In the middle of the night she thought she heard a truck engine outside and tires crunching on clamshells, then the sound disappeared in the thunder and she fell asleep again.

When she awoke he was standing over her, his form-fitting T-shirt molded wetly against his torso. His body had a fecund odor, like water in the bottom of a coulee; a nickel-plated revolver, the handles wrapped with electrician's tape, hung from his gloved right hand.

"I came in out of the rain," he said.

"Yeah, you done that. There ain't no rain in the house," she replied, raising herself up on her hands, a wishbone breaking in her throat.

"You mind if I stay here? I mean, stay out of the rain?" he asked.

"You here, ain't you?"

His palm opened and closed on the grips of the pistol, the edges of the tape sticking, popping on his skin. His face was pale, his mouth soft and red in the flashes of lightning outside. He wet his lips and cut his eyes at the window, where mist was drifting across the sill and dampening the baby's mattress.

The man pushed the window tight and gazed down at the baby, who slept with his rump in the air. A pillow was stuffed into an empty space where one of the wood runners was missing. For some reason, perhaps because of the noise the window made, the baby woke and started to cry. The man pried the pillow loose and kneaded it in his left hand and turned toward Little Face.

"Why'd you get mixed up with a bunch of geeks? Why'd you run your mouth?" the man said. His black hair was combed back neatly on both sides, his skin glistening with water, his navel rising and falling above his jeans.

"Write out a list of the people ain't geeks. I'll start hanging 'round wit' them," she replied.

"Make that baby be quiet."

"You done woke him up. Babies gonna cry when they get woke up."

"Just shut him up. I can't think. Why don't you have a man to take care of you?"

"I can have all the men I want. Trouble is, I ain't met none I want, including present company."

He looked at the baby again, then closed and opened his eyes. He took a breath of air through his mouth, holding it, as though he were about to speak. But no sound came out. He folded the pillow around the pistol and held both ends together with his left hand. The rims of his nostrils whitened, as though the temperature had dropped precipitously in the room.

"You make me mad. You're too dumb to understand what's happening. Get that look off your face," he said.

"It's my house. I ain't axed you in it. Go back in the rain you don't like it," she said quietly.

Then she saw into his eyes and her throat went dry and became constricted like a piece of crimped pipe and she remembered the word "abyss" from a sermon at a church somewhere and she knew now what the word meant. She tried to hold her gaze evenly on his face and stop the sound that thundered in her ears, that made her own words distorted and unintelligible to her.

Her hands knotted the sheet on top of her stomach.

"My baby ain't part of this, is he?" she said.

The man drew an enormous breath of air through his nose, as though he were hyperventilating. "No, what do you think I am?" He held up the pillow as though he had just discovered its presence. "Don't put something like this in a crib. That's how babies suffocate," he said, and flung the pillow across the room.

He shoved the revolver in his blue-jeans pocket, the butt protruding just above the edge of the cloth, his booted feet wide-spread, as though he were confronting an adversary that no one else saw.

"You gonna just stand there, Rain Man?" she asked, because she had to say something or the sound roaring in her ears would consume her and the shaking in her mouth would become such that her jawbones would rattle.

He waited a long time to answer her. "I don't know what I'm gonna do. But you shouldn't be messing with my head, lady. You really shouldn't be doing that at all," he said.

Then he went out the screen door into the storm and drove his truck in reverse down the clamshells to the two-lane state road, the rain blowing like shattered crystal in his backup lights.

I SPENT THE next morning, along with my partner, Helen Soileau, interviewing Little Face and anyone else in Loreauville who might have seen the intruder into Little Face's home. Helen had started her career as a meter maid at NOPD, then had put in seven years as a patrolwoman in the Garden District and the neighborhood around the Desire Welfare Project, an area so dangerous and violent that black city councilmen tried to persuade President Bush to clean it out with federal troops. Finally she returned to New Iberia, where she had grown up, and was hired as a plainclothes investigator by the sheriff's department.

Helen wore slacks and khakis and jeans to work, was thick-bodied and muscular, and looked boldly into the world's face, her arms pumped, her waved, lacquered blond hair her only visible concession to femininity. As a rule, she had trouble with difficult people only once. She had shot and killed three perpetrators on the job.

We stood in the parking lot of the bar the intruder had visited the night before he had wedged a screwdriver blade into the lock on Little Face's cabin door. The sun was out, the air cool and rain-washed, the sky blue above the trees.

"You think he's the same guy who did Zipper Clum, huh?" Helen said.

"That's my read on it," I said.

"He tells the bartender he's delivering dishware to a family named Grayson, who don't exist, then casually mentions the Graysons live next to the Dautrieves, and that's how he finds Little Face. We're dealing with a shit-bag who has a brain?"

She didn't wait for me to answer her question. She looked back at the bar, tapping her palm on the top of the cruiser.

"How do you figure this guy? He must have known his contract was on a woman, but then he walks out on the job," she said.

"She had the baby in the room with her. It sounds like he wasn't up to it."

"All we need is another piece of shit from New Orleans floating up the bayou. What do you want to do now, boss man?"

"Good question."

Just as we started to get in the cruiser, the bartender opened the screen door and leaned outside. He held up a brightly colored brochure of some kind in his hand.

"Is this any hep to y'all?" he asked.

"What you got there?" I said.

"The man you was axing about? He left it on the counter. I saved it in case he come back," the bartender said.

Helen's usual martial expression stretched into a big smile. "Sir, don't handle that any more than you need to. There you go. Just let me get a Ziploc bag and you can slip it right inside… That's it, plop it right in. Lovely day, isn't it? Drop by the department for free doughnuts any time. Thank you very much," she said.

It's called the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or AFIS. It's a miracle of technology. A latent fingerprint can be faxed to a computer at a regional pod and within two hours be matched with a print that is already on file.

If the fingerprint has a priority.

Priorities are usually given to homicide cases or instances when people are in custody and there is a dramatic need to know who they are.

The man who had prized open Little Face Dautrieve's cabin door was de facto guilty of little more than breaking and entering. The possibility that he was the same man who killed Zipper Clum was based only on my speculation. Also, the Clum homicide was not in our j ur isdiction.

No priority for the latent print we took off the dish-ware brochure the bartender had saved. Get a number and wait. The line in Louisiana is a long one.

I called the office of Connie Deshotel, the attorney general, in Baton Rouge.

"She's out right now. Can she call you back?" the secretary said.