“Are all the kids retarded?”

“All with some kind of problem. It's a special school.”

He ran a hand over his face, as if washing without water. “Here's how it lays out: The kids were dropped off near the entrance by a chartered bus, and hiked about a half-mile into the park. It gets thickly wooded pretty quickly but there are marked pathways for novice hikers. The kids ran around for an hour or so, had snacks, bathroom breaks, then reboarded. Almost two hours had lapsed by then. They called roll, Irit wasn't there, they went looking for her, couldn't find her, 911'd Westside Division, who sent a couple of units, but they couldn't find her either and called for K-9 backup. It took half an hour for the dogs to get there, another half to sniff her out. The body was about a mile away, lying in a pine grove. No overt signs of violence, no ligature striations, no subdermal hemorrhaging, no swelling, no blood. Except for the positioning they would have assumed she'd had a seizure or something like that.”

“Sexual positioning?”

“No, show you in a second. The coroner found bruising on the hyoid and the sternohyoid and the pharyngeal muscles. No sexual assault.”

“Strangulation,” I said. “Why no external marks?”

“Coroner said you can get that when the choke-force is spread out over a broad area- using a soft ligature like a rolled-up towel or a clothed forearm. Gentle strangulation, they call it.”

Grimacing, he removed the top file and flipped it open to two pages of snapshots in plastic strip-fasteners.

Some were of the surrounding forest. The rest were of the girl. Thin and fair-haired, she wore a white T-shirt with lace trim around the neck and sleeves, blue jeans, white socks, pink plastic shoes. Very thin. Pipe-cleaner limbs, the elbows prominent, as if recently enlarged by a growth spurt. I would have guessed her age at twelve, not fifteen. Lying on her back, brown earth beneath her, arms at her sides, feet pressed together. Too symmetrical to have fallen. Arranged.