THE PRIEST CALLED THE SHERIFF'S office in St. Martin Parish, where his encounter with the man in the Stetson had taken place, then contacted me when he got back to New Iberia. The sheriff and I interviewed him together at the rectory.

"The bag had a velvet cord and a plastic sack and a roll of tape in it?" the sheriff said.

"That's right. I left it all with the sheriff in St. Martinville," Father Mulcahy said. His eyes were flat, as though discussing his thoughts would only add to the level of degradation he felt.

"You know why he's after you, don't you, Father?" I said.

"Yes, I believe I do."

"You know what he was going to do, too. It would have probably been written off as a heart attack. There would have been no rope burns, nothing to indicate any force or violence," I said.

"You don't have to tell me that, sir," he replied.

"It's time to talk about Lila Terrebonne," I said.

"It's her prerogative to talk with you as much as she wishes. But not mine," he said.

"Hubris isn't a virtue, Father," I said.

His face flared. "Probably not. But I'll be damned if I'll be altered by a sonofabitch like the man who climbed on my boat."

"That's one way of looking at it. Here's my card if you want to put a net over this guy," I said.

When we left, rain that looked like lavender horse tails was falling across the sun. The sheriff drove the cruiser with the window down and ashes blew from his pipe onto his shirt. He slapped at them angrily.

"I want that guy in the hat on a respirator," he said.

"We don't have a crime on that houseboat, skipper. It's not even in our jurisdiction."

"The intended victim is. That's enough. He's a vulnerable old man. Remember when you lived through your first combat and thought you had magic? A dangerous time."

A half hour later a state trooper pulled over a red pickup truck with a Texas tag on the Iberia-St. Martin Parish line.

THE SHERIFF AND I stood outside the holding cell and looked at the man seated on the wood bench against the back wall. His western-cut pants were ironed with sharp creases, the hard points of his ox-blood cowboy boots buffed to a smooth glaze like melted plastic. He played with his Stetson on his index finger.

The sheriff held the man's driver's license cupped in his palm. He studied the photograph on it, then the man's face.

"You're Harpo Scruggs?" the sheriff asked.

"I was when I got up this morning."

"You're from New Mexico?"

"Deming. I got a chili pepper farm there. The truck's a rental, if that's what's on your mind."

"You're supposed to be dead," the sheriff said.

"You talking about that fire down in Juarez? Yeah, I heard about that. But it wasn't me."

His accent was peckerwood, the Acadian inflections, if they had ever existed, weaned out of it.

"You terrorize elderly clergymen, do you?" I said.

"I asked the man for a can of gas. He pointed a shotgun at me."

"You mind going into a lineup?" the sheriff asked.

Harpo Scruggs looked at his fingernails.

"Yeah, I do. What's the charge?" he said.

"We'll find one," the sheriff said.

"I don't think y'all got a popcorn fart in a windstorm," he said.

He was right. We called Mout' Broussard's home and got no answer. Neither could we find the USL student who had witnessed the execution of the two brothers out in the Atchafalaya Basin. The father of the two brothers was drunk and contradictory about what he had seen and heard when his sons were lured out of the house.

It was 8 p.m. The sheriff sat in his swivel chair and tapped his fingers on his jawbone.

"Call Juarez, Mexico, and see if they've still got a warrant," he said.

"I already did. It was like having a conversation with impaired people in a bowling alley."

"Sometimes I hate this job," he said, and picked up a key ring off his desk blotter.

Ten minutes later the sheriff and I watched Harpo Scruggs walk into the parking lot a free man. He wore a shirt with purple and red flowers on it, and it swelled with the breeze and made his frame look even larger than it was. He fitted on his hat and slanted the brim over his eyes, took a small bag of cookies from his pocket and bit into one of them gingerly with his false teeth. He lifted his face into the breeze and looked with expectation at the sunset.

"See if you can get Lila Terrebonne in my office tomorrow morning," the sheriff said.

Harpo Scruggs's truck drove up the street toward the cemetery. A moment later Helen Soileau's unmarked car pulled into the traffic behind him.

THAT NIGHT BOOTSIE AND I fixed ham and onion sandwiches and dirty rice and iced tea at the drainboard and ate on the breakfast table. Through the hallway I could see the moss in the oak trees glowing against the lights on the dock.

"You look tired," Bootsie said. "Not really."

"Who's this man Scruggs working for?"

"The New Orleans Mob. The Dixie Mafia. Who knows?"

"The Mob letting one of their own kill a priest?"

"You should have been a cop, Boots."

"There's something you're not saying."

"I keep feeling all this stuff goes back to Jack Flynn's murder."

"The Flynns again." She rose from the table and put her plate in the sink and looked through the window into the darkness at the foot of our property. "Why always the Flynns?" she said.

I didn't have an adequate answer, not even for myself when I lay next to Bootsie later in the darkness, the window fan drawing the night air across our bed. Jack Flynn had fought at the battle of Madrid and at Alligator Creek on Guadalcanal; he was not one to be easily undone by company goons hired to break a farmworkers' strike. But the killers had kidnapped him out of a hotel room in Morgan City, beaten him with chains, impaled his broken body with nails as a lesson in terror to any poor white or black person who thought he could relieve his plight by joining a union. To this day not one suspect had been in custody, not one participant had spoken carelessly in a bar or brothel.

The Klan always prided itself on its secrecy, the arcane and clandestine nature of its rituals, the loyalty of its members to one another. But someone always came forward, out of either guilt or avarice, and told of the crimes they committed in groups, under cover of darkness, against their unarmed and defenseless victims.

But Jack Flynn's murderers had probably not only been protected, they had been more afraid of the people they served than Louisiana or federal law.

Jack Flynn's death was at the center of our current problems because we had never dealt with our past, I thought. And in not doing so, we had allowed his crucifixion to become a collective act.

I propped myself up on the mattress with one elbow and touched Bootsie's hair. She was sound asleep and did not wake. Her eyelids looked like rose petals in the moon's glow.

EARLY SATURDAY MORNING I turned into the Terrebonne grounds and drove down the oak-lined drive toward the house. The movie set was empty, except for a bored security guard and Swede Boxleiter, who was crouched atop a plank building, firing a nail gun into the tin roof.

I stood under the portico of the main house and rang the chimes. The day had already turned warm, but it was cool in the shade and the air smelled of damp brick and four-o'clock flowers and the mint that grew under the water faucets. Archer Terrebonne answered the door in yellow-and-white tennis clothes, a moist towel draped around his neck.

"Lila's not available right now, Mr. Robicheaux," he said.

"I'd very much like to talk to her, sir."

"She's showering. Then we're going to a brunch. Would you like to leave a message?"