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our room.”
    “Why didn’t you call your daddy?”
    “I was too scared to make a noise. I heard him getting closer, going past. Then, after that, I wanted to get out, but I couldn’t. The door was stuck. It got really quiet.”
    “But you did hear noises?”
    This time, instead of answering aloud, Benjamin Harrison Weston, Jr., buried his head against Big Al’s chest and sobbed into it. The detective didn’t bother to ask him what he had heard—there was no need. We both had a pretty good idea what the horror outside must have sounded like to a terrified child hiding in a darkened closet, wondering if the monster would come after him next.
    “I knew he hurt them. He was bad,” Junior Weston said finally. “Before you even told me, I thought maybe he killed them. Like on TV.”
    “Ja,” Big Al said softly. “I thought maybe you did. You’re a smart boy, Junior, and you were real smart to stay hidden. Your daddy would be proud of you.”
    At the mention of his father, Junior’s eyes once more clouded with tears. “But I wanted to help…what if…” he began, then he broke off. For the next several minutes he sobbed brokenly into Big Al’s massive chest. I couldn’t know how a five-year-old would process the end of that sentence. Maybe he wondered what would have happened if, instead of hiding, he had warned his father, just as Officer Dunn had wondered what would have happened if the patrol car had somehow arrived on the scene sooner.
    In the aftermath of death, “what if” becomes a haunting question, a philosophical imperative dictating the lives of survivors. Some ask themselves variations of that question for the rest of their lives. I’ve done it myself on occasion, especially in regard to Anne Corley, a woman I loved and who I thought loved me—right up until she tricked me into killing her.
    Actually, over the years I’ve almost managed to convince myself that she did love me with the same kind of life-changing ferocity I felt for her. I’ve wondered if the force of that love didn’t somehow bring her face-to-face with the reality of the fiendish monster she’d become. I don’t blame her for not being able to live with that reality, but I’ve often wished she had committed suicide with her own hand instead of mine.
    Still, though, I’ve asked myself countless times what if I had done something else? What if I had taken some other action? Would it have caused a different result? Would we somehow, somewhere have managed to live happily ever after? I don’t know. I doubt it.
    It was painful hearing Junior Weston, sitting there on Detective Lindstrom’s lap in our little cubicle, ask himself those same questions for the very first time. Finally, having cried himself out, the boy grew still.
    “He was way bigger than you. You did the best you could at the time,” Big Al said reassuringly. “Now you’re helping us. We’ll have an artist work with you on a composite, a picture drawn from your description. Do you know about those?”
    Junior nodded. “I saw one once when Daddy brought me down here on a Saturday morning.”
    “We’ll do that later on, tomorrow or the next day,” Big Al added. “In the meantime, we have to talk to the other boy’s family, to Adam’s family. What’s his last name?”
    “Jackson. Adam Jackson. He slept over because his mama had to work all night.”
    “Where does she work?”
    “In a hospital.”
    “Where? Which one?”
    “Somewhere,” Junior said vaguely. “I don’t know the name of it.”
    “What’s Adam’s daddy’s name?”
    “He doesn’t have a daddy.”
    “Does his mother have another name, a first name?”
    “Her name is Mrs. Jackson,” Junior responded firmly. “That’s what my mommy said to call her.”
    Ben and Shiree Weston had taught their son to respect his elders, but that respect wouldn’t make our job any easier.
    Big Al took another tack. “Where does she live? Somewhere close to you?”
    “No. They live all the way