That's the way it is. The right people seldom go down. Closure is a word that does not work well with the victims of violent crime. If you're a cop and you're lucky, you won't let your point of view put you in late-hour bars.

On a spring Saturday afternoon last year, I answered the phone on my desk at the Iberia Parish Sheriffs Department and knew I had just caught one of those cases that would never have an adequate resolution, that would involve a perfectly innocent, decent family whose injury would never heal.

The father was a cane farmer, the mother a nurse at Iberia General. Their sixteen-year-old daughter was an honor student at the local Catholic high school. That morning she had gone for a ride across a fallow cane field on a four-wheeler with her boyfriend. A black man who had been sitting on his back porch nearby said the four-wheeler had scoured a rooster tail of brown dust out of the field and disappeared in a grove of gum trees, then had rumbled across a wooden bridge into another field, one that was filled with new cane. A low-roofed gray gas-guzzler was parked by the coulee with three people inside. The black man said the driver tossed a beer can out the window and started up his automobile and drove in the same direction as the four-wheeler.

My partner was Helen Soileau. She had begun her career as a meter maid at NOPD, then had worked as a patrolwoman in the Garden District before she returned to her hometown and began her career over again. She had a masculine physique and was martial and often abrasive in her manner, but outside of Clete Purcel, my old Homicide partner at NOPD, she was the best police officer I had ever known.

Helen drove the cruiser past the grove of gum trees and crossed the bridge over the coulee and followed a dirt track through blades of cane that were pale green with the spring drought and whispering drily in the wind. Up ahead was a second grove of gum trees, one that was wrapped with yellow crime scene tape.