Rusty looks back with an inquisitive arch of the eyebrows.

“This is chaos,” I tell him. “Find Tim and his guys, and don’t leave Mom’s side until you do. Tell Tim I’m fine alone for a half hour.”

“I’ve got her, buddy. Who you meeting?”

“Jewel,” I whisper.

Rusty’s eyes widen, but he says nothing, and I jog down the steps to Washington Street, ignoring the reporters and texting Serenity as I run.

hav 2 meet somebody. tlk2 u soon as i can.

At the corner of Washington and Wall stands a house that was built in 1735. When I was a boy, it was owned by a man who operated a rare bookstore out of it. My father would spend hours browsing through the dusty shelves or digging through boxes of the latest acquisitions while I toyed with more esoteric merchandise. The book dealer owned a gold-headed cane that had belonged to George Washington Cable when the writer lived in New Orleans. I often pretended that the cane had a sword tip concealed in it, and the dealer would play the role of villain for me. When he died, the old man left that cane to my father. Now it lies in a treasured place on one of the bookshelves in my father’s study.

Jewel chose this house for its proximity to both the courthouse and her office. She had to walk only one block to reach it. Behind the two-story colonial is a courtyard bounded by a high, ivy-covered wall of crumbling brick. One gate opens onto the street, and it’s this that I slip through, into a fragrant, verdant world of flower beds and hanging plants.

The county coroner sits at a wrought-iron table in the corner of the courtyard, smoking a cigarette with intense concentration. I walk over and sit far enough away that I don’t have to breathe the smoke as she exhales it.

“Mrs. Petros would kill you if she saw you smoking out here.”

“She’s on a bicycle trip in France. I don’t think her eyes are that good.”

“What’s going on, Jewel?”

“I’m not sure, but something’s rotten in the sheriff’s department. And you need to know about it.”

“That’s not exactly news with Billy Byrd wearing the star.”

“How about tampering with evidence?”

“Talk to me.”

Jewel takes one last drag, then stubs out the cigarette, stands, and throws the butt over the high wall behind her. “About an hour ago, I ran into a deputy down at the convenience store. A black deputy.”

“Okay.”

“He’s kind of been giving me the eye for a while, so when he pulled me aside, I figured he was trying to flirt with me. He wasn’t. He told me he had overheard two white deputies talking about your father’s case in the locker room. They were laughing about how slick they had done something.”

“What?”