“That doesn’t mean he knows Albert.”

“Maybe,” Clete said. But his attention had already shifted to something down the slope.

“What is it?” I said.

Clete worked his way about five feet down the incline, holding on to pine trunks for balance. He took his ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket and tried to pick up a leather cord and a small wood cross that lay at the base of a lichen-encrusted rock. The cord was broken, and it slipped off his pen.

“Don’t taint the scene, Clete,” I said.

“If we hadn’t found this, no one would have ever known it was here,” he said. But he didn’t touch the cord with his hand; instead, he lifted up the end with his pen. “Look, the break is dry and there’s no discoloration. The kid tore it off the shooter, or the shooter tore it off the vic.”

“A logger might have dropped it, too.”

“No, something weird happened out here. This isn’t a random abduction and killing. I’ll call the evidence in to Higgins,” he said.

“Okay, partner, but I think you’re overreading the information,” I said.

Clete pulled himself up the incline and stepped back on level ground. His face was blotched from exertion and the high altitude. He looked at me a long time.

“Say it,” I said.

“What’d the guy do to the girl before she died?”

“Everything he could without leaving his DNA,” I replied.

“We’re going to hear more from this guy. You know it, Dave. Don’t pretend you don’t.”

The mist was white blowing through the trees. The rock that was stippled with the dead boy’s blood glistened in the weak light. I picked up a pinecone and flung it into space.

DURING THE WEEK we heard a lot more about Ridley Wellstone and his family, in the same way you hear a word or name for the first time and then hear it every hour for the next month.