"You know the family?" Helen asked.

"A little bit," I replied.

"They have any other kids?"

"No," I said.

"Too bad. Do they know yet?"

"They're in Lafayette today. The sheriff hasn't been able to reach them," I said.

She turned and looked at me. Her face was lumpy, her blond hair thick on her shoulders. She chewed her gum methodically, a question in her eyes.

"We have to inform them?" she said.

"It looks like it," I replied.

"On this kind, I'd like to have the perp there and let the family put one in his ear."

"Bad thoughts, Helen."

"I'll feel as guilty about it as I can," she said.

Two deputies and the black man who had called in the "shots fired" and the teenage boy who had been the driver of the four-wheeler were waiting for us outside the crime scene tape that was wound around the grove of gum trees. The boy was sitting on the ground, in an unplanned lotus position, staring dejectedly into space.

Through the back window of the cruiser I saw an ambulance crossing the wooden bridge over the coulee.

Helen parked the cruiser and we walked into the lee of the trees. The sun was low in the west, pink from the dust drifting across the sky. I could smell a salty stench, like a dead animal, in the coulee.

"Where is she?" I asked a deputy.

He took a cigarette out of his mouth and stepped on it. "The other side of the blackberry bushes," he said.

"Pick up the butt, please, and don't light another one," I said.

Helen and I stooped under the yellow tape and walked to the center of the grove. A gray cloud of insects swarmed above a broken depression in the weeds. Helen looked down at the body and blew out her breath.

"Two wounds. One in the chest, the other in the side. Probably a shotgun," she said. Her eyes automatically began to search the ground for an ejected shell.