I found the master bedroom farther down the hall. Through the French doors that gave onto the gallery I could see the tops of the oak trees beating in the wind. I turned on the light and looked at the canopied bed that was centered against one wall. The sheets, bedspread, pillows, and mattress were gone. Only the box spring remained in the wooden frame. I walked in a circle around the bed and felt the rug. It was still damp in two places and smelled of dry-cleaning fluid or spot remover.

I knew it was time to call the Lafayette Parish sheriff's office. I was overextended legally, in the home on questionable grounds, and perhaps even in danger of tainting evidence in a homicide. But legality is often a matter that is decided after the fact, and I believed sincerely that someone owed me ten more minutes.

I went out a side door onto the flagstone patio, past the screened-in pool and the breezeway where Bubba kept his dumbbells, universal gym, and punching bags, and found a garden rake leaned against the carriage house. The wind was blowing stronger now, the first raindrops clicking against the upstairs windows.

Even though the flower bed by the side of the house was flooded from the soak hose, the leaves of the geraniums still looked like wilted green paper. I began to rake the dirt and the plants out of the bed. The soil was rich and black and had been built up with compost, and as I scooped it out on the gravel, milky puddles formed in the hollows. A foot down the rake's head struck something solid. I worked the dirt and torn plants and root systems back over the brick border and created a long, shallow depression through the center of the garden, the rake's teeth again touching something thick and resistant. Then I saw the edge of a vinyl shower curtain rise on one of the teeth and a pajama-clad knee protrude through the soil. I scraped around the edges of the body, watched the feet and shoulders and brow take shape, as though I were its creator and sculpting it from the earth.

I set the rake on the gravel and cut the soak hose in half with my knife to release a strong jet of water. Then I washed the soft dirt, which looked like black coffee grounds, from Bubba's face. He rested on top of the shower curtain, his gray-blue eyes open, his face and hands and feet absolutely bloodless. The handle and the metal back of the cane knife she had used stuck out of the dirt by his head. The cut across the side of his neck went all the way to the bone.

I turned off the soak hose and went back through the kitchen door and called the Lafayette Parish sheriff's office and Minos Dautrieve, then I started toward my truck. Dead leaves swirled all over the yard in the wind, the sky was black, and the few raindrops that struck my face were as hard as BBs.

Behind me I heard the phone ring. I went back inside and picked up the receiver.

"Hello," I said.

"Bubba? This is Kelly. What's the deal on this dago linen service?" a man's voice said over the hum of long-distance wires. "Claudette says I'm supposed to hire these guys. What the fuck's going on over there?"

"Bubba's dead, partner."

"What? Who is this?"

"I'm a police officer. What's your name?"

He hung up the phone.

I drove back down the gravel lane toward the highway while the thick limbs of the oak trees beat against one another overhead. The black thunderheads on the southern horizon were veined with lightning. The air was almost cold now, and the young sugarcane was bent to the ground in the wind. I rolled up my windows, turned on the windshield wipers, and felt the steering wheel shake in my hand. Pieces of newspaper and cardboard were flying in the air across the highway, and the telephone wires flopped and bounced like rubber bands between the poles.

I passed a cement plant and a sidetracked Southern Pacific freight, and then I saw the maroon convertible parked in front of a truck stop that had a small lounge attached to it. It began raining hard just as I walked inside.

Because the Negro janitor was mopping the floor and wiping down the tables, the curtains were open and the overhead lights were turned on. In the light you could see the cigarette burns on the floor, the mending tape on the booths, and the stacked beer cases in a back corner. An overweight barmaid was drinking coffee and talking with two oilfield roughnecks at the bar. The roughnecks wore tin hats and steel-toed boots and had drilling mud splattered on their clothes. One of them rolled a matchstick in his mouth and said something to me about the weather. When I didn't answer, he and his friend and the woman continued to look at me and the pistol and badge on my belt.

Claudette Rocque was at a table by the back door. The door was open and mist was blowing through the screen. Out on the railway tracks I could see the rust-colored SP freight cars shining in the rain. She sipped her gin rickey and looked at me across the top of the glass. Her face was bruised and fatigued, and her brown eyes, which had that strange red cast to them, were glazed and sleepy with alcohol. There was an outline of adhesive tape around the stitches on her chin, and the skin was puckered on the tip of the bone. But her yellow sundress and the orange bandana in her hair were fresh and clean and even looked attractive on her, and I guessed that she had showered and changed after she had dragged Bubba downstairs on the shower curtain, dug up the garden, buried him, replanted the geraniums, and burned the mattress and pillows and sheets. She inhaled from her filtertipped cigarette and blew smoke out toward me.

"You had a hard night," I said.

"I've had worse."

"You should have taken him somewhere else. You might have gotten away with it."

"What are you talking about?"

"I dug him up. The cane knife, too."

She drank from her glass and puffed on the cigarette again. Her eyes looked vaguely amused.

"Drink it up, Claudette. You're going on a big dry."

"Oh, I wouldn't count on that, pumpkin. You ought to watch more television. Battered wives are in fashion these days."

I slipped the handcuffs off the back of my belt, took the cigarette out of her mouth and dropped it on the floor, and cuffed her wrists through the back of the chair.

"Oh, our law officer is so uncorruptible, so noble in his AA sobriety. I bet you might like a slightly bruised fuck, though. It's your last chance, sugarplum, because I'll be out on bond tomorrow morning. You should give it some thought."

I turned a chair around backwards and sat across from her.

"You did three years and you think you're conwise, but you're still a fish," I said. "Let me give you the script. You won't do time because you cut Bubba's throat. Nobody cares when somebody like Bubba gets killed, except maybe the people he owes money to. Instead, a jury of unemployed roughnecks, fundamentalist morons, and welfare blacks who don't like rich people will send you up the road because you're an ex-con and a lesbian.

"Of course, you'll think that's unfair. And you'll be right, it is. But the greatest irony is that the people who'll send you back to St. Gabriel will never hear the name of the innocent girl you had murdered. Some people might call it comedy. It'll make a good story in the zoo."

Her reddish-brown eyes were narrow and mean. The bruise over the lid of one eye looked like a small blue mouse. I walked to the pay phone on the wall by the bar and called the sheriff's office. Just as I was about to hang up, I heard Claudette scrape the chair across the floor and smash it with her weight against the wall. She snapped the back loose from the seat, and then with the broken wood supports hanging from her manacled wrists, she went out the screen door into the rain.

I followed her across a field toward the railroad tracks. The bottom of her yellow dress was flecked with mud, and her bandanna fell off her head and her hair stuck wetly to her face. The rain was driving harder now, and the drops were big and flat and cold as hail. I grabbed her by the arm and tried to turn her back toward the truck stop, but she sat down in a puddle of gray water. Her arms, twisted behind her by the handcuffs, were rigid with muscle.