The shamus is Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), whose search for his ex-girl-friend's killer leads him into a romance with a femme fatale (Nora Zehetner) and an ambiguous friendship with The Pin (Lukas Haas), a local drug-lord who reads Tolkien and lives with his mother.
The jury also watched a recorded interview with an eight-year-old girl who described how she was playing with a friend on their bikes when the defendant stopped his vehicle and began talking to her friend.