I watched for another few minutes, and then I made my way back through the trees, drove back to town, and let myself into Jimmie Ray Rebenack's office. It was as we had left it, quiet and smelling of raw shrimp, the sounds of the alley and backyards below drifting nicely through the open window. A lawn mower was growling a few houses away, and the rich smell of cut St. Augustine grass mixed nicely with the shrimp. The two-headed turtle was milky in its jar on the sill, and Tom Selleck looked bored in his frame atop the file cabinet. I could see Jimmie Ray Rebenack, watching Magnum reruns, watching Tom Selleck drive the fast car and mug with the beautiful women. Jimmie sitting in his little duplex in Ville Platte, thinking, yeah, I could do that, then taking some mail order course, How to Be a Private Eye!

I opened his desk to see what he had been reading, and suddenly the lawn mower sounds faded and the office was very quiet. Jodi Taylor smiled up at me from the cover of Music magazine. The cover and an accompanying article had been clipped from the magazine and stapled together. The People article was under it. I took a breath and let it out. Sonofagun. I went through the rest of the desk, but the rest of the desk was empty. I moved to the file cabinet. Two cans of Dr Pepper were hiding in the bottom drawer, and a single roll of prank toilet paper, the kind with Jerry Falwell's face printed on each of the sheets. Office-warming gift. The second drawer was empty, and the third was nicely outfitted with hanging file folders in various colors, only the folders were as empty and as clean as the day Jimmie Ray had installed them. There were eight hanging files in the top drawer. One of them held a Polaroid snapshot of a nude woman with a Winn-Dixie shopping bag over her head. A lot of blond hair peeked out beneath the bag, and she was cheap-looking, wearing rings on her diird and fourth fingers. Girlfriend, no doubt. Another held a surveillance report that Jimmie Ray Rebenack had written for a Mrs. Philip R. Cantera, who was convinced that her husband was playing around. Jimmie Ray's report said that he had observed Mr. Cantera in intimate embrace on several different occasions with (a) a young woman who worked at Cal's Road House and (b) another young woman who sold beer at the Rebel Stock Car Oval. The next three files contained case notes from similar jobs, two of them involving suspected infidelity, and the remaining being a grocery store owner who suspected an employee of stealing houseware products. The fifth folder contained more pictures of Jodi Taylor clipped from magazines and newspapers and what looked like studio press release sources, only sandwiched in with the articles were the Xeroxed copies of the first two pages of a document relinquishing the care and trust of one Maria Sue Johnson, a baby girl, to the State of Louisiana from her natural parents, Pamela E. Johnson and Monroe Kyle Johnson, on 11 July, thirty-six years ago. The document was incomplete and bore no signatures. Jodi Taylor's birth certificate was paper-clipped to the document along with a second birdi certificate, this one stating that Maria Sue Johnson had been born to Pamela E. Johnson and Monroe Kyle Johnson on 9 July. Jodi Taylor's birthday.