“It upsets me. I can’t help it. I’m very conscious of children these days. I don’t know what goes through a man’s mind when he does a thing like this. There are some things I can imagine—project—but not this. The newspapers call it bestiality. Maybe it really is. When you were with the Police Department, did you ever work on one of these things?”

“I saw one. I saw a victim.”

“A little girl? A dead little girl?”

“That’s right.”

“How can you live with it?”

“Watch your driving.”

“I am.”

“I can’t,” he said. “I don’t. I don’t think about it.”

“Can you do that?”

“Most of the time.”

Her eyes were staying on the road. “Can I ask you something else?”

“Go ahead.”

“Could you do it? Physically. Could you keep it up?”

It had the intense shock of an unexpected slap across the face. She was maddening. He thought he should laugh, but he was too embarrassed. It was irrational, he knew it; he knew he could expect anything from her. He said, “No. No, I couldn’t.”

“I don’t want to believe that any man could,” she said.

“This one did.”

“Can you be sure? The legal definition makes it rape if he just touches her with himself. I know that much.”

“The report specified mutilation. In these cases that’s usually a euphemism for penetration. The newspapers will work around the details, but it may come out in the trial—if there is a trial.”

“He must be insane,” she said. “He’ll never get to trial.”

“Innocent until proven guilty, Norma. You can ask your Dr. Roberts about this, too. I’d be interested in hearing his answers myself.”

The car was moving down Bay Slope toward the bay, which could not be seen because of the angling of the streets. It was not far to the Crescent Expressway, and from there, a few minutes to the Jefferson University campus. “He must have stopped talking about the killing by now,” Leland said, and turned the radio on again. It was rude, but he wanted the opportunity to collect his thoughts.

Collegeville Road had not changed since he had seen it last—which might have been before the war. The sorority house where he had met Karen was four blocks away, and he knew he could get out of the car and walk to the end of the street, make a half-left turn, and cut across the campus lawn to the dormitory where she had lived.

He had never come back on a sentimental visit, and he did not know if Karen had, either. It would not surprise him if she had done it while she had lived here alone. Even in November the section was beautiful and restful, lawns, trees, and shrubs carefully tended, no fun for the children he had known in his own childhood. No children were in sight. In this neighborhood they were too jaded to play after dark. Where he had grown up the children had had to be run indoors. Even Steffie had had a taste of that. He had to think of the gulf that was going to spread between Norma and her child. In neighborhoods like this the children took dancing lessons and had cats they bred and their own listed telephones. Leland could remember the street urchins around Franklin Pierce High School. He had a picture of little girls playing jacks by an apartment doorway. Norma’s child would never learn what jacks were.