“A DNA sample. From the inside of your cheek. Your mouth. It takes about two seconds. Would you agree to letting me do that?”

“I won’t try to stop it.”

“That’s not good enough. I can’t take the sample without your consent unless I get a warrant. But it will look better for you if you give your consent.”

“You mean verbally?”

“Yes.”

“All right, I give my consent.”

Luske sat back and the door opened and a tall thin woman stepped in. She wore a white medical smock and white latex examination gloves. A silver badge swung from her neck on a lanyard. She asked the boy to open his mouth and she scraped at the inside of his cheek with a plastic wand and he smelled her latex gloves and remembered the doctor at the hospital, the Chinese man with his needle light, and the woman placed the wand carefully inside a plastic tube and capped the tube and went away again.

“How long will it take?” said the boy.

“How long will what take?”

“The test.”

“That has no bearing on this investigation, Sean. The test is for the State, for its case, should it decide to bring one.”

The boy sat, hands on the table.

The detective picked up his pencil and began drumming the eraser on the table. The boy watched him.

“I don’t suppose I can smoke,” he said, and Luske shook his head and said, “There’s no smoking in this building,” and he reached into the pocket of his suit jacket draped over the chairback. He held the boy’s pack across the table and the boy pulled a cigarette free and the detective lit it with the boy’s lighter. He watched the boy draw in the smoke and blow it toward the ceiling.

“Sean,” said Luske. “Tell me why you went into that alley.”

“I had a feeling,” the boy said, once again.

“A sexual feeling?”

“No, just a feeling. I heard some people leaving when I was in the bathroom but when I went outside for a smoke I saw by the tracks that they’d pulled into that alley. And I thought something was wrong about that and I had an idea what it was.”

“Why didn’t you go back inside and call the police? Or tell one of the staff at the restaurant?”

“It was just a feeling. I wasn’t positive until I got back there.”

“All right. So you went back inside the Paradise Lounge and you got this—what was it, the handle of a plunger? You didn’t go to your truck and get your hammer?”

“No, he’d have seen me.”

“Who?”

“The one at the corner keeping watch. The big one with Valentine on his shirt.”

“All right. So you walk to the corner and you and this boy have words and then you strike him with the handle from the plunger.”

“After I saw what was going on in the alley, yes.” He recounted again his hitting the second boy and trying to keep the girl from sliding off the tailgate and being put in a choke hold by the first boy and being struck with the stick by the second boy.

“Where did he hit you?”

“In the alley.”

“Where on your person.”

“Same as I did him. Across the ass.”

“Across the bare buttocks.”

“Yes.”

“Why were your buttocks bare?”

The boy regarded the ash on his cigarette. He readied to tap it into his palm but the detective told him to tap it on the floor and he did.

“Why were your buttocks bare, Sean?”

“Because he’d pulled down my jeans. The smaller guy. While the big one held me.”

“Then what happened, after he struck you.”

“Nothing. That’s when Reed Lester showed up.”

“Nothing more happened to you sexually?”

“No.”

“All right.” The detective scratched the side of his nose. “What made Reed Lester go back there?”

“I don’t know. You’d have to ask him.”

“Do you have an opinion?”

“I think he got to thinking I’d taken off without him.”

“With his backpack in the truck?”

The boy shrugged.

“Where did you first meet him, Reed Lester?”

“On the side of the road. He was walking and he helped me change a flat so I gave him a lift.”

“You never met him before that?”

“No.”

“You didn’t spend any time with him in Lincoln?”

“No.”

“You didn’t know he was wanted on sexual assault charges in Lincoln?”

“How would I?”

“He might’ve told you. Two guys in a bar, drinking and jawing . . .”

The boy shook his head. “He said something about a fight in a bar with a writer over a Cuban girl.”

“A fight in a bar with a writer over a Cuban girl?” The detective stared at him. “This was a forty-five-year-old woman he attacked, in a parking lot. One of his professors. There wasn’t any Cuban girl.”

The boy drew on his cigarette and blew the smoke and waited.

“You didn’t know he had a gun either, I suppose,” said Luske.

“Not till he pulled it in that alley.”

“So you two didn’t get to talking, inside the Paradise Lounge, and decide to go on back there together with that gun and that stick and maybe finish what those boys started?”

“No. It happened like I told you.”

The detective watched him, then he read the paper in front of him and underscored something with his pencil.

“All right. So now you’ve got those two boys at gunpoint and the girl is lying there unconscious. Why didn’t you call the police at that point?”

“I don’t know. I thought they’d take too long. She was bleeding and I wanted to get her to the hospital.”

“Reed Lester and his gun didn’t factor into your decision?”

“No. I didn’t care about him or his gun.”

“How do you think the gun ended up with you, in the truck, and not with him?”

“He left it there when he ran off.”

“Some friend, huh.”

“He wasn’t a friend. I just met him that day.”

“Tell me about the hammer.”

“It’s an Estwing, twenty ounces. It belongs to my father.”

“How did it get blood on it.”

“I had to kill a dog by the side of the road.”

“You had to kill a dog by the side of the road.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why?”

“Because it was hurt and there wasn’t any help for it. Somebody had run over it.”

“So you hit it with the hammer and killed it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Reed Lester was there at the time?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why didn’t he use the gun? Or let you use it?”

“That’s what I asked him later.”

“What did he say?”

“He said something about not wanting to scare me off.”

The detective stood and refilled the boy’s cup of water and filled a cup for himself.

“Sean. What were that girl’s panties doing in your jacket pocket?”

“I guess I put them there.”

“Why did you do that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember doing it. I must’ve seen them lying in the snow and thought they were hers and she would probably want them back. I don’t know.”

“I’ve been doing this work for ten years, Sean, and I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve found the panties, or the underpants, of the victim either on the perpetrator or in his home. He doesn’t seem able to help himself. He’s gotta have that trophy. That memento.”

The boy drew on his cigarette and exhaled and waited.

The detective watched him.

“So you get a flat tire. You pick up a fugitive from the law. You have to kill a dog with a hammer. And you get pulled over with a raped girl and a gun in a truck that isn’t registered to you. That’s what I’d call a bad day, Sean.”

The boy nodded. “I’ve had worse.”

“I know you have. I know about your sister. I know how you got that limp.”

“You know about her, huh?”

“I know what happened to the two of you up there in the mountains, yes.”

“Then you know more than me. You know more than the entire state of Colorado and the FBI.”

They stared at each other. The detective tapped the eraser of his pencil on the top sheet of the file and the sound seemed to remind him that it was there. He looked down and turned the page over and turned it back. At length he said: “Here’s what we do know, Sean, all right? Here’s what our investigation knows as fact. It knows that on the night of the assault you were pulled over in a truck that was not registered in your name. It knows an eyewitness can place you at the scene of the assault. It knows that you were pulled over with the victim in the cab of the truck, constituting possible kidnapping. It knows there was a gun in the cab of the truck, constituting possible kidnapping at gunpoint. It knows that in the bed of the truck was a backpack belonging to a man wanted on sexual assault charges in another county. It knows there was a hammer in a tool bag with blood on it. It knows that the victim was bleeding and that you had fresh blood on your T-shirt. It knows that the girl was wearing no underpants and that there was a pair of girl’s underpants in your jacket pocket. Lastly it knows that there is no one, including the girl herself, to corroborate your statement that you did not rape her but instead tried to help her.”