With the assurance of experience Schoenstein kept up an assault of quietly posed questions in the method he had learned from Quillan years before. Quillan was living on the west coast of Florida now and would appreciate a note telling of this. Schoenstein still had the vivid imagination that could make the technique work. His questions were intensely physical, drawn from reconstructions of the crime. Some of the men in the room were plainly revolted. Quillan had told Leland that he had come upon the method watching newsreels of the German concentration camps. Stripping the victims naked had made them easy to handle. There were many kinds of nakedness. A perverted man, unless he was hopelessly insane, would be unable to stand having his acts and desires exposed and known to other men.

In a few minutes Schoenstein stood up and made his way to the front door. He gave Captain Leland a signal to join him in the corridor.

“You’d better stick with me, Joe,” his father said. “We don’t know who’s liable to walk in.”

“Hey! Joe! Your dad told me you were in town. How’ve you been?”

“Good, but not as busy as you. You’ve done all right. You’ve done a good job.”

He nodded. “Captain, I think he’s going to give. His answers are beginning to fall over each other. Maybe another hour, hour and a half, and we’ll be all set.”

Captain Leland looked unhappy. “He’s in our custody. We have the evidence to book him. Let’s do that before we go any further.”

“We only need an hour and this thing will be all wrapped up,” Schoenstein said.

“You’re holding him incommunicado,” the Captain said. “A good lawyer could leave the district attorney holding his ass if it went far enough in the courts. You know what would happen to you.” He had his finger under Schoenstein’s nose. “You’ll be putting diapers on piss clams up in Northport for the next thirty years.”

“It won’t get to any court. The man is crazy—”

“Who says? The law will say he’s sane. He did a bad thing and he knew it. That makes him sane. Are you going to bet your career against over a hundred years of decisions like that?”

“This is the way they want it,” Schoenstein said. “There’s no question about that.”

“What do you have in writing, sonny? What did they say they’d do if the trouble started?”

He stiffened. “All right. They dictated a statement. All right. Joe, what do you think?”

“Don’t ask him,” Captain Leland said. “He’s your friend and my son.”

“All the better. He’ll say what he thinks is best. He saw the guy and he knows the realities.”