He pulled the zipper from the girl's head all the way down to her ankles.

I took a breath and swallowed.

"I'd say she was in her early twenties, but I'm guessing," he said. "As you can see, we won't get much in the way of prints. I don't think an artist will be able to recreate what her face looked like, either. Cause of death doesn't appear to be a mystery-asphyxiation with a plastic bag taped around her neck. The same electrician's tape he used to bind her hands and ankles. Rape, sodomy, sexual degradation, that kind of stuff? When their clothes are gone, you can put it in the bank."

"No rings, bracelets, tattoos?"

He shook his head.

"Have they found anything out there?"

"Nothing."

"Tire tracks?"

"Not after all the rain we've had."

"Do y'all have any missing-persons reports that come with-"

"Nope."

A long strand of her blond hair hung outside the bag. For some reason it bothered me. I picked it up and placed it on her forehead. The coroner looked at me strangely.

"Why would he stuff her in a barrel?" I said.

"Dave, the day you can put yourself inside the head of a cocksucker like that, that's the day you eat your gun."

I stepped back outside into the humid brilliance of the floodlamps, then walked along the slope of the levee and down by the water's edge. The darkness throbbed with the croaking of frogs, and fireflies were lighting in the tops of the sawgrass. The weeds along the levee had been trampled by cops' feet; fresh cigarette butts floated in the water; a sheriff's deputy was telling two others a racial joke.

The Vermilion Parish plainclothes finished interviewing the fisherman, put his notebook in his shirt pocket, and walked up the slope to his car. The fisherman continued to stand by his pirogue, scratching at the mosquito bites on his arms, evidently unsure of what he was supposed to do next. Sweat leaked out of the band of his cloth cap and glistened on his jawbones. When I introduced myself, his handshake, like most Cajun men's, was effeminate.

"I ain't never seen nothing like that, me," he said. "I don't want to never see nothing like that again, neither."

The bottom of his pirogue was piled with mudcat. They quivered on top of each other, their whiskers pasted back against their yellow sides and bloated white bellies. On the seat of his pirogue was a headlamp with an elastic strap on it.

"When'd you first see that metal barrel?" I said.

"Tonight."

"Do you come down here often?" I asked.

"Not too often, no, suh."

"You've got a nice bunch of fish there."

"Yeah, they feed good when the moon's up."

I gazed into the bottom of his pirogue, at the wet shine of moonlight on the fish's sides, the tangles of trotlines and corks, and a long object wrapped in a canvas tarp under the seat.

I caught the pirogue by the gunwale and slid it partly up on the mudbank.

"Do you mind if I look at this?" I said, and flipped back the folds of the canvas tarp.

He didn't answer. I took a pen flashlight out of my shirt pocket and shone it on the lever-action.30-.30 rifle. The bluing was worn off and the stock was wrapped with copper wire.

"Walk down here a little ways with me," I said.

He followed me out to the edge of the lighted area, out of earshot of the Vermilion Parish deputies.

"We want to catch the guy who did this," I said. "I think you'd like to help us do that, wouldn't you?"

"Yes, suh, I sho' would."

"But there's a problem here, isn't there? Something that's preventing you from telling me everything you want to?"

"I ain't real sho' what you-"

"Are you selling fish to restaurants?"

"No, suh, that ain't true."

"Did you bring that.30-30 along to shoot frogs?"

He grinned and shook his head. I grinned back at him.

"But you might just poach a 'gator or two?" I said.

"No, suh, I ain't got no 'gator. You can look."

I let my expression go flat.

"That's right. So you don't have to be afraid," I said. "I just want you to tell me the truth. Nobody's going to bother you about that gun, or your headlamp, or what you might be doing with your fish. Do we have a deal?"

"Yes, suh."

"When'd you first notice that barrel?"

"Maybe t'ree, fo' weeks ago. It was setting up on dry ground. I didn't have no reason to pay it no mind, no, but then I started to smell somet'ing. I t’ought it was a dead nutria, or maybe a big gar rotting up on the bank. It was real strong one night, then t'ree nights later you couldn't smell it 'less the wind blow it right across the water. Then it rained and the next night they wasn't no smell at all. I just never t'ought they might be a dead girl up there."

"Did you see anyone up there?"

"Maybe about a mont ' ago, at evening, I seen a car. I 'member t’inking it was new and why would anybody bring his new car down that dirt road full of holes."

"What kind of car?"

"I don't remember, suh."

"You remember the color?"

"No, sun, I'm sorry."

His face looked fatigued and empty. "I just wish I ain't been the one to find her," he said. "I ain't never gonna forget looking inside that barrel."

I put my business card in his shirt pocket.

"Call me if you think of anything else. You did just fine, podna," I said, and patted him on the arm.

I turned my truck around in the middle of the levee and headed back toward New Iberia. Up ahead the glow of the red and blue emergency lights on the ambulance sped across the tops of the sawgrass, cattails, and bleached sandspits where the husks of dead gars boiled with fire ants.

What had I learned from it all?

Not much.

But maybe in his cynical way my friend the sleepless coroner had cut right to the heart of the problem: How do you go inside the head of a homicidal sadist who prowls the countryside like a tiger turned loose in a schoolyard?

I've seen films that portray detectives who try to absorb the moral insanity of their adversaries in order to trap them inside their own maniacal design. It makes an interesting story. Maybe it's even possible.

But four years ago I had to go to Huntsville, Texas, to interview a man on death row who had confessed to almost three hundred murders throughout the United States. Suddenly, from all over the country, cops with unsolved homicide cases flocked to Huntsville like flies on pig flop. We were no exception. A black woman in New Iberia had been abducted out of her house, strangled to death, and thrown in the Vermilion River. We had no suspects, and the man in Huntsville, Jack Hatfield, had been through Louisiana many times in his red tracings across the map.

He turned out to be neither shrewd nor cunning; there was no malevolent light in his eyes, nothing hostile or driven about his behavior. His accent was peckerwood, his demeanor finally that of a simpleton. He told me about his religious conversion and glowing presences that appeared to him in his cell; it was quickly apparent that he wanted me to like him, that he would tell me anything I wanted to hear. All I had to do was provide him the details of a murder, and he would make the crime his own.

(Later, an unemployed oil-field roughneck would confess to murdering the black woman after being given title to a ten-year-old car by her husband.)

I asked Jack Hatfield if he was trying to trade off his cooperation for a commutation of his sentence. He answered, "Naw, I got no kick comin' about that, long as it's legal."

With a benign expression on his face, he chronicled his long list of roadside murders from Maine to southern California. He could have been talking about a set of embossed ceramic plates that he had collected from each state that he had visited. If he had indeed done what he told me, he was completely without remorse.