“Not the best? I would get this case dismissed in a single motion. I’m not kidding. I would set an expedited hearing and have these boys back out on the street in forty-eight hours. Who’d you have working this case, Barney Fife?”

“We don’t get many murders, Tatum, and we only have a handful of detectives for the entire county. They’re used to credit card fraud and car theft cases. This is the first homicide they’ve ever worked.”

“So you call in someone else from a bigger county.”

“That’s not how it works here. Nobody wants this case. The public is screaming for blood, and if these boys get acquitted, any prosecutor or detective working the case is going to get the brunt of that anger. I made a call up north to Vernal, Saint George, Provo . . . everyone said they’d get back to me, and lo and behold they stopped returning my calls. I’m thinking I might see if the FBI can help.”

I shook my head. “With their budget cuts? Forget it. They got all their resources wrapped up years in advance.”

She looked down to a photo of Patty laid out in the ditch, her milky eyes upturned to the sky. “I mean, it’s not the best I’ve seen, but I think you’re exaggerating a little. There’s enough there for a conviction.”

“No, there’s not.”

“Why not?”

“For starters, semen deteriorates extremely quickly outside the male body. In a living woman, it can last about five days. If the woman is dead and there’s no warmth or blood down there, two days tops, usually one day. Your coroner says the body was out there four days after death, which means he wouldn’t have been able to test for the presence of semen. It just wouldn’t be there. So the day of the murder is wrong, for one. Oh, and there’s the little matter that a good defense attorney is going to argue fairly convincingly that the boys didn’t actually do it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look at it from the jury’s point of view: Two kids that went to high school with her, that knew her, knew her family, and just suddenly, after knowing her their entire lives, decided to kill her? And not just kill her, but brutally abuse and kill her? That kinda thing doesn’t happen out of nowhere. I saw Anderson’s got a prior sexual assault that was dismissed, but there were no details in there. You need to get those reports right away and see if there was violence involved. Don’t get me wrong, these boys did it. But I could have these kids acquitted with my eyes closed.”

“You think someone else was involved?”