The bedroom door opened and Matt Magrath came out, barefoot, wearing only Adidas gym shorts and a T-shirt. “Ma, give it a rest, would you? You’re freaking the guy out.”

The police reports in Leonard Patz’s indecent A amp;B case described the victim as fourteen years old, but Matt Magrath seemed a few years older than that. He was handsome, square-jawed, with a slouchy, wised-up manner.

The girlfriend, Kristin, followed him out of the bedroom door. She was not as pretty as Matt. She had a thin face, small mouth, freckles, flat chest. She wore a wide-necked shirt that hung off one side, exposing a milky shoulder and a vampy lavender bra strap. I knew instantly that this boy did not care about her. He would break her heart, probably very soon. I felt sorry for her before she even got all the way out of the bedroom door. She looked about thirteen or fourteen. How many men would break her heart before she was through?

“ You’re Matthew Magrath?”

“Yeah. Why? Who are you?”

“How old are you, Matthew? What’s your birth date?”

“August 17, 1992.”

I was distracted momentarily by the thought of it: 1992. How recent it sounded, how far along in my life I was already. In 1992 I had already been a lawyer for eight years. Laurie and I were trying to conceive Jacob, in both senses.

“You’re not even fifteen years old yet.”

“So?”

“So nothing.” I glanced at Kristin, who was watching me with a lidded expression like a proper bad girl. “I came to ask you about Leonard Patz.”

“Len? What do you want to know?”

“ ‘Len’? Is that what you call him?”

“Sometimes. Who are you again?”

“I’m Jacob Barber’s father. The boy who’s accused in the Cold Spring Park murder.”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “I figured you were something like that. I figured you might be a cop or something. The way you were looking at me. Like I done something wrong.”

“Do you think you’ve done something wrong, Matt?”

“No.”

“Then you’ve got nothing to worry about, do you? Doesn’t matter if I’m a cop or not.”

“What about her?” He inclined his head toward the girl.

“What about her?”

“Isn’t it a crime if you have sex with a kid and she’s, like, too young-so it’s like, what do they call it?”

“Statutory rape.”

“Right. Only it doesn’t count if I’m too young too, does it? Like, if two kids have sex, you know, with each other, and they’re both under the age and they’re boning each other-”

His mother gasped, “Matt!”

“The age of consent in Massachusetts is sixteen. If two fourteen-year-olds have sex, they’re both committing rape.”

“You mean they’re raping each other?”

“Technically, yes.”

He gave Kristin a conspiratorial look. “How old are you, girl?”

“Sixteen,” she said.

“My lucky day.”

“I wouldn’t go that far, son. The day’s not over yet.”

“You know what? I don’t think I better talk to you, about Len or anything else.”

“Matt, I’m not a cop. I don’t care how old your girlfriend is, I don’t care what you do. I’m only concerned with Leonard Patz.”

“You’re that kid’s father?” Touch of a Boston accent: fatha.

“Yeah.”

“Your kid didn’t do it, you know.”

I waited. My heart began to pound.

“Len did.”

“How do you know that, Matt?”

“I just know.”

“You know how? I thought you were the victim in an indecent A amp;B. I didn’t think you knew… Len.”

“Well, it’s complicated.”

“Is it?”

“Yeah. Lenny and me are friends, kind of.”

“He’s the kind of friend you report to the cops for indecent A amp;B?”

“I’ll be honest with you. What I reported him for? Lenny never did that.”

“No? So why’d you report him?”

A little grin. “Like I said, it’s complicated.”

“Did he grab you or not?”

“Yeah, he did.”

“So what’s complicated?”

“Hey, you know what? I’m not really comfortable with this. I don’t think I should be talking to you. I have a right to remain silent. I think I’ll go ahead and take that, a’ight?”

“You have a right to remain silent with the cops. I’m not a cop. The Fifth Amendment doesn’t apply to me. In this room right now, there is no Fifth Amendment.”

“I could get in trouble.”

“Matt-son. Listen to me. I’m a very patient man. But you’re beginning to try my patience. I’m starting to feel”-deep breath-“angry, Matt, okay? That’s not something I like to feel. So let’s stop playing games here, all right?”

I felt the enormity of the body that houses me. How much bigger I was than this kid. I had the sense I was expanding, I was becoming too big for the room to hold me.

“If you know something about that murder in Cold Spring Park, Matt, you’re going to give it to me. Because, son, you have no idea what I’ve been through.”

“I don’t want to talk in front of them.”

“Fine.”

I clamped my fist around the kid’s right upper arm and twisted it-but not twisting it anywhere near the limits of my strength at that moment, because I felt how easily I could separate that arm from his body with just a little torque, how I could tear it off him, skin, muscle, and bone-and I led him into his mother’s bedroom, which was furnished, memorably, with a night table comprised of two Hood milk crates stacked and turned upside down and a collage of photos of male movie stars carefully cut out of magazines and Scotch-taped to the wall. I closed the door and stood in front of it, arms crossed. As quickly as it had formed, the adrenaline was already receding from my arms and shoulders, as if my body sensed the crisis had passed its peak, the kid had already folded.

“Tell me about Leonard. How do you know him?”

“Leonard came up to me once at McDonald’s, like all greasy and pathetic, and he asked me if I wanted anything, like a burger or anything. He said he’d buy me whatever I wanted if I’d just eat it with him, like just sit at the table with him. I knew he was a fag, but if he wanted to buy me a Big Mac, what did I care? I know I’m not gay, so what does it matter to me? So I said okay, and we’re eating and he’s trying to be all beast, like he’s this cool dude, like he’s my buddy, and he asks me if I want to come see his apartment. He says he’s got a bunch of DVDs there and we can watch a movie or whatever. So I knew what he was after. So I told him straight up I wasn’t going to do anything with him, but if he had some money maybe we could work something out. So he says he’ll give me fifty bucks if he can, like, touch my package or whatever, like over my pants. I told him he could do it if he gave me a hundred bucks. So he did.”

“He gave you a hundred bucks?”

“Yeah. Just, like, to touch my ass and stuff.” The kid snorted at the price he had extorted for such a small thing.

“Go on.”

“So after that he kept saying he wanted to keep doing it. So he’d give me a hundred bucks every time.”

“And what did you do for him?”

“Nothing. I swear.”

“Come on, Matt. A hundred bucks?”

“Really. Alls I ever did was let him touch my ass and, like… my front.”

“Did you take anything off?”

“No. My clothes were on the whole time.”

“Every time?”

“Every time.”

“How many times were there?”

“Five.”

“Five hundred bucks?”

“That’s right.” The kid sniggered again. Easy money.

“Did he reach inside your pants?”

Hesitation. “Once.”

“Once?”

“Really. Once.”

“How long did this go on?”

“A few weeks. He said it was all he could afford.”

“So what happened at the library?”

“Nothing. I’ve never even been to the library. I don’t even know where it is.”

“So why’d you report him?”

“He said he didn’t want to pay me anymore. He said he didn’t like paying, he shouldn’t have to pay if we were, like, friends. I told him if he didn’t pay me, I’d report him. I knew he was on probation, I knew he was on the sex offender list. If he got violated on his probation, he was going away. Even he knew that.”