The newspapers and radio and television stations had turned the case into the circus it had become—“hoping against hope” was a phrase Leland had heard. Leland usually read three or four newspapers a day in the attempt to find out what was really happening, but he had passed them over on Saturday and yesterday. He knew that in a case like this what was really happening, if anybody knew it, was unprintable in newspapers. On Friday night, without a picture to run, one of the Port Smith papers had gone with a front-page editorial sketch of the weeping parents, captioned “Why?” Leland wondered why. The newspapers knew the truth almost as well as the police. Before the end of the week the father would be escorted through the corridors of the police headquarters basement to view the freshly decomposing body of his daughter. Leland had seen enough doctored victims of crimes of violence—one would have been enough. They were stripped and bathed down with alcohol, the wounds cleaned and tucked together for the official photographs. After death, before it sank back into the skull, the human eye had a strange shine. The oldest corpse Leland had seen in that basement, a man over seventy, had looked like a child surprised. Having been kicked to death had been only part of it. Death itself seemed to have put the expression on his face. They all looked young and surprised, those whom death had overtaken quickly. Mr. Shoftel would see his own child, and Leland, who had always had the role he had been playing to hide behind, could not eagerly wish Mr. Shoftel a long life. Every man had his nightmares, and it was not hard to imagine Mr. Shoftel’s. Setting his jacket on his shoulders before the mirror. Leland could not conceive any experience for Mr. Shoftel that would not be clouded by the memory of a dead daughter. Mr. Shoftel would have something to remember after he saw her body, and if he read the newspapers, he was being set up for it nicely. Leland started to fill his pockets.