Carter Williams, a big man with broad shoulders and overpowering intellect, stood and flipped up the collar of his coat. Crisp and cold air blew on that first Monday morning of December, as a chilling wind rustled the leaves on the trees. A cold front had dumped what seemed like an ocean of rain on Baton Rouge the day before and brought the first bit of winter weather for the season.

“Always remember the most important aspect of evidence collection is protecting the crime scene,” said the former ace homicide detective as he knelt over his subject.

“But—” Shawn, his ten-year-old son, tried to interrupt.

“No buts. Pay attention. Before it’s contaminated, you have to collect and record the evidence. Take this, for instance.” He pulled out a small plastic container holding a single live cockroach.

“Is that a roach?”

“Yes. Insecta Dictyoptera. I found this one in the house. Let’s say this roach did something as simple as walk through a pool of blood at a crime scene. It can produce tracking an untrained observer may not recognize. The little things are important. Specks of blood in unique and unusual areas may mislead crime scene technicians unless they are aware of the appearance of blood contaminated by roach tracks. The same thing can happen with flies, fleas, or any other insects.”

An exasperated breath escaped the boy’s mouth. “That’s cool…I guess,” he answered and rolled his eyes. Carter noticed his son focusing on something in the distance. He turned to see a white, unmarked police cruiser turning into his driveway. He felt a twinge in the pit of his stomach. Had his day of reckoning finally arrived?

“Go inside and finish getting ready for school,” he told his son.

“Okay, but don’t forget the project is due Friday, and you promised to help me finish,” the boy said and ran inside.

The car stopped and out stepped Carter’s former supervisor, Lieutenant Pamela Shelton. In her late forties and of South American descent, she was considered attractive by most. Those people didn’t know her. With a reputation built more in the bedroom than the squad room, she ruled more as politician than cop.

As she walked toward him, Carter popped open the container and released the roach onto the ground. It scurried toward the lieutenant. He held them both in the same regard. Her heavily made up face and weighty chest gave her the look of an aged porn star. She ran her hand through her dark shoulder-length hair and, with a slight lisp, said, “Carter.”

“Lieutenant,” he replied.

“I hear you are teaching again.”

“Just a few night classes at the Community College. Next semester I’ll go back to the university.”

She looked nervous, but why? If this was going to be the end of his law enforcement career, he would have thought she would be at the very least satisfied if not pleased. Six months ago, Carter had served as one of three black detectives in the homicide division of the Baton Rouge Police Department. The number dropped down to two after the death of his former partner, Ray Newsome. That death led to his suspension. He spent the first month convincing himself Ray’s death wasn’t his fault. The next five he spent trying to convince everyone else. Carter imagined what else could go wrong.

“Cut the pleasantries, Lieutenant. Why are you here?”

“There’s been a murder.”

“Is this your way of giving me my job back? All you had to do was ask. Is my suspension over?”

“No, Carter. You don’t understand.” She hesitated. “I…I need you to come in for questioning.”

“Questioning? I’m a suspect? Are you serious?”

He asked the question, but he already knew the answer. She was telling the truth. Freud once said, ‘He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozed out of him at every pore.’ The Lieutenant was no different from any other suspect or citizen. Carter could detect a lie as if it were were a bad, lingering odor. It was a blessing and a curse.

“Williams, don’t make this any harder than it has to be.”

“Why me?”

“Listen, I could’ve sent a couple of uniforms down here and had them put the cuffs on you,” she snapped. “I tried to do you a favor. None of us wanted it this way, but it had to be done. The circumstances surrounding your suspension were unpleasant but justifiable.This is a different situation altogether.”

“Who’s the vic?” he asked.

“Dwayne Bentley.”

Carter wished he could have forgotten about Dwayne Bentley. The thought of the child-killer’s cold body lying on the coroner’s table would make it easier to deal with, but he knew he could never truly forget. The Bentley case had introduced him to his first “red ball,” a term used in homicide for a top-priority case. When a red ball appeared, work on all other pending cases stopped. Red ball cases usually involved a murdered or injured officer, an ongoing active threat such as a rampage or spree killer, any murder with strong political or public relations repercussions, or, worst of all, child abductions.

