Hook looked at Bobby sitting next to him, but the boy had turned away.

“I just wish I was goin’ out there with you, Dave!” the old man went on. “I’d show them lying bastards a thing or two!”

“Don’t worry,” Hook said. “We’ll get the truth.”

“That ain’t enough! Somebody should pay!” Arnie—mild, easy-going Uncle Arnie—slammed his fist into the Jeep hood so hard he almost dented it.

“We’ll see,” Hook said. “It depends on what happened.”

“I still say, you oughta get that girl Bobby says Chris put it to and make her testify. You can, you know. What’s the word—?”

“Subpoena.”

“That’s it. Use it.”

In the days since he had returned with the body, Hook had learned from Bobby that Chris, along with a half-dozen other boys his age, had had sexual intercourse with the daughter of a Banner Hill grocer, a man who was a deacon in the First Baptist Church, a Kiwanian, a community pillar of sorts. But Hook considered it highly unlikely that this man would permit his daughter to make a deposition declaring herself the town tramp. Bobby also had revealed that another girl Chris had dated, a girl whose family Hook knew and liked, had regularly made the boy come with her hand, though she had denied him anything more than that. Hook planned to tell Rider about both girls and if the sergeant considered the testimony important they could do something about it then, possibly get corroboration from the girls personally, without having to cause them or their families embarrassment. And then, of course, there was the letter. Hook was not worried. He would not be going back empty-handed.

“And if she denies it all,” Arnie said now, “subpoena the other kids that was layin’ her. They’ll back up Bobby’s word, believe me. Nothin’ they’d be happier to do than brag about gettin’ a little. It’s only human.”

“Maybe later on. We’ll see what develops.” Hook restarted the Jeep’s engine.

Arnie slid off the hood and headed for the pickup, which he had driven back into the cleared pasture before closing the fence gap. Hook drove slowly back across the pasture and through the trees that separated it from the road. It was a beautiful woodland, almost parklike in its lack of undergrowth, which was kept down by the cattle as they used the trees for shade in the summer and shelter in the winter. Coming to the gate, Hook stopped the Jeep and Bobby jumped out to open it. As the boy swung it wide, the battered pickup of Ralph Metzler, whose small farm bordered Hook’s, came rattling around a curve in the blacktop and braked sharply in front of the gate. Rolling down his window, Metzler told Hook that one of his calves had been killed that night. He had been at work, Metzler said-he worked nights at the glass factory in Alton—but his wife had been home, though of course she had not heard a thing, deaf as she was.