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hooted angrily.
    “Again let off with a caution. Desterres has friends in the right places.”
    Lafitte set his arms on her desk, the open newspaper beneath his elbows. “Desterres’s father was a rich man. One of that mulatto class that’s done almost as well as the
békés
and the businessmen from Martinique. The father sold off the machinery business before dying last year and now Desterres’s going to have to fend for himself. The restaurant at Tarare doesn’t make money.”
    “You think Desterres’s coming to see me was preemptive, Monsieur Lafitte?”
    “No one is guilty until proved so.”
    Lafitte was a few years older than Anne Marie. His skin had taken a jaundiced tint, with the wrinkles of years spent in the tropics. The sandy hair was short and brushed back. He spoke with the hint of a northern accent. From Roubaix or Lille. He had entered the police after a brief career as a professional cyclist and later he had captained a veteran team. Until his promotion to the Service Régional de Police Judiciaire, he had appeared boyish, but since his return to the Caribbean after a couple of years in Limoges he had been putting on fat. No more cycling. There was a jowly look to the face and the dark chin was beginning to sag from too much rum.
    “You think it’s possible Desterres tried to rape the girl?” Parise asked, turning away from the window.
    “We have no proof of rape.” Lafitte threw a hurried glance at the
gendarme
. “For the moment, Desterres is the only lead we have. A restaurant little more than a kilometer from where the victim was found. And a record.” Lafitte added, “He’s the last person to have seen the girl alive.”
    “You don’t have yourself photographed by the woman you intend to rape,” Parise said.
    “You don’t always know yourself you’re going to rape somebody.”
    “Most sexual violence is carried out by somebody within the family,” Anne Marie said flatly.
    Parise turned toward her and grinned. “I’ll remember that when serving Sunday dinner.”
    Anne Marie looked at Parise. “In fact the last person to have seen Evelyne Vaton alive is this man Richard.”
    “Supposing Richard actually exists.”
    “He’s in the photograph,” Anne Marie remarked as she tapped the Polaroid.
    “That doesn’t mean Richard was with the girl and it certainly doesn’t mean Desterres’s telling the truth.”
    “We’ll know that as soon as we’ve located Richard.” Again Anne Marie tapped the picture with her pen. “No proof of rape, Lafitte?”
    “The autopsy’s this afternoon.”
    “You’d better take this bikini top to the Institut Pasteur. Desterres left it.” She held up a plastic envelope. Anne Marie shook her head unhappily. “A woman with no belongings? Whatever happened to the other Polaroids and the rest of her swimming stuff? Didn’t she have a tote bag, suntan oil, towels? I’m told women carry a lot of clutter. Did she really leave nothing in the hired car?”
    “Nothing was left in the car.” Lafitte shook his head. “I’ve sent a couple of men to take prints but the Hertz people hired the car out yesterday afternoon.”
    Parise sat down at her desk beside Lafitte. He coughed. “
Madame le juge
, we’ve had a few phone calls to the incident room in Saint-François. People saying they saw the white girl.”
    “And?”
    “She’s not the only young female tourist in the Saint-François area. Several callers saw a Fiat Uno. Every call’s recorded, but at the moment, we don’t have any leads, beyond a couple of people who say they saw a topless white girl at the Pointe des Châteaux before ten o’clock on Sunday morning. A woman who was by herself, sitting on the beach.” Parise’s intelligent eyes looked at Anne Marie. “In Saint-François, the hotels and the restaurants don’t want anything happening to the flow of satisfied tourists.”
    “Anything happening to the flow of cash,” Lafitte remarked.
    Anne Marie tapped the desk like an