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In 1972 Spring Hill was as safe a neighborhood as you could find near an East Coast city, one of those instant subdivisions where brick split-levels and two-car garages had been planted like cabbages on squares of quiet green lawn. Occasionally somebody's Schwinn bicycle was stolen, or a dog was hit by a car that kept on going. Once in a while we heard about a shoplifter at the Spring Hill Mall, six blocks away. But otherwise both the mall and the neighborhood always struck everyone as the most ordinary of places. The one summer evening around five-thrity, just as business at the mall had finished for the day, a florist named Miss Evelyn Crespo carried a box of orchid corsages out to her car for a wedding that night. She had parked far back behind the mall in a row of spaces reserved for employees, below a two- acre wooded rise. That time of day, the mall's triangular shadow cut upward across the hill like a wedge. As Miss Crespo slid the corsages into her back seat, she heard what she thought was a cat mewing from the shaded half of the hillside. The sun was in her eyes when she backed away from the car to look around. After a moment, the mewing came again, or something like it, a small, weak sound. Although she was a heavy woman, and the day was hot, she climbed partway up the rise toward where it flattened out, wading through the broken bottles, locust husks, and tangled creeper vines to see if the source of the mewing might be somebody's lost kitten. When she didn't find anything, she carefully edged back down toward the parking lot, once grabbing the branch of a laurel bush for support. then she went inside the mall, locked up her shop for the night, waved to the hairdressers in the Klip 'n' Kurl hair salon, came out through the automatic glass doors to her car carrying the bridal bouquet, and drove off to Bethesda to deliver her wedding flowers. The whole experience lasted no more than ten minutes. As it turned out, Miss Crespo was to recount the details of those ten minutes over and over in the next few weeks, first to the Montgomery County police officers who came to question her, then to a police detective, then to three newspaper reporters, later to her family and neighbors, and finally to her customers, who came into the shop to lean against her refrigerated display case of long-stemmed roses, tiger lilies, and baby's breath. She described those ten minutes so frequently she grew sick of the sound of her own voice. She also ceased believing that the details she recounted were true, which happens when you tell a story about yourself so often the words are memorized. Because what Miss Crespo had heard that mid-July evening was not a kitten mewing, but a young boy groaning behind a clump of laurel bushes, where not twenty minutes before he had been raped by a man who had also tried to choke him to death.