"Bill?" Ribbon came to the doorway. "You can be present at questioning but -"

"Oh, goddamnit," Corde exploded. "Goddamnit! You don't have probable cause to charge him. Call the DA. Ask him!"

Ribbon said delicately, "We do for conspiracy and obstruction. You'll just make things worse for everybody."

"Jamie, why?" Corde's eyes begged, his hand reached for his son's arm but stopped short of contact. "What did I do? Why won't you tell me?"

Eyes downcast, the boy let Ribbon lead him into the filthy house, while his father's desperate questions fell like shot quail, silent and flimsy.

The tall grass waved in the wind and the sunlight flickered off the leaves of thin saplings. Sarah stepped into her circle of stones and sat down. She crossed her legs carefully. From her backpack she took the bear she was going to give to the Sunshine Man and set him next to her.

She looked at her Madonna watch. It said 2:40. She closed her eyes and remembered that this meant twenty minutes to three. She hated numbers. Sometimes you counted to a hundred before they started over, other times you counted to sixty.

Twenty minutes until the Sunshine Man arrived.

She remembered a drill at school – her second-grade teacher would move the hands on a clock and then point to different students and have them tell the time. This exercise socked her with icy terror. She remembered the teacher's bony finger pointing at her. And, Sarah, what time is it now? She screamed that she didn't know she couldn't tell don't ask don't ask don't ask… She cried all the way home from school. That night her daddy bought her the digital watch she now wore.

A sudden breeze whipped her hair around her face and she lay down, using her backpack as a pillow. Sometimes she took afternoon naps here. Looking around her, wondering where the Sunshine Man would come from, Sarah noticed just above the horizon a sliver of new moon. She imagined that the sky was a huge ocean and that the moon was the fingernail on a giant's hand as he swam just below the surface of the smooth water. Then she wondered how come you can see the moon in the daytime.

She closed her eyes and she thought of the giant as he swam, lifting arms as big as mountains from the water, kicking his mile-long legs and speeding across the sky. Sarah was afraid of the water. When the family went to the park downtown she would still play in the baby pool, which made her ashamed but wasn't as bad as the terror of bouncing on the adult pool floor with the water inches from her nose and thinking she might get swept into the deep part.

She wished she could swim. Strong strokes, like Jamie. Maybe this was something else she could ask the Sunshine Man to do for her. She looked at her watch. 2:48. She counted on her fingers. Two minutes… No! Twelve minutes. She closed her eyes and kneaded the grass bunched up at her hips and pretended she was swimming, skimming across the pool like a speedboat, back and forth, saving the lives of children struggling in the deep end and racing past her brother once then again and again…

Five minutes later she heard the approaching footsteps.

Sarah Corde's heart began pounding in joyous anticipation, and as she climbed out of her imaginary pool she opened her eyes.

Look at this place. Lord.

Bill Corde couldn't get over the size of Wynton Kresge's office.

"Flush."

"Yeah, well." Kresge seemed uncomfortable.

The room was probably a third as big as the entire New Lebanon Sheriffs Department. Corde took pleasure walking over the thick green carpet and wondered why two busy oriental rugs had been laid over the pile.

"That's the biggest desk I've ever seen."

"Yeah, well."

Corde sat down in one of the visitor's chairs, which was itself bigger and more comfy than his own Sears armchair at home, and his a recliner at that. He tried to scoot it closer to the desk but it wouldn't move and he had to stand again and lug the chair up to the desk.

Kresge explained, "Was the office of some dean or another. Academic affairs, something like that. He retired and they needed someplace to put me. I think they like having a black man on this corridor. See, when you come this way from the main stairwell you see me at my big desk. Looks good for the school. Think I'm a big shot. Little do they know. So they caught the kid."

"They caught him. He was a friend of my son's."

"Well." Kresge would be wondering whether he should ask the question about how close a friend but he let it pass.

"The evidence is pretty strong against him. He's a spooky boy and his father's worse." Corde realized he still had his hat on – it banged into the high back of the chair – and he took it off, pitched it like a Frisbee onto the seat of the other chair. He opened his briefcase. "I need a favor."

"Sure," Kresge said eagerly.

Corde leaned forward and set a plastic bag in front of Kresge. Inside was the burnt scrap of computer paper.

"What's this?"

"A bit of that paper we found behind -"

"No, I mean this." The security chief pointed at the white card attached to the bag by a red string.

"That? A chain of custody card."

"It's got your name on it."

"It's not important, Wynton. The piece of -"

"This's for trial, right?"

"Right. So the prosecutor can trace the physical evidence back to the crime scene."

"Got it. So that if there's a gap in the chain, the defense attorney can get the evidence thrown out?"

"Right." Because Corde was here to ask a favor he indulged Kresge, who was examining the COC card closely. Finally Corde continued, "The piece of paper inside? I'd like to find out where it came from. I've got this idea -"

"You're leaning on it."

"- it's from the school. What?"

"You're leaning on it."

"On what?"

Kresge motioned him away. Corde sat back in the chair and Kresge yanked a thick wad of computer printouts from beneath a stack of magazines. Corde had been using the pile as an armrest.

"It's a university Accounting Department printout. They send them around every week to each department.

Mine shows me security expenses, real and budgeted, allocation of overhead. You know, that sort of thing."

"You know what department this was from?"

Kresge looked at it. "No idea."

"Any chance you could find out?"

"Technically I don't have access to the Accounting Department's files."

Corde asked coyly, "How 'bout untechnically?"

"I'll see what I can do." After a pause he asked, "But if they caught the boy what's the point?"

Corde slowly touched away a fleck of lint from his boot heel and stalled long enough that an attractive woman blustered into the office with an armful of letters for Kresge to sign. The security chief rose and with clumsy formality introduced two people with nothing in common except their lack of desire to meet. Corde, however, was grateful for the curious decorum – it seemed to drive the question from Kresge's mind and after the signing-fest, when their conversation resumed, he did not ask it again.