given chase. “You took a nasty blow. You should get some rest.”
    Hank shook his head, even as he lifted his fingers to the gash at his cheek. He’d barely brought his car to a stop before ending up in one of the canals. “Looks worse than it is. I can—”
    “Everything’s under control. We can take it from here.”
    Hank’s mouth tightened into a flat line, but he did as told—and Jack started across the highway.
    She didn’t see him at