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ounces…but silver was weighed in troy ounces, which, if he remembered correctly, were about ten percent heavier than regular ounces. Sterling wasn’t pure, only about 90 percent, so you’d have some more loss. Call it roughly 550 troy ounces of pure silver at…he didn’t know how much. Ten bucks? Fifteen? Not a fortune. After fencing it off, reworking it and refining it, getting it to the end user, the guys who carried it out of the house would be lucky to take out a grand.
    In the meantime, they’d be humping around a lot of silver that had the dead woman’s initials all over it. Maybe, he thought, they didn’t take it because it wasn’t worth the effort or risk. Maybe smarter than your average cokehead.
    Another gurney went by in the hall, another body bag: Bucher. Then a cop stuck his head in the dining room door: “The Lash kid is here. They’ve taken him into the front parlor.”
     
    L UCAS WENT that way, thinking about the silver, about the video games, about the way the place was trashed, the credit cards not stolen…Superficially, it looked local, but under that, he thought, it looked like something else. Smith was getting the same bad feeling about it: something was going on, and they didn’t know what it was.
     
    R ONNIE L ASH was tall and thin, nervous—scared—a sheen of perspiration on his coffee-brown forehead, tear tracks on his cheeks. He was neatly dressed in a red short-sleeved golf shirt, tan slacks, and athletic shoes; his hands were in his lap, and he twisted and untwisted them. His mother, a thin woman in a nurse’s uniform, clutched a black handbag the size of a grocery sack, stood with him, talking to John Smith.
    “They always say, get a lawyer,” Mrs. Lash said. “Ronnie didn’t do anything, to anybody, he loved Sugar, but they always say, get a lawyer.”
    “We, uh, Mrs. Lash, you’ve got to do what you think is right,” Smith said. “We could get a lawyer here to sit with Ronnie, we could have somebody here in an hour from the public defender, won’t cost you a cent.” Which was the last thing Smith wanted. He wanted the kid alone, where he could lie to him.
    Mrs. Lash was saying, “…don’t have a lot of money for lawyers, but I can pay my share.”
    Ronnie was shaking his head, looking up at his mother: “I want to get this over with, Ma. I want to talk to these guys. I don’t want a lawyer.”
    She put a hand on his shoulder. “They always say get a lawyer, Ronnie.”
    “If you need one, Ma,” the Lash kid said. “I don’t need one. Jesus will take care of me. I’ll just tell the truth.”
    She shook a finger at him: “You talk to them then, but if they start saying stuff to you, you holler for me and we’ll get a lawyer up here.” To John Smith: “I still don’t understand why I can’t come in. He’s a juvenile.”
    “Because we need to talk to Ronnie—not to the two of you. We need to talk to you, too, separately.”
    “But I didn’t…” she protested.
    “We don’t think you did, Mrs. Lash, but we’ve got to talk to everybody,” Smith said. His voice had lost its edge, now that he knew he’d be able to sweat Ronnie, without a lawyer stepping on his act.
     
    L UCAS LEANED AGAINST the hallway wall, listening to the exchange, mother and son going back and forth. The Lashes finally decided that Ronnie could go ahead and talk, but if the cops started saying stuff to him…
    “I’ll call you, Ma.”
    At that point, Lucas was eighty-three percent certain that Ronnie Lash hadn’t killed anyone, and hadn’t helped kill anyone.
     
    T HEY PUT Mrs. Lash on a settee in the music room and took Ronnie into the parlor, John Smith, a fat detective named Sy Schuber, and Lucas, and shut the door. They put Ronnie on a couch and scattered around the room, dragging up chairs, and Smith opened by outlining what had happened, and then said, “So we’ve got to ask you, where were you this weekend? Starting at four-thirty Friday afternoon?”
    “Me’n