“We found his body this morning. Everyone knows your history with him. Come down and talk to us so we can straighten this all out.”

“Do you think I could have done it?”

“No, not really,” she lied.

“I didn’t,” he answered and paused for a second before he spat out, “But I’m glad he’s dead.” He knew he shouldn’t have said it, but he meant it. That case was his first as the primary on a red ball and it changed him forever. The missing girl’s name was Marcia O’Neal, nine years old, with red spiral curls, countless freckles, and an infectious smile under her perfect little button nose. In the picture he continued to carry in his wallet, she wore a purple shirt with big yellow and white flowers.

For three weeks, finding Marcia remained the top priority of the department. She was last seen on the evening of February twenty-third when her father put her to bed, both she and the stuffed bear she slept with were gone. The clothes she had laid out for school lay in their place, and her shoes next to the bed. Having a young child himself, the ordeal gave Carter nightmares for months.

Against Carter’s wishes, Marcia’s mother made an emotional appeal on national television for her daughter’s safe return. He knew it wouldn’t help. Being one of six registered sex offenders within a ten-mile radius of Marcia’s house, Dwayne Bentley’s name popped up early in the investigation. From the first time they met, Carter knew of Bentley’s guilt.

During a house burglary in 1988, Bentley had grabbed a girl in her bedroom, placing his hand over her mouth and fondling her. He served five years in prison before his parole release in the mid-nineties. He had an extensive criminal record including twenty-four arrests for burglary, carrying a concealed weapon, and indecent exposure. In 1997, the police arrested him in Florida on a charge of fondling a child under the age of sixteen. He pled down to a misdemeanor, yet another triumph for the criminal justice system of this country.

“When was Bentley’s body found?” he asked.

“You know I can’t tell you that.”

Carter remained quiet on his ride to headquarters as he replayed the events of Bentley’s capture in his mind.

Between the city police and the sheriff’s department, they had more than a hundred officers and volunteers. They searched with four-wheelers, bloodhounds, and helicopters for days following the disappearance. Under normal circumstances, there wasn’t enough evidence for an arrest warrant for Bentley. The unreliable eyewitness and degraded DNA didn’t make a strong case, but Carter didn’t doubt his guilt for one minute. He found the Honorable Judge Nathan Parms at the Pastime Lounge at much later than respectable hours. After an hour or so of Carter buzzing in his ear, and non-stop glasses of red wine over crushed ice, he signed the warrant. Without even bothering to go home or to the office, he radioed headquarters and requested the Special Tactics and Ordeal Response Management Team, or STORM Team for short. They hit the house at full force at three in the morning, but Bentley had already gone.

“You’re pretty quiet over there,” the lieutenant said, bringing his thoughts back to the situation at hand as they turned onto Mayflower Avenue.

“Were you expecting a confession?”

“You haven’t changed a bit. You know, sometimes it’s better to go along to get along in the job. You know that.”

“Still doesn’t make it right,” he answered as they approached headquarters. The Baton Rouge Police Department Headquarters sat in the Beauregard Town area of downtown Baton Rouge at 504 Mayflower Street, bordered by South Boulevard, East Boulevard, and St. Philip Street. Carter prepared to walk through those doors of homicide division he had entered and exited thousands of times. He trekked up the stairs and walked through those doors for the first time as a suspect.

The lieutenant led him to her office, where she kept him waiting forever. Bentley’s case file sat on her desk, but he knew better than to touch it. His mind drifted back again to the night they went after him.

They did everything the right way, but he still got away. When he attempted to follow up with the family, Bentley’s parents refused to answer those questions about their son, who, of course, was being unjustly persecuted. Help came from the unlikely source of Bentley’s younger

sister, Sandra. Speaking to Carter away from the family, she denied that Binky, as she had always called him, lived with them. However, she told him they did have family in Atlanta he stayed with from time to time.

