“You want me to go in with you?”

It was late afternoon when Devin arrived at Laurel Oak…

Lamar did not answer Devin’s calls or texts the week that followed the art walk…

On third Fridays every other month, the city’s French Quarter galleries opened doors to anyone strolling in off the streets…

She didn’t tell Lamar what she had actually seen in the woods till later that evening, in his studio…

“If we’re going to do this,” Lamar said, “the best way is by water…”

Ron Holbrooke was strangling her…

Dark eyes, half-hid by the glare on his wire-frame glasses, and a bristly white mustache…

“I don’t know how you can drink that in this heat,” Devin mused…

Lamar’s Rio slid into the lot of a dive on the edge of town, some three or four miles up Sixty-one…

The stranger thrust them on in short strokes, stabbing the creek with his paddle like a heron spearing fish…

It was nearing five o’clock and the breeze, muted here beneath the pines, carried the smell of the marsh…