CHICAGO -- The little girl sat across the table from Nora Rubel, fidgeting in her chair.

"Does this look right?" Rubel asked the 5-year-old, who had been playing in the driveway of her Ingleside home April 18 when a stranger sexually assaulted her.

Rubel is a 911 operator at the Lake County, Fla., Sheriff's Office. But every other month or so, she pulls out her plastic box of art supplies and works her second job as a sketch artist of crime suspects. Her work, she says, requires as much patience and psychology as artistry. Those skills were never more crucial than when she interviewed the 5-year-old -- the youngest victim she had ever worked with. And they never paid off more, said Rubel, 35, as she recently recounted the events that began when she interviewed the girl.

She said that she tried to relax the child. She stopped herself from asking the questions she would ask adults -- such as the height of cheekbones or the slant of a suspect's eyes. She gave the girl crayons and a motorized eraser to play with.

Then something unusual happened, Rubel said.

"She looked at my work and said, 'The hair is wrong.' And she began erasing the hairline."

Experts say children have a tough time describing key details such as age; rather than differentiate between a 30-year-old and a 55-year-old, for example, they may not be able to be more precise than to say "child" or "grown-up."

Rubel's meeting with the 5-year-old took place in a conference room, and Rubel didn't protest when the child climbed onto the chair next to her and scribbled a version of the drawing with a brown crayon (the suspect had brown hair).

Rubel's mother was a 911 dispatcher, and her stepfather was a police officer. The Lake Villa, Ill., resident, who grew up in Illinois' Lake and McHenry Counties, began studying portrait drawing at the former McGee Middle School in Round Lake, Ill., where she asked an art teacher to show her how to draw faces.

Early on at the sheriff's office, Rubel saw a sketch the officers were using. She said she told them, as modestly as possible, that she could do better. The department enrolled Rubel in a course to study police sketching. She has been drawing sketches for the department for eight years.

Before she starts drawing, Rubel usually sits down with a victim who tells her about the shape of a suspect's mouth, the arch of an eyebrow. Rubel flips through the FBI Facial ID Catalog and has the victim scan pictures of long chins, fleshy cheeks, downturned noses and square heads.

After the listening phase, Rubel spends about an hour drawing. She meets with the victim again and asks what needs to be changed. There are usually a few rounds of revisions. Sometimes a victim says the drawing doesn't look right but can't pinpoint why. That's when Rubel may draw features on tracing paper and lay them on top of her sketch, asking, "Does the beard look like this?" Or -- laying a different drawing over the face -- "Does it look like this?"

When she interviewed the 5-year-old, Rubel let her look at the photos at her own pace. The girl's parents, a detective and the girl's brother, also 5 -- and the only witness to his sister's attack -- sat with her, watching quietly.

After about an hour, Rubel had a finished drawing: A white or Hispanic young man with full lips and a high hairline.

With the sketch done, Rubel's role in the case was over and she went back to her dispatch desk. She wondered how close the man rendered in the drawing was to the suspect.

She didn't have to wait long for an answer.

Lake County Detective John Willer wasn't assigned to the case, but he saw the sketch as it circulated around the office.

"As soon as I saw it, I said, 'I know this guy,"' he said. "The hairline, the eyebrows. (The sketch) was probably the most accurate I've ever seen."

He told other detectives that the man in the picture was Joseph Ray Dalton, 23, who was charged 10 days after the alleged crime.

Dalton admitted during questioning that he had contact with the girl, Lake County Sheriff's Sgt. Christopher Thompson said. He was charged with predatory criminal sexual assault and pleaded not guilty during a preliminary court appearance.

"She was my youngest victim," Rubel said. "This (drawing) probably had the best result."

Rubel said she often wonders what happens to the victims she meets and sometimes checks in with detectives on the cases. The girl will be one of those, she said.

"It's hard not to get invested. I truly wish her well."