He opened his desk drawer and removed a stick of gum and peeled it and placed it in his mouth. Then he brushed at the tip of one nostril with his knuckle, huffing air out of his breathing passage. He pushed a button on his desk and turned his back on me and stared out the picture window at the river until I had left the room.

THAT EVENING I DROVE to the city library on East Main. The spreading oaks on the lawn were filled with birds and I could hear the clumps of bamboo rattling in the wind, and fireflies were lighting in the dusk out on the bayou. I went inside the library and found the hardback collection of Megan's photography that had been published three years ago by a New York publishing house.

What could I learn from it? Maybe nothing. Maybe I only wanted to put off seeing her that evening, which I knew I had to do, even though I knew I was breaking an AA tenet by injecting myself into other people's relationships. But you don't let a friend like Clete Purcel swing in the gibbet.

The photographs in her collection were stunning. Her great talent was her ability to isolate the humanity and suffering of individuals who lived in our midst but who nevertheless remained invisible to most passersby. Native Americans on reservations, migrant farmworkers, mentally impaired people who sought heat from steam grates, they looked at the camera with the hollow eyes of Holocaust victims and made the viewer wonder what country or era the photograph had been taken in, because surely it could not have been our own.

Then I turned a page and looked at a black-and-white photo taken on a reservation in South Dakota. It showed four FBI agents in windbreakers taking two Indian men into custody. The Indians were on their knees, their fingers laced behind their heads. An AR-15 rifle lay in the dust by an automobile whose windows and doors were perforated with bullet holes.

The cutline said the men were members of the American Indian Movement. No explanation was given for their arrest. One of the agents was a woman whose face was turned angrily toward the camera. The face was that of the New Orleans agent Adrien Glazier.

I drove out to Cisco's place on the Loreauville road and parked by the gallery. No one answered the bell, and I walked down by the bayou and saw her writing a letter under the light in the gazebo, the late sun burning like a flare beyond the willow trees across the water. She didn't see or hear me, and in her solitude she seemed to possess all the self-contained and tranquil beauty of a woman who had never let the authority of another define her.

Her horn-rimmed glasses gave her a studious look that her careless and eccentric dress belied. I felt guilty watching her without her knowledge, but in that moment I also realized what it was that attracted men to her.

She was one of those women we instinctively know are braver and more resilient than we are, more long-suffering and more willing to be broken for the sake of principle. You wanted to feel tender toward Megan, but you knew your feelings were vain and presumptuous. She had a lion's heart and did not need a protector.

"Oh, Dave. I didn't hear you come up on me," she said, removing her glasses.

"I was down at the library looking at your work. Who were those Indians Adrien Glazier was taking down?"

"One of them supposedly murdered two FBI agents. Amnesty International thinks he's innocent."

"There were some other photos in there you took of Mexican children in a ruined church around Trinidad, Colorado."

"Those were migrant kids whose folks had run off. The church was built by John D. Rockefeller after his goons murdered the families of striking miners up the road at Ludlow."

"I mention it because Swede Boxleiter told me a hit man named Harpo Scruggs had a ranch around there."

"He should know. He and Cisco were placed in a foster home in Trinidad. The husband was a pederast. He raped Swede until he bled inside. Swede took it so the guy wouldn't start on Cisco next."

I sat down on the top step of the gazebo and tossed a pebble into the bayou.

"Clete's my longtime friend, Megan. He says he needs this security job with Cisco's company. I don't think that's why he's staying here," I said.

She started to speak but gave it up.

"Even though he says otherwise, I don't think he understands the nature of y'all's relationship," I said.

"Is he drinking?"

"Not now, but he will."

She rested her cheek on her hand and gazed at the bayou.

"What I did was rotten," she said. "I wake up every morning and feel like a bloody sod. I just wish I could undo it."

"Talk to him again."

"You want Cisco and me out of his life. That's the real agenda, isn't it?"

"The best cop New Orleans ever had has become a grunt for Billy Holtzner."

"He can walk out of that situation anytime he wants. How about my brother? Anthony Pollock worked for some nasty people in Hong Kong. Who do you think they're going to blame for his death?"

"To tell you the truth, it's a long way from Bayou Teche. I don't really care."

She folded her letter and put away her pen and walked up the green bank toward the house, her silhouette surrounded by the tracings of fireflies.

CISCO FILMED LATE THAT night and did not return home until after 2 a.m. The intruders came sometime between midnight and then. They were big, heavy men, booted, sure of themselves and unrelenting in their purpose. They churned and destroyed the flower beds, where they disabled the alarm system, and slipped a looped wire through a window jamb and released the catch from inside. Each went through the opening with one muscular thrust, because hardly any dirt was scuffed into the bricks below the jamb.

They knew where she slept, and unlike the men who admired Megan for her strength, these men despised her for it. Their hands fell upon her in her sleep, wrenched her from the bed, bound her eyes, hurled her through the door and out onto the patio and down the slope to the bayou. When she pulled at the tape on her eyes, they slapped her to her knees.

But while they forced her face into the water, none of them saw the small memo recorder attached to a key ring she held clenched in her palm. Even while her mouth and nostrils filled with mud and her lungs burned for air as though acid had been poured in them, she tried to keep her finger pressed on the "record" button.

Then she felt the bayou grow as warm as blood around her neck just as a veined, yellow bubble burst in the center of her mind, and she knew she was safe from the hands and fists and booted feet of the men who had always lived on the edge of her camera's lens.

THE TAPE ON THE SMALL recorder had only a twenty-second capacity. Most of the voices were muffled and inaudible, but there were words, whole sentences, sawed out of the darkness that portrayed Megan's tormenters better than any photograph could:

"Hold her, damnit! This is one bitch been asking for it a long time. You cain't get her head down, get out of the way."

"She's bucking. When they buck, they're fixing to go under. Better pull her up unless we're going all the way."

"Let her get a breath, then give it to her again. Ain't nothing like the power of memory to make a good woman, son."

It was 2:30 a.m. now and the ambulance had already left with Megan for Iberia General. The light from the flashers on our parked cruisers was like a blue, white, and red net on the trees and the bayou's surface and the back of the house. Cisco paced back and forth on the lawn, his eyes large, his face dilated in the glare.

Behind him I could see the sheriff squatted under the open window with a flashlight, peeling back the ruined flowers with one hand.