“No one’s eight three either,” Pescado said, sectioning the orange as he talked. “You gotta come up with something better than that.” Orange juice dripped on Pescado’s trousers as he leaned forward. “In the first place your witness is lying or crazy. There’s no way one unarmed man could beat five other men to death. No way in the world.”

“Maybe he was armed,” Hawkins said.

“He wasn’t. Did your genius witness see any weapons?”

“No,” Hawkins answered.

“Right. Because there weren’t any.”

“So maybe they took them away or hid them . . .”

“They didn’t. Weapons leave tracks. You know that, Roger. You show me a stab wound, and I can probably tell you if it was made by a butcher knife, a bowie knife, a nail. You hit someone with a baseball bat—it looks like you hit him with a baseball bat.”

“Okay,” Hawkins said warily, “no weapons.”

“Not unless they were made of clay.”

“Is there such a thing?” Hawkins asked.

“I never heard of it,” Pescado answered.

Hawkins was quiet and Pescado opened his copy of the Post. There were pictures of the outside of the clubhouse, and of the basement room after they’d taken the bodies away. Hawkins didn’t look at it. Pescado said, “Roger, one of the boys was torn apart.”

Hawkins remembered the leg on the floor. He closed his eyes and breathed through his mouth.

“How did they do that?”

“I don’t know,” Pescado said. “I never saw anything like it. There’s more.”

“I’m waiting,” Hawkins said quietly. He kept his eyes closed.

“The boys had their knives out. All of them.”

“So?”

“If they had their knives out, they must’ve used them. Right?”

Hawkins didn’t answer.

“But there was no blood on them, Roger.”

Hawkins opened his eyes. “That’s crazy,” he said.

“Yeah, crazy.”

Hawkins tried to think. A man six nine or seven two could look huge on a rainy evening in the street light. There might be weapons that Pescado never heard of . . . maces of wood or clubs made out of clay. But the bloodless knives didn’t make sense, and never would, no matter how many witnesses they found or how much evidence they uncovered. The headache pounded and he stopped thinking and pulled the speech to him. The last paragraph read, “We have to prove more than the cops before us. They just had to prove that they were regular guys because no one believed that they were. We have to prove . . .” He pushed the speech away and picked up the Post. There was a picture of the basement room on page two, and yearbook and communion pictures of the boys. The one who’d cried was Jorge Ortiz; he was fifteen and a freshman in high school. The Post said the funeral was that afternoon, at one.