“And then we’ll discuss it. Come on, Jay,” she cajoled, as she headed north on River Road, past the old state Capitol building, a Gothic castle-shaped edifice that loomed on a bluff above the slowly moving Mississippi River. “You promised me a week.”

“My mistake.”

“The first of many,” she teased, feeling better. “I’ll see ya in a few.” She hung up before he could argue, or before she let it slip that she was going to set her own little trap. Tonight.

At Father Mathias’s morality play.

She only hoped her plan would work.

“So far, we’ve got ourselves a big potful o’ nothing!” Ray Crawley snorted in disgust and cast an “I-told-you-so” look at Portia Laurent.

A detective for the Baton Rouge Police Department, Crawley was a big, bulky bear of a man who stood six-four and fought the beginnings of a beer gut. He had huge hands and a nasty disposition when he was angry, and now, standing in the rain, he was well past angry and doing sixty toward infuriated. Shoulders hunched, he smoked a cigarette and stared at the swamp where boats with divers and bright lights were searching the water through a relentless downpour.

It was getting dark, the gloom of the day seeping into Portia’s skin, the shadows in the boggy wetlands growing longer as she stood clustered with Del Vernon and Crawley, who called himself “Sonny,” and a hunter by the name of Boomer Moss.

Wearing the raincoat and boots she always kept in her car, Portia huddled under an umbrella. Her boots sinking in the mud, she thought she would just about kill for a cigarette, but decided against bumming one from Crawley, who was just looking for an excuse to round on someone.

“You sure this is where you caught the gator?” Sonny asked with obvious skepticism, rain sliding off the bill of his police department cap. The area had been searched by boat, on foot, and when possible, by divers. With no luck.

But Moss, the poacher, was adamant this was the area in which he’d bagged the bull alligator. That prime gator that the cops had confiscated and trucked off to their crime lab.

“Right through them there trees,” Boomer Moss insisted, pointing toward a stand of ghostly white cypress, their roots twisting and visible above ground and the black water.

“We looked there.” Crawley drew hard on his cigarette.

“I’m tellin’ ya, that’s where I got him.” Moss’s voice elevated an octave in agitation. Dressed head-to-toe in camouflage, he jabbed a finger at the nearest cypress. Even in the gathering darkness, with the cold winter air sitting heavy in the swamp, Portia saw that Boomer was sweating, drips drizzling from beneath his hunting cap and down a cheek stretched over a wad of tobacco. Obviously, he didn’t like dealing with the police.

But then, nobody did.