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Samples, isn’t it?”
    Leanne managed an uncertain smile and said why of course it was still Miss.
    “I thought maybe some young man might have spirited you away by now,” he said. “Off to the Casbah or something.”
    The young woman reddened and hid her face with her hands.
    “Stop it,” she said with a giggle.
    She hadn’t changed a great deal. Same wide-open face and deep-set eyes. Her brown hair was, if anything, thicker, and she might have lost a little weight. She was, what? Twenty-one or so now. She’d been something like eighteen at the time. Probably not the PC nomenclature anymore, but, back then, Corso had decided that “slow” was the proper term for Leanne Samples. Eventually, Leanne got to the right answer. It just took her a bit longer than it did most folks.
    “Leanne…,” Corso began. “I hope you won’t mind if we get right down to business here.” She nodded. “Did you tell Mr. Hawes that Mr. Himes did not attempt to rape you? Is that what you told him?” Before she could answer, Corso waved a finger in her face. “Because…if you are…I mean, girl, I’ve got to tell you right up front what a serious matter you’re getting yourself into here.”
    She was chewing her thumb. Moving her head up and down.
    “I did,” she said softly.
    The bench squeaked as Corso leaned back against the wall. His scalp tingled.
    “Now why would a nice girl like you want to do a thing like that, Leanne? Why would you want to go and tell a lie about something so important?”
    She thought it over. “I was scared,” she said finally.
    “Scared of what?”
    “Of my parents.”
    “Why would you be afraid of your parents?”
    “I thought I was pregnant.”
    “Pregnant by whom?”
    She shrugged. “Some boy from school.” She pulled her hand from her mouth and waved it as if she were shooing a fly. “You remember my parents…” She looked pleadingly at Corso. He nodded. “They’d go crazy,” she said. “They’d…”
    “So you…”
    “So I went to the park. I tore up my clothes…scratched myself…” Unconsciously, she brought her fingertips to her cheek. “You know, to make it look like I was attacked. So…you know…in case I turned out to be pregnant…I could say I’d been…”
    “What did you think the cops would do?” he pressed.
    “There weren’t supposed to be any police,” she blurted out.
    The lunchroom fell silent around them. She looked around. She started her thumb to her mouth, caught herself, jammed it back in her lap.
    “I was just going to go home and tell my parents. That was all,” she whispered. “They’d keep the shame in the family. It’s their way.” She waved her hand again. “The policemen just drove up. I didn’t—”
    “You identified a picture of Mr. Himes.”
    “They kept asking me to look again and look again and look again. I didn’t know what else to do,” she whined.
    “You picked him out of a lineup.”
    “He was the man in the picture,” she said. “I thought—”
    “You testified in court,” Corso interrupted.
    She began to cry. “They’re going to kill him. I never thought…I thought—”
    “You thought what?” Corso pushed.
    Her shoulders shook as she began to sob. “I thought he was a bad man and that they would put him away where he could get better and not hurt anybody.”
    Over the top of her head, he could see that the room had nearly stopped again as people realized who they were. The air was still and electrically charged, like in the seconds before a cloudburst.
    “Have you been to the authorities?”
    Her eyes again filled with tears. When she nodded, droplets rolled down her cheeks. “They didn’t believe me. They said I’d have to go to jail.”
    Corso wasn’t surprised. Recanting testimony was nearly impossible. Careers were at stake even in low-profile cases. In a case as emotionally charged as Walter Leroy Himes’s, God only knew how far they’d go to cover their collective asses.
    “Who did