“She’d had recent intercourse. It could be called rough sex. But that doesn’t go with what people knew about either her or her boyfriend.” Then he told me what the perpetrator had done to her.

“My guess is the girl was the target. The perp separated them so he could take his time with the girl,” I said. “Maybe he locked the boy in the car trunk. Can cars get up the mountain behind the university?”

“There’s a fire road for pump trucks along the face of the mountain.”

When I didn’t reply, he looked up at the hill again. The morning was blue with shadow, the wind channeling through the wildflowers and bunch grass. Farther down the valley, wood smoke was drifting off a stone chimney that was still dusted with frost. “If I owned Albert’s place, I’d hang up my badge and mess with my horses and trout-fish in the evening,” he said. “I wouldn’t do this kind of work anymore.”

THAT AFTERNOON I helped Albert dig knapweed and leafy spurge out of his pasture. Knapweed is a nuisance in the American West. Leafy spurge is a plague. The root system can go twenty feet into the ground and form a network that, once established, cannot be eradicated with chemicals or even excavation by giant machines. A shopping center can be constructed on top of it, and its root system will continue to reproduce and grow laterally until its stems find sunlight. That’s not a metaphor.

Albert was sweating heavily, chopping at the ground with a mattock, his gloves streaked with the thick milky-white substance that a broken spurge stem produces. He hadn’t spoken for almost a half hour.

“Something bothering you besides noxious weeds?” I said.

“That fellow Wellstone owes me for a punctured gas tank.”

But I doubted that his mood had its origins in a minor car accident. The light had died in his eyes, and I had a feeling that Albert had gone to a private place inside himself that he shared with few people.