The next day I got the warrant to search the grounds of the LaRose plantation. Helen Soileau parked the cruiser in the driveway, and I got out and knocked on the front door.

Karyn was barefoot and wore only a pair of shorts and a halter, with a thick towel around her neck, when she opened the door. In the soft afternoon light her tan took on the dark tint of burnt honey. The momentary surprise went out of her face, and she leaned an arm against the doorjamb and brushed back her hair with her fingers.

"What are we here for today?" she said.

"Here's the warrant. We'll be looking at some things back on the bayou."

"How did you-" she began, then stopped.

"All I had to do was tell the judge the state police warned me off y'all's property. He seemed upset about people intruding on his jurisdiction."

"Then you should scurry on with your little errand, whatever in God's name it is."

"Does Jerry Joe's death bother you at all?"

Her mouth grew small with anger.

"There're days when I wish I was a man, Dave. I'd honestly love to beat the living shit out of you." The door clicked shut.

Helen and I walked through the coolness of the porte cochere into the backyard. The camellias were in bloom and the backyard was filled with a smoky gold light. I could see Karyn inside the glassed-in rear corner of the house, touching her toes in a crisscross motion, her thighs spread, the back of her neck slick with a necklace of sweat.

"You ever read anything about the Roman Coliseum? When gladiators fought on lakes of burning oil, that kind of stuff?" Helen said.

"Yeah, I guess."

"I have a feeling Karyn LaRose was in the audience."

We walked past the stables and through the hardwoods to the sloping bank of the Teche. A heavyset black state trooper sat in a folding chair, back among the trees, eating cracklings from a jar. His scoped rifle was propped against a pine trunk. He glanced at my badge holder hanging from my coat pocket and nodded.

"Crown hasn't tried to get through your perimeter, huh?" I said, and smiled.

"You ax me, he's been spooked out," he answered.

"How's that?" I asked.

"Man's smart. See the mosquitoes I been swatting all day?"

"They're bad after a rain," I said.

"They're bad in these trees anytime. Man don't see nobody out yonder on the bank, he knows what's waiting for him inside the woods. That, or somebody done tole him."

"You take it easy," I said.

Helen and I walked along the bank toward the spot where I had thrown the oar lock. I could feel her eyes on me, watching.

"You're damn quiet," she said.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to be."

"Dave?"

"What's up?"

"I'm getting a bad sense here."

"What's that?" I said, my eyes focused on the gazebo that two carpenters were hammering and sawing on around the bayou's bend.

"What that trooper said. Did you warn Crown?"

"We don't execute people in Iberia Parish. We want the man in custody, not in a box."

"We didn't have this conversation, Streak."

The carpenters were on all fours atop the gazebo's round, peaked roof, their nail bags swinging from their stomachs.

"That's quite a foundation. Y'all always pour a concrete pad under a gazebo?" I said.

"High water will rot it out if you don't," one man answered.

"What did y'all do with the dirt you excavated?"

"Some guy hauled it off for topsoil."

"Which guy?"

"Some guy work for Mr. LaRose, I guess."

"Y'all did the excavation?"

"No, sir. Mr. LaRose done that hisself. He got his own backhoe."

"I see. Y'all doin'all right?"

"Yes, sir. Anyt'ing wrong?"

"Not a thing," I said.

I walked down on the grassy bank, which was crisscrossed with the deep prints of cleated tires and dozer tracks. A fan of mud and torn divots of grass lay humped among the cattails at the bayou's edge. I poked at it with a stick and watched it cloud and drift away in the current.

"You want to bag some of it?" Helen said.

"It's a waste of time. Buford beat us to it."

"It was a long shot," Helen said. "You've got to consider the source, too, Dave. Dock Green's nuts."

"No, he's not. He's just different."

"That's a new word for it."

I didn't say anything. We walked up the slope and through the trees toward the house. The air was filled with gold shafts of light inside the trees, and you could smell the water in the coulee and the fecund odor of wet fern and the exposed root systems that trailed in the current like torn cobweb.

"Can I get out of line a minute?" Helen said.

I looked at her and waited. She kept walking up the incline, her face straight ahead, her shoulders slightly bent, her masculine arms taut-looking with muscle.

"The homicides you're worried about took place out of our jurisdiction. The Indian guy who tried to mess you over with the machete is dead. We don't have a crime connected with the LaRoses to investigate in Iberia Parish, Dave," she said.

"They're both dirty."

"So is the planet," she said.

We took a shorter route back and exited the woods by a cleared field and passed the brick stables and an adjacent railed lot where a solitary bay gelding stood like a piece of stained redwood in a column of dust-laden sunlight. The brand on his flank was shaped in the form of a rose, burned deep into the hair like calcified ringworm.

"They sure leave their mark on everything, don't they?" I said.

"What should they use, spray cans? Give it a break," Helen said.

"I'll tell them we're leaving now," I said.

"Don't do it, Dave."

"I'll see you in the car, Helen."

She continued on through the field toward the driveway. I walked through the backyard toward the porte cochere, then glanced through a screen of bamboo into the glassed-in rear of the house where Karyn had been doing her aerobic exercises. We stared into each other's face with a look of mutual and surprised intimacy that went beyond the moment, beyond my ability to define or guard against, that went back into a deliberately forgotten image of two people looking nakedly upon each other's faces during intercourse.

I had caught her unawares in front of a small marble-topped bar with a champagne glass and a silver ice bucket containing a green bottle of Cold Duck on it. But Karyn was not one to be undone by an unexpected encounter with an adversary. With her eyes fastened on my face, a pout on her mouth like an adolescent girl, she unhooked her halter and let it drop from her breasts and unbuttoned her shorts and pushed them and her panties down over her thighs and knees and stepped out of them. Then she pulled the pins from her platinum hair and shook it out on her shoulders and put the glass of Cold Duck to her mouth, her eyes fixed on mine, as empty as death.