Rune kept looking up at him.

He turned and walked into the park. They climbed to the top of a huge rock thirty feet high and sat down.

“Sam?”

“Rune, it isn't that they could've prosecuted you —”

“Sam, I —”

“— they couldn't have made the extortion case, and, yeah, they didn't identify themselves as cops. And somebody found a fake FBI ID, but nobody's connected it to you yet. But what they could have done is shot you. Fleeing felon. If they thought you were dangerous they could have shot.”

“I'm sorry.”

“I do something risky for a living, Rune. But there are procedures and backup and a lot of things we do to make it less dangerous. But you, you get these crazy ideas about killers and blackmail and you dive right in.”

They watched a softball game in the meadow for a minute. The heat was bad and the players were lethargic. Puffs of dust rose up from the yellow grass as the ball skipped into the outfield.

“There were some rumors about Schmidt and this teenage boy in Colorado. I thought Shelly found out about it and was blackmailing him to get the part.”

“Did the facts lead you to that conclusion? Or did you imagine that's what happened and shoehorn the facts into your idea?”

“I... I shoehorned.”

“Okay.”

Rune said, “Sam, I have this notebook at home. I write all kinds of stuff in it. It's sort of like a diary. You know what I have written on the first page?”

“ 'I won't grow up'?”

“If I'd thought about it, yeah, it probably would say that. But what I wrote is: 'Believe in what isn't as if it were until it becomes.' ”

Crack. A home run. The pitcher watched the ball sail toward the portable toilet a hundred feet from home plate.

“Sam, this movie is important to me. I didn't go to college. I worked in a video store. I did store-window design. I worked in restaurants. I've sold stuff on the streets. I don't want to keep doing that forever.”

He laughed. “You've got a few years' worth of false starts ahead of you.”

“At the film company they treat me like a kid... Well, okay, sometimes I act like a kid. But I mean, they don't think I'm capable of anything more. I know this film about Shelly is going to work. I can feel it.”

“What you did back there, with Schmidt, that wasn't bright.”

“He was the last of my suspects. I thought he was the one.”

“A suspect doesn't call the cops to —”

“I know. I was wrong... It's just that, well, I can't point to anything in particular. I just had a, I don't know...”

“Hunch?”

“Yeah. That somebody killed her. And it wasn't this stupid Sword of Jesus.”