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woman asking the question. His arms and legs were shaking slightly. His stomach roiled. He said, “I didn’t do anything.”
    The woman, her voice rising, answered, “You downloaded a picture of a child being raped. You kept it on your computer.”
    T said, “But it was already there.”
    “On your computer?” she said, incredulous.
    “On the Internet.”
    “But you downloaded it to your computer,” she said. “You looked at it with lust, for sexual pleasure.”
    “With interest,” T said.
    “Interest?” she said. “What do you mean, interest?”
    “I mean the picture is interesting,” T said.
    “Interesting?” She looked horrified.
    “Interesting?” she repeated. “This is a child being raped, and you think it’s”—her hand shot out and she slapped him hard across the cheek— “interesting?”
    The slap was hard enough to knock him back in his seat and leave the imprint of her hand on his face, but at the time he hardly felt it. It was as if his body had gone numb. He wanted to explain himself to the woman who had slapped him and he was too busy trying to formulate the words to paymuch attention to the physical blow. The other detectives had been shocked by the slap; he had seen it on their faces for a brief moment before they gathered themselves back to professional impassivity, as if there were nothing surprising at all in what had just happened. T wanted to direct the woman’s attention back to the picture. Look, he wanted to say. She’s not being raped. She’s been seduced by the older woman and given as a gift, an offering to the man’s desire. Look at the motherly tenderness in the older woman’s eyes, the way the young girl holds on to her, as if for reassurance. She’s been seduced. She’s been seduced by the older woman and delivered into the arena of sex. It’s terrible, I know, he wanted to say. In the real world, it’s terrible. But this is a picture. I was fascinated by a picture. I wasn’t sanctioning what happened, I was looking at an image. There’s a difference, he wanted to say. There’s an important difference. In the real world, it’s terrible, it’s a crime; but this is an image, a powerful, troubling, resonant image that reaches someplace deep and disturbing. I was interested in the image; I wasn’t sanctioning the act. I didn’t
do
anything, he wanted to say, except look at a picture.
    But he never got to say any of it. Instead he watched the stick-figure woman as she went to a countertop sink in a corner and washed her hands, and then looked back at him one more time with loathing before leaving the room.
    In the dark and quiet of the Rover, approaching Alexandria Bay, T drew in a deep, calming breath and tried to empty his mind. His muscles were knotted and stiff. He felt a headachecoming on. Alongside him, Jenny was stretched out with her head close to his thigh, her knees bent and her body hunched and cramped into an uncomfortable-looking S. He ran his fingers along a lock of her hair and could almost taste the texture of its silky waves. He moved the lead pipe away from her head, to the floor by her feet. She stirred with his movements and turned onto her back with her knees up in the air and her forehead jammed into the space between his thigh and the back of the seat.
    Driving through the night, with Jenny and Lester sleeping, he thought of his own daughter, of family trips with her and her stepbrother sleeping buckled up in the back seat and Alicia, his wife, his daughter’s stepmother, sleeping trustingly alongside him. There were few things in this life that he liked better than driving at night with his family asleep around him—though even the memory of those moments seemed to come to him from another lifetime, from some other dimension of existence, one he had passed through in a dream before finding himself utterly different, in the current moment, at night, in a strange vehicle with a girl in red leather pants curled up where Alicia should be,