The tenth book in the Robicheaux series

I would like to thank the following attorneys for all the legal information they have provided me in the writing of my books over the years: my son James L. Burke, Jr., and my daughter Alafair Burke and my cousins Dracos Burke and Porteus Burke.

I would also like once again to thank my wife Pearl, my editor Patricia Mulcahy, and my agent Philip Spitzer for the many years they have been on board.

I'd also like to thank my daughters Pamela McDavid and Andree Walsh, from whom I ask advice on virtually everything.

I HAD SEEN A DAWN like this one only twice in my life: once in Vietnam, after a Bouncing Betty had risen from the earth on a night trail and twisted its tentacles of light around my thighs, and years earlier outside of Franklin, Louisiana, when my father and I discovered the body of a labor organizer who had been crucified with sixteen-penny nails, ankle and wrist, against a barn wall.

Just before the sun broke above the Gulf's rim, the wind, which had blown the waves with ropes of foam all night, suddenly died and the sky became as white and brightly grained as polished bone, as though all color had been bled out of the air, and the gulls that had swooped and glided over my wake lifted into the haze and the swells flattened into an undulating sheet of liquid tin dimpled by the leathery backs of stingrays.

The eastern horizon was strung with rain clouds and the sun should have risen out of the water like a mist-shrouded egg yolk, but it didn't. Its red light mushroomed along the horizon, then rose into the sky in a cross, burning in the center, as though fire were trying to take the shape of a man, and the water turned the heavy dark color of blood.