The father was a cane farmer, the mother a nurse at Iberia General. Their sixteen-year-old daughter was an honor student at the local Catholic high school. That morning she had gone for a ride across a fallow cane field on a four-wheeler with her boyfriend. A black man who had been sitting on his back porch nearby said the four-wheeler had scoured a rooster tail of brown dust out of the field and disappeared in a grove of gum trees, then had rumbled across a wooden bridge into another field, one that was filled with new cane. A low-roofed gray gas-guzzler was parked by the coulee with three people inside. The black man said the driver tossed a beer can out the window and started up his automobile and drove in the same direction as the four-wheeler.

My partner was Helen Soileau. She had begun her career as a meter maid at NOPD, then had worked as a patrolwoman in the Garden District before she returned to her hometown and began her career over again. She had a masculine physique and was martial and often abrasive in her manner, but outside of Clete Purcel, my old Homicide partner at NOPD, she was the best police officer I had ever known.

Helen drove the cruiser past the grove of gum trees and crossed the bridge over the coulee and followed a dirt track through blades of cane that were pale green with the spring drought and whispering drily in the wind. Up ahead was a second grove of gum trees, one that was wrapped with yellow crime scene tape.

"You know the family?" Helen asked.

"A little bit," I replied.

"They have any other kids?"

"No," I said.

"Too bad. Do they know yet?"

"They're in Lafayette today. The sheriff hasn't been able to reach them," I said.

She turned and looked at me. Her face was lumpy, her blond hair thick on her shoulders. She chewed her gum methodically, a question in her eyes.

"We have to inform them?" she said.

"It looks like it," I replied.

"On this kind, I'd like to have the perp there and let the family put one in his ear."

"Bad thoughts, Helen."

"I'll feel as guilty about it as I can," she said.

Two deputies and the black man who had called in the "shots fired" and the teenage boy who had been the driver of the four-wheeler were waiting for us outside the crime scene tape that was wound around the grove of gum trees. The boy was sitting on the ground, in an unplanned lotus position, staring dejectedly into space.

Through the back window of the cruiser I saw an ambulance crossing the wooden bridge over the coulee.

Helen parked the cruiser and we walked into the lee of the trees. The sun was low in the west, pink from the dust drifting across the sky. I could smell a salty stench, like a dead animal, in the coulee.

"Where is she?" I asked a deputy.

He took a cigarette out of his mouth and stepped on it. "The other side of the blackberry bushes," he said.

"Pick up the butt, please, and don't light another one," I said.

Helen and I stooped under the yellow tape and walked to the center of the grove. A gray cloud of insects swarmed above a broken depression in the weeds. Helen looked down at the body and blew out her breath.

"Two wounds. One in the chest, the other in the side. Probably a shotgun," she said. Her eyes automatically began to search the ground for an ejected shell.

I squatted down next to the body. The girl's wrists had been pulled over her head and tied with a child's jump rope around the base of a tree trunk. Her skin was gray from massive loss of blood. Her eyes were still open and seemed to be focused on a solitary wildflower three feet away. A pair of panties hung around one of her ankles.

I stood up and felt my knees pop. For just a moment the trees in the clearing seemed to go in and out of focus.

"You all right?" Helen asked.

"They put one of her socks in her mouth," I said.

Helen's eyes moved over my face. "Let's talk to the boy," she said.

His skin was filmed with dust and lines of sweat had run out of his hair and dried on his face. His T-shirt was grimed with dirt and looked as though it had been tied in knots before he had put it on. When he looked up at us, his eyes were heated with resentment.

"There were two black guys?" I said.

"Yes. I mean yes, sir," he replied.

"Only two?"

"That's all I saw."

"You say they had ski masks on? One of them wore gloves?"

"That's what I said," he replied.

Even in the shade it was hot. I blotted the sweat off my forehead with my sleeve.

"They tied you up?" I said.

"Yes," he replied.

"With your T-shirt?" I asked.

"Yes, sir."

I squatted down next to him and gave the deputies a deliberate look. They walked to their cruiser with the black man and got inside and left the doors open to catch the breeze.

"Let's see if I understand," I said to the boy. "They tied you up with your shirt and belt and left you in the coulee and took Amanda into the trees? Guys in ski masks, like knitted ones?"

"That's what happened," he replied.

"You couldn't get loose?"

"No. It was real tight."

"I have a problem with what you're telling me. It doesn't flush, partner," I said.

"Flush?"

"T-shirts aren't handcuffs," I said.

His eyes became moist. He laced his fingers in his hair.

"You were pretty scared?" I said.

"I guess. Yes, sir," he replied.

"I'd be scared, too. There's nothing wrong in that," I said. I patted him on the shoulder and stood up.

"You gonna catch those damned niggers or not?" he asked.

I joined Helen by our cruiser. The sun was low on the horizon now, bloodred above a distant line of trees. Helen had just gotten off the radio.

"How do you read the kid?" she asked.

"Hard to say. He's not his own best advocate."

"The girl's parents just got back from Lafayette. This one's a pile of shit, bwana," she said.

The family home was a one-story, wood-frame white building that stood between the state road and a cane field in back. A water oak that was bare of leaves in winter shaded one side of the house during the hot months. The numbered rural mailbox on the road and a carport built on the side of the house, like an afterthought, were the only means we could use to distinguish the house from any other on the same road.

The blinds were drawn inside the house. Plastic holy-water receptacles were tacked on the doorjambs and a church calendar and a hand-stitched Serenity Prayer hung on the living room walls. The father was Quentin Boudreau, a sunburned, sandy-haired man who wore wire-rim glasses and a plain blue tie and a starched white shirt that must have felt like an iron prison on his body. His eyes seemed to have no emotion, no focus in them, as though he were experiencing thoughts he had not yet allowed himself to feel.

He held his wife's hand on his knee. She was a small, dark-haired Cajun woman whose face was devastated. Neither she nor her husband spoke or attempted to ask a question while Helen and I explained, as euphemistically as we could, what had happened to their daughter. I wanted them to be angry with us, to hurl insults, to make racial remarks, to do anything that would relieve me of the feelings I had when I looked into their faces.

But they didn't. They were humble and undemanding and probably, at the moment, incapable of hearing everything that was being said to them.

I put my business card on the coffee table and stood up to go. "We're sorry for what's happened to your family," I said.

The woman's hands were folded in her lap now. She looked at them, then lifted her eyes to mine.

"Amanda was raped?" she said.

"That's a conclusion that has to come from the coroner. But, yes, I think she was," I said.

"Did they use condoms?" she asked.

"We didn't find any," I replied.