At 2:04 that afternoon a woman named Patsy Boyd Vaughn, a forty-one-year-old mother of three, made a left onto South Street from the highway going fifty-five miles an hour. She was speeding, though this was hardly unusual in Bentley—South Street was all but abandoned in the midafternoon and was often treated as an extension of the highway. That morning, however, Patsy had complained to her husband that she hadn’t slept well since Friday night.
At 2:04 she was asleep at the wheel, and by 2:05 was lying dead against it.
She lost consciousness somewhere in the middle of the turn. Her foot came to rest on the accelerator. Her restored lime-green Cadillac, a lavish birthday gift from her husband as an apology for an affair, carried on at fifty-five miles an hour and fishtailed into the first building at the intersection of South Street and Highway 77.
Emily Bunner, a bored girl with a husband (still) in Iraq, was the sole teller that afternoon at First Community Bank, and she didn’t look up from her phone until Mrs. Vaughn’s Cadillac came flying through the bank’s front windows. Emily leaped out of the way, though she lost her leg in the subsequent collision. Ironic, folks said later, that Emily’s husband had made it through three tours of IEDs and ISIS unscathed, but it was she who would be the amputee.
Jamal was still in the interview room, speaking to his lawyer. Clark was seated in the sheriff’s department bull pen. Mayfield was seated at the desk across from her, filling out paperwork, treating her just as he had all day: as if she weren’t there at all.
Mayfield’s phone began to ring. Clark’s curiosity was piqued when she heard the way the investigator said, “You’re shitting me? On I-35?”
Still listening to Mayfield’s conversation, Clark began running searches through the department’s system. She pressed Enter and discovered there was no official record of any kind regarding KT Staler, whom Wesley Mores had told Joel “got into some kind of trouble” over the summer. No arrests, no tickets, not even a citation.
She discovered a moment later that there was no record of any investigation into the distribution of those dirty photographs of Joel ten years ago, the investigation the Whitley family had been promised was still ongoing.
Out of curiosity (Clark was long past caring that all of these searches were tracked), she pulled the record of Joel’s arrest in 2007 and discovered it was so thinly written it was almost laughable. Old Officer Grissom had written:
Two men interrupted at Milam Municipal park in midst of sexual act...unidentified man between 5'8 and 6'2 (really?) fled the scene... Whitley, nude, produced wallet from pants on the ground stating quote “we can figure something out” end quote but...
Clark found all of this doubtful. She struggled to imagine Joel Whitley, aged seventeen (and no doubt terrified), possessing the wherewithal to offer a uniformed sheriff’s deputy a bribe to avoid arrest. For that matter, she struggled to imagine fat, fidgety Officer Grissom turning the money down: before his accident this past summer, Grissom had possessed a reputation for being almost endearingly corrupt.
But it begged the question: why would dirty Officer Grissom write a false report? To cover for the other man, the one who had allegedly escaped unidentified?
“That was the Dallas PD,” Mayfield said, hanging up the phone at his desk. “They arrested KT Staler for drug possession at a traffic stop on Tuesday night. Apparently they received some new APB this morning describing his Tacoma as ‘aquamarine’ and it flagged him in the system.” Mayfield raised an eyebrow. “I’d have thought ‘green’ would have covered all our bases.”
Clark’s heart fluttered. That had been her APB.
“They say KT’s ours for the taking if we want him. The new mayor up there put in a catch-and-release policy for the possession charges. They was about to cut him loose again.”
Clark reached for her keys. “Are we going now?”
“You’re going over to South Street,” said Sheriff Lopez. Clark spun in her chair. She hadn’t heard him stepping up behind her.
“But, sir—”
“But nothing. A car just drove into the bank and cracked open the vault.”
Clark stood. “Sir, with all due respect, we have a suspect in custody in—”
“Indeed we do. In our station.” Lopez narrowed his eyes at her computer screen. “If Mayfield wants to be a good Samaritan and bring Mr. Staler home, that’s his prerogative. We’re considering the Whitley case as good as closed, Deputy. And you’re out of line.”
Clark’s cell buzzed. She slipped it far enough from her pocket to see the name on the screen. She swallowed her anger. “Excuse me, Sheriff,” she said. “It’s my father’s home.”
It was Joel. She stepped into the woman’s restroom.
“Luke Evers wasn’t home Friday night.” Joel didn’t bother with hello. “Where did he say he was?”
Clark ran her mind over all the alibis the boys had given them on Tuesday. “He went home to his mother straight after the game. We followed up with her—she said he was in by ten forty.”
“T-Bay Baskin, the tall kid on the defensive line—you know him?”
“Of course. He was at home on Friday night too. We checked.”
“Precisely. Which is how he knows that Luke Evers wasn’t.” Earlier this morning Clark had heard a calm in Joel’s voice she didn’t trust, the quiet of a coiled spring. It had gotten tighter. “T-Bay’s family, apparently they live down the street from the Evers place—the guy can see Luke’s driveway from his upstairs window. T-Bay told Kimbra Lott he was up late with Whiskey Brazos on the Xbox and by the time they fell asleep at four o’clock Luke’s truck still wasn’t parked at his family’s house. T-Bay said he noticed because Luke’s mother is so ‘psycho’—his word, not mine—she never lets Luke stay out late. T-Bay even mentioned to Whiskey that Luke would have hell to pay when he came home. Luke lied to you, Clark. And his family fucking covered for him.”
“Or T-Bay lied to get Luke in the shitter.”
“Why would he lie?”
“Why would Luke kill Dylan?”
“You saw how the two of them were fighting at the game. Those kids had bad blood.”
“They could have been disagreeing on a play.”
“Can you talk to Luke? Shake him a little?”
“I’m not shaking anybody,” she said, then added, “They’re putting me back on street duty. It’s a wild day over here.”
Joel was silent for a moment. “Then I’ll talk to him.”
“No!” She nearly shouted it. “Christ, Joel, that kid’s parents are richer than God. Do you have any idea what his father would do if he heard you came near his boy?”
“It would just be a conversation. Nothing scandalous.”
Clark did not care for Joel’s tone of voice at all. She also doubted she could stop him if he set his mind to something crazy. She made a decision. “Give me a couple hours. Let me settle things here. We’ll figure out a way I can talk to Luke, somewhere private where he won’t feel any pressure.”
“Fine.”
Clark made to hang up, but something in the silence on the line made her stop.
“Is there something else?”
“I wish there wasn’t.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I found out what the Bison were passing around at halftime.”
Her phone buzzed against her ear. She put Joel on hold, opened the message he’d sent, paused. It was a URL with a name she vaguely recognized. She opened it.
The link led to an escorting website. Across the top of the page was the profile name REALTXQB99. Beneath the name were all the tedious statistics.
6'1. 185 lbs.
8 inches cut.
$200/hour. Your place.
I’m a fucking horny Texas Teen who loves to FUCK and SERVICE mature men.
Happy to serve the Dallas/Austin/Houston areas.
Available most weekends just give me heads-up.
And there, right in the center, was Dylan Whitley, shirtless, chiseled, smiling with his hand disappearing into a thick darkness at the bottom edge of a bathroom mirror.