Ten minutes later the sheriff, with a file folder open in his hands, came into my office and sat down across from me. He had owned a dry-cleaning business and been president of the local Lions Club before running for sheriff. He wore rimless glasses, and he had soft cheeks that were flecked with blue and red veins. In his green uniform he always made me think of a nursery manager rather than a law officer, but he was an honest and decent man and humble enough to listen to those who had had more experience than he had.

"I got the autopsy and the photographs on that LeBlanc girl," he said. He took off his glasses and pinched the red mark on the bridge of his nose. "You know, I've been doing this stuff five years now, but one like this-"

"When it doesn't bother you anymore, that's when you should start to worry, sheriff."

"Well, anyway, the report says that most of it was probably done to her after she was dead, poor girl."

"Could I see it?" I said, and reached out my hand for the folder.

I had to swallow when I looked at the photographs, even though I had seen the real thing only yesterday. The killer had not harmed her face. In fact, he had covered it with her blouse, either during the rape or perhaps before he stopped her young heart with an ice pick. But in the fourteen years that I had been with the New Orleans Police Department, or during the three years I had worked off and on for the Iberia Parish sheriff's office, I had seen few cases that involved this degree of violence or rage against a woman's body.

Then I read through the clinical prose describing the autopsy, the nature of the wounds, the sexual penetration of the vagina, the absence of any skin samples under the girl's fingernails, the medical examiner's speculation about the moment and immediate cause of death, and the type of instrument the killer probably used to mutilate the victim.

"Any way you look at it, I guess we're talking about a psychopath or somebody wired to the eyes on crack or acid," the sheriff said.