Sarah didn’t speak for a long time. I was waiting for my father to repeat the question, but he didn’t. Finally, she said, “Because he was my boyfriend.”

“Ah… so it’s okay to have sex with your boyfriend?”

“You have to do sex with your boyfriend. If you don’t, he isn’t your boyfriend.”

“Ah.NowI understand. Did David tell you that?”

She didn’t answer. I eyed Louise sitting as stiff as steel, kneading hands that should have been resting in her lap.

“Someone else?”

She was silent.

From the other room, Ella let go with a few halfhearted cries. Maybe we were talking too loudly.

Louise got up quickly. “Excuse me.”

Sarah started to stand, but her sister told her to stay put.

“But it’smybaby,” Sarah protested.

“I’ll bring her in if she’s up, all right? Just sit, okay?”

Sarah didn’t argue, but she remained sulky. Decker waited until Louise was gone. Then he smiled and said, “You know, a beautiful girl like you, I bet you had… a hundred boyfriends.”

Sarah’s face softened. “No.”

“Fifty?”

“No.”

“Twenty-five?”

She attempted to hold back a smile. “No.”

“But more than one. I’m sure of it.”

She gave a half smile. “Maybe.”

“And your other boyfriends… did they tickle you?”

The smile widened. “Maybe.”

“Maybe, huh?” Dad made a mock skeptical face. In a singsong voice, he said, “I bet they did.”

Sarah giggled.

“Did they also do sex with you?”

Instantly, the merriment died.

“Sarah,” Decker said. “Remember we talked before. And I told you how it’s okay to tell secrets if they’re bad secrets.”

She didn’t speak.

“If you had sex with a man, it’s okay to tell me. Even if he told you not to tell.”

She turned her head away.

“Please, Sarah. You’ve got to trust me. You can tell me.”

“But he was my boyfriend.” Tears were in her eyes. “Then he said he didn’t want to be my boyfriend anymore.” Wet streaks rolled down her cheeks.

“Who, Sarah?” Decker asked. “Who didn’t want to be your boyfriend anymore?”

Sarah shook her head. “I don’t want to tell you.”

“Sarah, you don’t have to keep a bad secret.”

“I don’t have to, but Iwantto.”

Decker glanced at me and shook his head. “Okay, Sarah. If you don’t want to talk, you don’t have to. But if you ever change your mind, I’ll be happy to listen to you.”

She nodded, and for a minute, I thought she might actually relent. Instead, she got up. “I want to see Ella.”

My father’s words rolled through my brain: Molesters are usuallycharming.They often inspire an unbelievable amount of loyalty, enough trust to get a retarded girl to follow the molester into Hollywood and walk alone in the middle of the night. I still retained my last image of Belinda, crossing the street with her head down, her demeanor so forlorn. A disconsolate figure mowed down by some evil force. Someone had to bury this child properly!

“Sarah,” I called out.

She turned around.

“How about this?” I suggested. “How about if you tell Louise?”

Sarah fixed her eyes on me. She remained stubborn and silent.

My last-ditch effort. “Well, how about if you tell Koby?”

Slowly, she began to smile. Then she began to giggle. “Well…maybeKoby.”

44

By midmorning,the sky had turned sooty gray, the sun blazing down on the top of my head. It was only one-and-a-half blocks to the Strip, but in the heat it felt like a mile in the Sahara. There was a small café at the intersection of Sunset and Willem. Dad and I settled in at a back table, which was serviced by a red-haired waitress with a crew cut, droopy eyes, and an open mouth. She got the order wrong: a pretty slick trick because all we had asked for were coffee variations. Then she realized she was bringing the wrong java to the wrong table. A minute later, she fixed her mistake.

“Who gets the latte?”

“Me,” I told her.

She served me the latte. “Who gets the black coffee?”

My father was the only other one at the table. He looked at me and winked. “Right here, please.”

“Six bucks.”

“I pay now?” Dad said.

“Now or later.”

Decker frowned, then took out a ten. “It’s all yours. Just give us some privacy.”

She stared at the bill. “Okay. Are you a cop or something?”

The Loo took out his badge. “Yes.”

“Wow! Neat!”

“Privacy?” Decker repeated.

“Yeah. Sure.”

“That means you leave.”

“Oh. Right.”

Eventually, she left. Dad turned to me. “I’m reluctant to get Koby involved.”

“Why?” I said. “He’ll do it-”

“I know he’ll do it. That’s not the problem. He’s a nurse; that’s the problem. As a health-care professional, once she tells him about any kind of molestation, he’s obligated to report it, just like we would be as cops. The difference is, if he reports it, the case jumps into the system and it’s out of our hands. Yeah, we could get involved, but it would be messy. Someone would probably call in DSS. Then some social worker starts talking to Sarah and before long the whole thing about Sarah abandoning the baby comes up. Didn’t you tell me that Louise went through hurdles to get legal custody of Ella?”

“Yes.”

“Who knows? This might jeopardize the custody decision. Once it’s out, we open a big can of worms, Cindy.”

I hadn’t thought of that.

“Furthermore,” Dad continued, “a good lawyer can claim that Koby is biased against Buck or whoever it is, and he’d have a point. It would look like a setup. And in a way it would be a setup because we dragged Koby into it. I’m not saying we won’t use him. But if we do it without considering the consequences, the perp could slip away.”

“But if we don’t jump soon, Daddy, Sarah could change her mind about talking to Koby. Then we’re back to square one. Aren’t you the one who told me to just go for it?”

“Cindy, this isn’t someone who’s pointing a gun at you. This is a crime that happened maybe a year ago-”

“Belinda Syracuse happened only a few months ago.”

“And that’s another thing. Even if Sarah was being molested, you have nothing to tie that to Belinda Syracuse’s hit-and-run.”

“We have DNA on the car. If Buck molested Sarah, we could arrest him and demand a DNA sample.”

“Why would the DA bother with a DNA sample? Sarah’s molestation isn’t a recent rape where there’s evidence. It’s he says, she says. We have to show a link to connect the molester to the hit-and-run, if there even is a molester. The only thing we do know is that if Sarah tells Koby about any kind of impropriety, it’s all over. So we’ve got to map out the contingencies before Sarah makes the confession.”

“But Sarah is the case,” I said.

Decker said, “No, Sarahisn’tthe case, Cindy. The DNA from the blood smear on the license plate is the case. Our first priority is to see if we can get a matchup.Ifwe do get a match andifit is Buck, then we have Buck associated with the car. Now thatstilldoesn’t place him at the crime. But it will be enough to get us a search warrant for his house and start a file on him. From there, we can probably get his phone records, go through his papers, start asking around town for witnesses who may have seen Buck and Belinda together the night of the murder.That’sour best bet. And even if people did see them together, Buck can always say that he was just trying to be a nice guy to Belinda, much in the way Koby was just being nice to Sarah.”

“Yeah, I was wondering where you were going with that line of questioning.”

“I know I made you nervous. I brought up Koby for a couple of reasons. One, to get rapport with Sarah. She obviously likes Koby and I knew I could build on that. But also, I wanted to show you how easy it is to screw up a molestation case, how easy it is to get the facts wrong if you don’t know what you’re doing. You start saying things like he took her away from home to get her alone. Then he lifted her up to the basketball hoop ostensibly to make a shot, but really he wanted to touch her or look up her dress. Then he held her hand-”