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reminding her of a hastily assembled scarecrow. His starched white collar was at least two sizes too big and he had the smallest hands Karen had ever seen on a man. His thick horn-rimmed glasses kept sliding down his nose, and every few seconds he would reach up with his right pinky finger and push them back.
    “Now that you’re able to talk,” he was saying in a brisk impersonal voice, “I’d like you to tell us what happened.”
    Karen looked at him in dismay. She had spent a lot of time thinking about what she would say to her family and her friends,
     framing the words carefully, but she never realized she would have to talk to the police.
    “Is this really necessary?” she replied, pressing her fingersover the tracheotomy tube as Waschkowski had taught her to do.
    “I’m afraid so,” Haller replied, fishing a pad and pen from his jacket pocket. “You see, the way it works is, Sergeant Mc-Cluskey here files a report, and then my office investigates.”
    “I see,” Karen conceded. “What is it you need to know?”
    “Do you remember the events of the night in question?”
    “Yes,” she replied, thinking how pompous he sounded.
    “Why don’t you tell us about it?”
    She looked from one to the other, wondering whether she could suddenly develop amnesia, but she didn’t suppose they would go away until they’d gotten what they’d come for, so she took a deep breath.
    “His name was Bob.”
    “He told you his name?”
    “Yes. At the party.”
    The two men exchanged glances.
    “Maybe you should start at the beginning,” the policeman suggested.
    Karen shut her eyes as images she didn’t want to see flooded her mind, images she didn’t want to share with these strangers.
     It took almost an hour for the whole story to come out, in bits and pieces and tears. By the time Haller ran out of questions,
     Karen’s mind was numb, her throat ached, her sheets were damp with perspiration, and her pillow was soaked with tears.
    “Why did he do such an awful thing?” she rasped. “Why?”
    Tug sighed. “There doesn’t always have to be a reason,” he admitted. “There are a lot of psychos wandering around.”
    “He didn’t seem like a psycho.”
    “Some of them don’t, until something sets them off.”
    “I can’t promise that we’ll get this guy,” Haller said, returning his pad and pen to his pocket. “These kinds of cases are difficult at best, and we don’t have very much to work with.”
    “But don’t you worry about that right now,” Tug told her. “You just concentrate on getting well, and leave the rest to us.”
    The scarecrow was already halfway out the door.
    Karen blinked, but the significance was lost on the two officers. She watched silently as they left. Maybe it was the way they probed for every tiny detail, almost like voyeurs, going over and over the same ground, but it was as though they had raped her all over again—coldly and callously violating the fragile sense of self she needed so desperately to protect.
    She took a small measure of comfort in knowing that, after this, telling her parents and her friends and Peter would be easy.
    “Don’t you think you were a little hard on her?” Tug asked as he walked with Haller down the front steps of the hospital.
    “It’s how you get at the truth,” the investigator said with a shrug.
    “So, what do you think?”
    The investigator shook his head in disgust and sighed. “It’ll never get to court,” he said.
    “You don’t think you can find him?”
    “Oh, I’ll probably find him, if I look hard enough, if his name really is Bob, if he really does go to Harvard. But what’s the point?”
    “Jesus, Haller,” Tug protested. “He shouldn’t get away with what he did to that girl.”
    “Come on, Sergeant, don’t go getting soft this late in the game. She knew him, for God’s sake. They were partying, they were drinking. She went for a walk with him. At two o’clock in the morning. For all I know, she could