“How did they call for help?” I ask.

“I don’t know. Nine-one-one.” It’s his way of flipping me off.

“I’m aware that nine-one-one was called. My point is at least one of them must have a phone.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t search them,” he says. “But tell you what. When I get them in the daisy room and can distract them, I’ll go through their backpacks. I guarantee their phones and who knows what else is in there.”

I return him to the subject of the body being found, and he tosses out the same details I’ve already heard. The girls were walking home and noticed something ahead on the path.

“They got closer,” Barclay says, “and at first they thought it was someone who’d been in a bad bike accident. Like it was getting dark and she ran into a lamppost or something, hitting her head so hard it knocked her helmet off. They could see blood and that she wasn’t moving.”

“What do you mean at first?” Before I talk to the twins I want an idea of how much he may have tainted them. “At first they thought she’d had a bike accident? That’s what they said?”

“Well I doubt they think that now. They think somebody did something bad to her.”

“How did they get a good enough look to notice blood and decide she was dead?” I ask, and if the girls suspect foul play it’s probably because Barclay has his mind made up about what type of case this is.

He hasn’t hesitated saying it’s a homicide—a sexual one at that.

“It’s extremely dark, and the shadows are especially thick where she is,” I point out. “Do they have a flashlight? Because I don’t know how they could have seen very much otherwise.”

“Maybe in one of the backpacks. I don’t know. They told me they were pretty sure she was dead. They said she smelled dead.”

“That’s interesting. Meaning what?”

“And they also said she smelled like a hair dryer.” He smirks.

“I’m wondering what they meant by that,” I reply, and he laughs.

“Who the hell knows? They’re retarded, right?”

“It’s not my job to test their IQs and I doubt it’s yours either, and that’s not a good word to use.” I look on as Marino takes photographs and sets down a numbered cone, and it’s all I can do not to blast Barclay but good. “The girls meant something by what they said,” I add in my most reasonable tone. “It would be smart to figure out what it was instead of assuming they’re talking nonsense.”