There were glaring headlines that the police had caught the man who had kidnapped and raped a six-year-old girl a couple of days before. The nude and mutilated body of the girl had been found, dead by strangulation, in a vacant lot within a matter of hours after she had disappeared. The authorities had picked up a drunken, middle-aged, moronic ex-janitor who lived in the neighborhood and had confessed the crime. He had a past record of several sex-offenses against children, so it looked like they had the right culprit.

I was reading all this over when John got back from taking his leak, and he glanced across our table as he sat down beside me, to see what I was reading. When he spotted the item that held my interest, he said, “It's all right to be eccentric in how you get your kicks, but that guy was sort of abusing the privilege.”

I grunted something meaningless and kept reading for a few seconds more. John then added, “And the worst thing that poor bastard did was get caught. That's the worst crime.”

Without thinking, — saying what was in my mind, but definitely not what I intended to say, I heard myself saying, “Maybe it was worth it.”

There was a pause of horrible silence while I realized what had come out in the few seconds that my guard was down. I glanced up quickly at John and managed a weak smile into his face which was staring down into mine with a peculiar interest.

“What I mean is, maybe the poor bastard was so hard up to get laid that he screwed the little girl because he couldn't get the real thing.” I tried to cover up the break I'd made. “I mean, even doing it to that child may have been worth it to that poor crazy drunk, — he was so mixed up.”