The Glass Rainbow: A Dave Robicheaux Novel Read Online Free Page B

people who can teach themselves not to blink. When a person doesn’t blink, you can’t read his thoughts. All you see is one undecipherable expression. It’s like staring into electrified silk.”
    “That’s quite an image,” he said to Kermit. “One of us ought to borrow that and give Mr. Robicheaux a footnote.”
    “You can just take it and use it in any fashion you choose. It’s free,” I said.
    Kermit Abelard touched my forearm with a loaded paper plate.
    “No, thanks,” I said. “I’d better get back on my run.”
    “You’re a police officer,” Robert Weingart said.
    “Alafair told you?”
    “Usually I can spot a police officer. It used to be part of my curriculum vitae. But in this case I think your daughter told me. I’m almost sure of it.”
    “You think? But you don’t know?”
    Alafair’s face was burning.
    “Is my plate ready? I could eat a whale,” Robert Weingart said, looking around, suppressing his amusement at the situation that swirled about him.
    “I CAN’T BELIEVE you. Why didn’t you punch him in the face while you were at it?” Alafair said to me after she returned home.
    “That’s a possibility,” I replied.
    “What did he do? The man was just sitting there.”
    “He’s a mainline recidivist, Alf. Don’t be taken in.”
    “Don’t call me that stupid name. How can you know somebody five seconds and make judgments like that?”
    “Anybody who’s con-wise can spot a dude like that five blocks away.”
    “The real problem is you always want to control other people. Instead of being honest about your own self-centered agenda, you go after Kermit’s friend.”
    “You’re right, I don’t know him.”
    “Why do you blame Kermit for what his family may have done? It’s not fair to him, Dave, and it’s not fair to me.”
    “There’s no ‘may have done’ about it. The Abelards are dictators. If they had their way, we’d all be doing their grunt work for minimum wage, if that.”
    “So what? That doesn’t mean Kermit is like the rest of his family. John and Robert Kennedy weren’t like their father.”
    “What’s with you two? I could hear you all the way out in the driveway,” Molly said, coming through the back door, both arms loaded with groceries.
    “Ask Dave, if you can get him to pull his head out of his ass,” Alafair said.
    “That’s the second time someone has said that to me today. The other person was a meltdown on a road gang in Mississippi.”
    Molly tried to make it to the counter with the grocery bags. But it was too late. One of them caved, and most of our delicatessen supper splattered on the linoleum.
    That’s when Clete Purcel tapped on the back screen. “Am I interrupting anything?” he said.

CHAPTER
2
    I T WAS THROUGH Clete Purcel that I had been over in Jeff Davis Parish asking about the seven girls and young women whose bodies had been found in ditches and swamp areas since 2005. Two weeks ago the remains of one of his bail skips were found in the bottom of a recently drained canal, her decomposed features webbed with dried algae, as though she had been wrapped in a sheet of dirty plastic. The pathologist said she had died of massive physical trauma. Perhaps she had been struck by a hit-and-run driver. Perhaps not.
    Clete operated a private investigative service out of two offices, one on St. Ann in the French Quarter and the other on Main Street, here in New Iberia. His daily routine was one of ennui coupled with an almost visceral disdain for the people he routinely hooked up and delivered to two bondsmen in New Orleans by the names of Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine, both of whom had been bankrupted after Katrina when FEMA transported their bonded-out clientele to faraway cities all over the United States. At one time Clete had been the best cop I ever knew, both as a patrolman and as a detective-grade investigator with the NOPD. But booze and pills and his predilection for damaged women had been his undoing, and