Luckily, Carter had a contact in Georgia. He called Detective Wade Patrick, and they had Bentley picked up in a matter of hours.

“He didn’t fight at all,” Patrick said. “Just cried like a great big ole sissy. He is truly a piece of poor white trash. The folks we picked him up with wasn’t no better, nothing but a bunch of druggies in a meth lab ’bout to blow up.”

Patrick assured him they would all face charges of obstruction, and the district attorney, Patrick’s brother-in-law, would not allow them to plea-bargain for reduced sentences. Even though his picture had been all over the national news, Bentley’s Atlanta relatives claimed to have no idea the police were looking for him. They were lying, of course.

When Carter walked into the interrogation room, Bentley stared at him with cold, dull eyes. In the short time since he had seen him last, Bentley had dropped ten to fifteen pounds. His skin looked pulled against his skull and his face looked ashen and gaunt. Dark lines formed under his eyes, and his lips looked white and crusted over.

“Make this easy on yourself and tell us where she is.”

A smile pulled dry white lips from yellow teeth. “Who?”

Carter wanted to throw Bentley to the floor and beat him like he was somebody else’s dog, a

little saying he’d picked up from Detective Patrick. It fit the occasion perfectly. “This is not a game,” Carter said.

“I don’t play games, Boss. You like games?”

“This is not going to end well for you.”

“Why you so worried ’bout that lil girl? You want a piece of that for yourself, Boss?”

Carter shook off his baiting and said, “Dwayne, are you a killer? I mean, am I looking at a killer right now? I know accidents happen. I’m not saying you tried to kill her. We are trying to give you a way out here. Where was the last place you saw the girl?”

Bentley scratched his chin and said, “Naw, you don’t look the type to be foolin’ wit’ no lil girls. Is it boys you like, Boss? Is that how you get off?”

“Where is she?”

“How did it start, Boss? Did your uncle play with yo’ little tally whacker when you was a boy?”

Carter pounded his fist on the table and shouted, “Where is she?”

“I sure am thirsty. You think I could get a little water, Boss?”

“Water? You want water? Tell me what I want to know and you’ll get your water.”

“When I was young, I used to love to play in the water. Water is a gift from God, the best thing in the world. You like water, Boss?”

“Don’t play games with me, Bentley. You can’t win. I have no doubt you bragged to those low-class relatives of yours about what you did. When they come down from that meth high, you don’t think they’re going to tell us exactly what happened with that little girl? You’re the one with the record. Stand up and take your charge like a man!”

He hesitated a moment before answering. “That girl was alone a lot, you know, by herself. When I was young, I used to like to go out by the river. Where I lived, you know I could sneak out the window and go down there. It was only a couple hundred feet. I even—”

“Where is she?” Carter shouted and pounded on the metal interrogation table again.

“Boss, it ain’t polite to interrupt people when they is trying to tell a story. As I was saying, I even got lost back there one evening. My sister and me was playing behind the house, and we just kept drifting back further and further. ’Fore we knew it, we was by the river and it was getting dark.”

“So she’s in the river?”

“Look, Boss, all’s I’m saying is, things happen and kids get lost sometimes when they go places they ain’t got no business going. Water is a gift from God, but it can be as unforgivin’ as a woman.”

The department crews worked through the night in temperatures dipping into the low thirties to search for her body.

In Carter’s mind, he could still see the hundreds of candles from the late-night vigil at Marcia’s home nearby.

It was four-fourteen on a Wednesday morning when they found the body. Weather, river water, and decomposition ruined any type of physical evidence there may have been, but the District Attorney charged Bentley with first-degree murder.

“This man has hurt too many people,” Lieutenant Shelton said at the news conference after the arrest. “He’s hurt too many children. He took Marcia’s life, and he will pay. Dwayne

Bentley will pay.” He didn’t.

Bentley’s defense attorney outclassed the hapless, overworked prosecutor. The case never even went to trial, and the only thing Bentley pled guilty to was violating his parole. Victor O’Neal cried on Carter’s shoulder, wondering why the system had failed his daughter.