“And you saw this happen?” Boyd asked, gently.

“No. But everyone is talking about it. Someone took pictures. It’s disgusting,” she added, her voice now growing stronger.

Maddie’s father banged the desk with his fist. “If everyone knows about this, why haven’t the police done anything?” he demanded. “You’re too busy chasing down kids for drinking beer at a party, and meanwhile my daughter is assaulted, and no one here knows a thing about it. I heard the police were there that night, giving out tickets on River Road. Why didn’t you bother to break up this party? Too much trouble? You’d rather collect your fat paychecks—my tax dollars—and sit in your cars drinking coffee. If you’d done your damn jobs, none of this would have happened! You better believe the papers are going to hear about this. And my lawyer.” He was on a roll, and Jake could tell from experience that his righteous anger was giving him relief from other more painful emotions. “And whose house was this, anyway?” he asked. “I think it’s pretty negligent to leave a big house like that just open to whoever might find it. That’s an attractive nuisance, right? Have the police looked into that? And do they know how these drugs are getting into the hands of children?”

Chief Whitman flipped off the audio with a grimace. Hal turned to Jake. “This girl wasn’t charged, correct?”

“That’s right,” Jake confirmed.

“And she won’t be now,” Hal said. “We can’t have kids coming forward with sexual assault allegations and getting charged with trespassing.”

“Of course not,” Jake agreed.

“I just want to make sure we’re on the same page,” Hal said. “I’m not sure that our focus here has been up to standards. I seem to recall that you and Detective Murray were informed of a possible assault weeks ago?”

Jake’s face reddened. He wasn’t sure why he was catching the blame here. If anything, he had fought for a more serious investigation and charges in the case, and Hal had blocked him at every turn. “That’s right,” Jake said, carefully. “But it was just a rumor. Nothing concrete.”

“And what about this kid, Will O’Connor? Wasn’t he the one who threw the party?”

“That’s our theory. He’s being charged with misdemeanor trespass and vandalism. This doesn’t change that. It’s one of our strongest cases.”

“It’s not going to play well if it turns out that Will O’Connor was breaking windows to prevent a rape,” Hal mused. “None of this came up in the investigation?”

Jake shook his head. They’d looked into it, but they hadn’t found anything definite.

“Do we have any leads on who assaulted this girl?” Hal asked.