“Maybe you’re not the right person for this job.”

“Maybe I’m not,” I said, setting down my cup and pushing back my chair. “Thank you for the tea.”

She reached out a hand. “Wait.”

I waited.

“Please,” she said.

I pulled my chair back in, rested my hands on the top of the dining room table.

“I suppose it’s reasonable to expect that your reaction is unlikely to be any different from that of anyone else I might approach. Jeremy has not been good at winning people over. But it was the judge’s decision not to send him to jail. It was the judge who decided to put the boy on probation. It was the judge who was persuaded by Mr. Finch that—”

“Mr. Finch?”

“Jeremy’s lawyer, whom you just referenced. Grant Finch. It was Mr. Finch who came up with the defense strategy, and to be honest, no one had high hopes that the judge would find it convincing. But we were ecstatic when he did. Sending Jeremy to jail would have been a terrible thing for the boy. After all, he is still a boy. He’d never have survived prison. And as horrible as the backlash to the sentence has been, it’s still better than Jeremy being behind bars.”

“Except now he’s living in fear,” I said.

Madeline Plimpton offered a small nod of acknowledgment. “That’s true, but these things pass. Jeremy could have gone to jail for several years. Social consternation over his sentencing will last a few months at most, I should think. The world is always waiting for the new thing to be outraged by. A hunter who kills a prize lion in Africa. A woman who tweets a joke about AIDS. A dimwitted politician who thinks a woman’s body knows how to shut down pregnancy following rape. That other judge, who gave the light sentence to the boy who raped that unconscious girl. We are so thrilled to be angered about something that we want a new target for our rage every week. Jeremy will be forgotten about, eventually, and he will be able to return to a normal life. But in the meantime, he needs to be safe.”

I wondered about when the family of the person Jeremy had killed would get back to a normal life, but decided not to pose the question out loud.

“So yes, to your earlier comment, he was branded the Big Baby. A teenager who was coddled as though he were an infant. The prosecuting attorney mentioned it once in passing, and the media loved it. CNN turned Jeremy into a flashy logo. The Big Baby Case, with lots of jazzy graphics.”

“As someone who once ran a newspaper, you must have some understanding of how those things happen.”

“Indeed,” she said. “But just because I owned a media outlet does not mean I approve of everything the media does.”

“I really don’t know that I can help you, Ms. Plimpton,” I said. “But I could probably recommend some agencies to you. Ones that don’t really do much in the way of investigations, as I do. They’re more like tough guys for hire.”