Hodges shakes with him carefully, mindful of the scrapes, and introduces himself. “You’re in absolutely no trouble here, Mr. Neville. In fact, Barbara Robinson sent me to say thanks and make sure you were okay. She and her family are longtime friends of mine.”

“Is she okay?”

“Broken leg,” Hodges says, pulling over a chair. His hand creeps to his side and presses there. “It could have been a lot worse. I’m betting she’ll be back on the soccer field next year. Sit down, sit down.”

When the Neville boy sits, his knees seem to come almost up to his jawline. “It was my fault, in a way. I shouldn’t have been goofing with her, but she was just so pretty and all. Still . . . I ain’t blind.” He pauses, corrects himself. “Not blind. What was she on? Do you know?”

Hodges frowns. The idea that Barbara might have been high hasn’t crossed his mind, although it should have; she’s a teenager, after all, and those years are the Age of Experimentation. But he has dinner with the Robinsons three or four times a month, and he’s never seen anything in her that registered as drug use. Maybe he’s just too close. Or too old.

“What makes you think she was on something?”

“Just her being down here, for one thing. Those were Chapel Ridge duds she was wearing. I know, because we play em twice every year. Blow em out, too. And she was like in a daze. Standing there on the curb near Mamma Stars, that fortune-telling place, looking like she was gonna walk right out into traffic.” He shrugs. “So I chatted her up, teased her about jaywalking. She got mad, went all Kitty Pryde on my ass. I thought that was cute, so then . . .” He looks at Higgins, then back at Hodges. “This is the fault part, and I’m being straight with you about it, okay?”

“Okay,” Hodges says.

“Well, look—I grabbed her game. Just for a joke, you know. Held it up over my head. I never meant to keep it. So then she kicked me—good hard kick for a girl—and grabbed it back. She sure didn’t look stoned then.”

“How did she look, Dereece?” The switch to the boy’s first name is automatic.

“Oh, man, mad! But also scared. Like she just figured out where she was, on a street where girls like her—ones in private school uniforms—don’t go, especially by themselves. MLK Ave? Come on, I mean bitch, please.” He leans forward, long-fingered hands clasped between his knees, face earnest. “She didn’t know I was just playing, you see what I mean? She was like in a panic, get me?”

“I do,” Hodges says, and although he sounds engaged (at least he hopes so), he’s on autopilot for the moment, stuck on what Neville has just said: I grabbed her game. Part of him thinks it can’t be connected to Ellerton and Stover. Most of him thinks it must be, it’s a perfect fit. “That must have made you feel bad.”