Carnal Innocence

the delta?”
    “Leave him alone.” Dwayne stirred himself to snag Tucker’s wrist.
    “The hell I will.”
    “I said leave him alone.” Dwayne stuck his face close to Tucker’s. “I’ve got nothing to hide. This Yankee sonofabitch can ask questions from now to doomsday and that won’t change. Leave him be so we can get it done.”
    Reluctantly, Tucker loosened his grip. “We’re going to finish this, you and me.”
    Stone-faced, Burns straightened his tie. “It’ll be a pleasure.” He remained standing, turning to the bulletin board at his back. “Mr. Longstreet, were you acquainted with Arnette Gantrey?” Burns tapped a finger against the space between a photo of a smiling blond woman and a black-and-white police photo taken at Gooseneck Creek.
    “I knew Arnette. We went to school together, dated a few times.”
    “And Francie Logan?” Burns slid his finger to the next set of photos.
    “I knew Francie.” Dwayne averted his eyes. “Everybody knew Francie. She grew up here. Lived in Jackson for a while, then came back after getting divorced.”
    “And you were acquainted with Edda Lou Hatinger?”
    Dwayne forced himself to look back, but focused on the tip of Burns’s finger. “Yeah. I knew Darleen, too, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
    “Did you know a woman named Barbara Kinsdale?”
    “I don’t think so.” Dwayne’s brow creased as he tried out the name in his head. “Nobody around here named Kinsdale.”
    “Are you quite sure?” Burns unpinned a photo from the board. “Take a look.”
    Dwayne picked up the photo from the desk, grateful it was a shot of a live woman. She was a pretty brunette, perhaps thirty, with straight hair sweeping slight shoulders, “I’ve never seen her before.”
    “Haven’t you?” Burns picked up his notes. “Barbara Kinsdale, five foot two, a hundred three pounds, brown hair, blue eyes. Age thirty-one. Does that description sound familiar?”
    “I can’t say.”
    “You should be able to say,” Burns continued. “It’s almost a perfect description of your ex-wife. Mrs. Kinsdale was a cocktail waitress at the Stars and Bars Club in Nashville. Residence 3043 Eastland Avenue. That’s about three blocks away from your ex-wife’s home. Emmett Cotrain, your ex-wife’s fiancé, performed at the Stars and bars on weekends. An interesting coincidence, isn’t it?”
    A thin bead of sweat dripped down Dwayne’s back. “I guess it is.”
    “It’s more interesting that Mrs. Kinsdale was found floating in the Percy Priest Lake, outside of Nashville, late this spring. She was naked, her throat had been slit, and her body mutilated.”
    Burns tossed another photo across the desk, but in this one, Barbara Kinsdale was very dead. “Where wereyou on the night of May 22 of this year. Mr. Longstreet?”
    “Oh, Jesus.” Dwayne shut his eyes. The body hadn’t been covered in the police shot, but had been laid out, gray and tortured, for the cold camera lens.
    “I should tell you that my information places you in Nashville from the twenty-first to the twenty-third.”
    “I took my boys to the zoo.” Dwayne rubbed shaking hands over his eyes. It did look like Sissy. God almighty, especially dead it looked like Sissy. “I took them to the zoo and to a pizza parlor. They stayed with me at the hotel.”
    “On the night of the twenty-second you were seen in the hotel bar at approximately ten-thirty. Your children weren’t with you.”
    “They were asleep. I left them in the room and went down and had a drink. Couple drinks,” he said with a sigh. “Sissy’d been on me about doing more for them, and wanting a bigger house once she and the guy she was with got married. I didn’t have more than two drinks because I didn’t want to forget the boys were asleep upstairs.”
    “And didn’t you call your wife from the bar just before midnight?” Burns continued. “You argued with her, threatened her.”
    “I called her. I was sitting there in the room while the boys slept. My boys. It didn’t seem right that I was to help her buy a new house so she could live in it with another man my sons would think of as a father.” Pale, shaken, Dwayne looked over at Tucker. “It wasn’t the money.”
    “It was the humiliation,” Burns suggested. “The humiliation at the hands of a woman. She’d already made you a laughingstock by locking you out of your own house, leaving you for another man. Now she was demanding more money so she could live a