After a moment, Rosie said, "It's his shrine."

"To what?" I said.

"Innocence. He's a psychopath, a rapist, a serial killer, a sadist, maybe a necrophiliac, but he's also a pedophile. Like most pedophiles, he seeks innocence by being among children or molesting them."

Then she rose from her chair, went into the bathroom, and I heard the water running, heard her spit, heard the water splashing.

"Could you wait outside a minute, Expidee?" I said to the deputy.

"Yeah, sure," he said.

"We'll be along in a minute. Thanks for your help today."

"That fella gonna make bail, Dave?"

"Probably."

"That ain't right," he said, then he said it again as he went out the door, "Ain't right."

The bathroom door was ajar when I tapped on it. Her back was to me, her arms propped stiffly on the basin, the tap still running. She kept trying to clear her throat, as though a fine fish bone were caught in it.

I opened the door, took a clean towel out of a cabinet, and started to blot her face with it. She held her hand up almost as though I were about to strike her.

"Don't touch me with that," she said.

I set the towel on the tub, tore the top Kleenex from a box, dropped it in the waste can, then pulled out several more, balled them up, and touched at her face with them. She pushed down my wrist.

"I'm sorry. I lost it," she said.

"Don't worry bout it."

"Those children, that smell in the trunk of the car."

She made her eyes as wide as possible to hold back the tears, but it didn't work. They welled up in her brown eyes, then rolled in rivulets down her cheeks.

"It's okay, Rosie," I said, and slipped my arms around her. Her head was buried under my chin. I could feel the length of her body against mine, her back rising and falling under my palms. I could smell the strawberry shampoo in her hair, a heated fragrance like soap in her skin.

The window was open, and the wind blew the curtain into the room. Across the street on a putting green, a red flag snapped straight out on a pole that vibrated stiffly in the cup. In the first drops of rain, which slanted almost parallel to the ground, I saw a figure standing by a stagnant reed-choked pond, a roiling myrtle bush at his back. He held himself erect in the wind with his single crutch, his beard flying about his face, his mouth an O, his words lost in distant thunder. The stump of his amputated right leg was wrapped with fresh white bandages that had already turned scarlet with new bleeding.

"What are you trying to warn me of, general? Why has so much pain come back to you, sir?"

I felt Rosie twist her face against my chest, then step away from me and walk quickly out the door, picking up her handbag from a chair in one smooth motion so I could not see her face. The screen door slammed behind her.

I put everything from Doucet's trunk into evidence bags, locked the house, and got into the pickup just as a storm of hailstones burst from the sky, clattered on the cab, and bounced in tiny white geysers on the slopes of the golf course as far as the eye could see.

That night the weatherman on the ten o'clock news said that the hurricane was moving again in a northwesterly direction and would probably make landfall sometime late tomorrow around Atchafalaya Bay, just to the east of us. Every offshore drilling rig in the Gulf had shut down, and the low-lying coastal areas from Grand Isle to Sabine Pass were being evacuated.

At eleven the sheriff called.

"Somebody just torched Mikey Goldman's trailer out at Spanish Lake. A gallon milk bottle of gasoline through the window with a truck flare right on top of it," he said. "You want to go out there and have a look?"

"Not really. Who's that yelling in the background?"

"Guess. I can't convince him he's lucky he wasn't in the trailer."

"Let me guess again. He wants Julie Balboni in custody."

"You must be psychic," the sheriff said. He paused. "I've got some bad news. The lab report came in late this evening. That utility knife's clean."

"Are they sure?"

"They're on the same side as we are, Dave."

"We can use testimony from the pathologist about the nature of the wounds. We can get an exhumation order if we have to."

"You're tired. I shouldn't have called tonight."

"Doucet's a monster, sheriff."

"Let's talk about it in the morning."

A sheet of gray rain was moving across my neighbor's sugarcane field toward the house, and lightning was popping in the woods behind it.

"Are you there?" he said through the static.

"We've got to pull this guy's plug in a major way."

"We'll talk with the prosecutor in the morning. Now go to bed, Dave."

After I replaced the receiver in the cradle I sat for a long time in the chair and stared out the open back door at the rain falling on the duck pond and cattails at the foot of my property. The sky seemed filled with electric lights, the wind resonant with the voices of children.

Chapter 19

The rain was deafening on the gallery in the morning. When I opened the front door, islands of pecan leaves floated in muddy pools in the yard, and a fine, sweet-smelling, cool mist blew inside the room. I could barely make out the marsh beyond the curtain of rain dancing in a wet yellow light on the bayou's surface. I put on my raincoat and hat and ran splashing through the puddles for the bait shop. Batist and I stacked all the tables, chairs, and umbrellas on the dock in the lee of the building, roped them down, hauled our boats out of the water, and bolted the shutters on the windows. Then we drank a cup of coffee and ate a fried pie together at the counter inside while the wind tried to peel the tin roof off the joists.

In town, Bayou Teche had risen high up on the pilings of the drawbridges and overflowed its banks into the rows of camellia bushes in the city park, and passing cars sent curling brown waves of water and street debris sliding across curbs and lawns all the way to the front steps of the houses along East Main. The air smelled of fish and dead vegetation from storm drains and was almost cold in the lungs, and in front of the courthouse the rain spun in vortexes that whipped at the neck and eyes and seemed to soak your clothes no matter how tightly your raincoat was buttoned. Murphy Doucet arrived at the courthouse in a jail van on a wrist chain with seven other inmates, bare-headed, a cigarette in the center of his mouth, his eyes squinted against the rain, his gray hair pasted down on his head, his voice loud with complaint about the manacle that cut into his wrist.

A black man was locked to the next manacle on the chain. He was epileptic and retarded and was in court every three or four weeks for public drunkenness or disturbing the peace. Inside the foyer, when the bailiff was about to walk the men on the chain to the front of the courtroom, the black man froze and jerked at the manacle, made a gurgling sound with his mouth while spittle drooled over his bottom lip.

"What the hell's wrong with you?" the bailiff said.

"Want to be on the end of the chain. Want to set on the end of the row," the black man said.

"He's saying he ain't used to being in the front of the bus," Doucet said.

"This man been bothering you, Ciro?" the bailiff said.

"No, suh. I just want to set on the end this time. Ain't no white peoples bothered me. I been treated just fine."

"Hurry up and get this bullshit over with," Doucet said, wiping his eyes on his sleeve.

"We aim to please. We certainly do," the bailiff said, unlocked the black man, walked him to the end of the chain, and snapped the last manacle on his wrist.

A young photographer from the Daily Iberian raised his camera and began focusing through his lens at Doucet.