They drove through a clutch of little towns that looked just like Bentley. The same cramped businesses and towering churches, the same empty streets and dangling stoplights. After leaving high school, Clark had spent a brief, ugly marriage in Waco, a hundred miles away. Since returning to Pettis County three years ago with a criminal justice diploma, she’d felt a quiet pride in knowing that she had become one of the guardians of her hometown, one of the quiet few who kept the fires lit. Bentley’s streets, its flat horizons, had comforted her upon her return in a way they never had in school. Had been blessedly familiar. Stable.
Why, then, did the sight of these other tiny towns on the highway fill her with nothing but dread? As Mayfield rocketed past diners and feed stores, Clark felt the eyes of people on the other side of their dark windows wishing her away, wishing her to tend to her own town’s secrets.
Dylan’s body had been discovered in a creek, on an unseasonably cool day, and those forces together had acted as a refrigerant, slowing the process of decay and making it difficult to determine a time of death. An autopsy was scheduled for this afternoon, which would hopefully shed more light on the matter. “But don’t get your hopes up,” the medical examiner had said. “You may as well have tucked this boy in a deep freeze.”
Meaning Dylan Whitley could have died anytime between Friday evening and Sunday night. Meaning that Clark and Mayfield were on their way to Galveston to visit KT Staler’s half brother, the man who swore on the phone with Clark yesterday that the three boys had stayed with him over the weekend.
“Can I say something?” Clark asked Mayfield.
“I should hope so. It’s a long ride.”
“I have real issues with the story KT told us about Dylan running away Sunday night.”
“Go on.”
Clark muffled a yawn before she could begin. She felt as if she had slept—if that was even the word for it—at the sheriff’s department. Upon their return from the funeral home yesterday afternoon, Clark and Mayfield had been greeted by the mayor and the sheriff and the sheriff’s boss, County Attorney Harlan Boone.
Mr. Boone was a squat, polished man, sixty but blessed with a glow of youth: full head of hair, taut skin, a nervy edge in his every word. He was partial to turquoise bolo ties, pointed cowboy boots, gleaming diesel trucks he replaced every year. He had always struck Clark as vain and vaguely useless. Her experience with him yesterday had not altered her opinion.
“The mayor and I have never had more faith in this department than we do tonight,” Mr. Boone had said. “I’ve assured my lovely wife—and I’m sure by now she’s assured every lady in town—that you will bring this case to a swift and firm conclusion.”
Boone drove his fist into his palm for emphasis. Mayor Malacek nodded a dignified assent. Clark had looked over her shoulder to be sure the county attorney wasn’t speaking to an audience of reporters that had somehow sneaked its way into the station behind her.
Now, on the road, she forced down some brackish truck stop coffee and struggled to sort her thoughts. “It’s just, I keep coming back to the text message that Joel Whitley received on Saturday. Why would Dylan send a message in which he sounds like he’d already run away but then wait to leave his buddies until over twenty-four hours later?”
“Waited to tell KT he was leaving, at least,” Mayfield said.
“You mean you don’t think Jamal ever came here with them?”
“I don’t know. I do know that Reynolds didn’t even know the name of this mysterious Tillery man.”
“Then why go to the trouble of leaving with his friends at the game Friday night if he wasn’t going to the coast with them?”
Mayfield shrugged. He seemed just as disappointed by their interviews with the rest of the team yesterday as she did. Other than confirming the fact that Dylan, KT and Jamal had all three left together on Friday night, Clark and Mayfield had learned little else from the Bison.
“Let’s play with hypotheticals,” Mayfield said. “Maybe all three boys came down here after all, and Jamal somehow forgot Floyd’s every detail. Maybe Dylan was upset when he texted his brother on Saturday morning but then he calmed down and didn’t leave.” Mayfield reached for his coffee. “Jamal said Dylan had been acting hot and cold since the start of the summer. Maybe something set him off Sunday, and this time he was upset enough to go through with it.”
“‘Go through with it.’ Like suicide,” Clark said and, not for the first time since Saturday at the bar with Joel, she thought of her brother. Suicide had long since become the popular theory to explain Troy’s disappearance. There was enough empty country in Pettis County a man could drive twenty minutes in any direction and put a gun in his mouth and run good odds of never being found. A search for Troy in the Flats east of Bentley had been mounted a decade ago—Clark remembered that much, though the search party had somehow gotten turned around and returned to town almost without realizing it, empty-handed and unsettled. A second search had not been mounted.
“Not suicide. Dylan Whitley couldn’t have cut his own throat so deep on his own,” Mayfield said, steering their car around a rickety horse trailer. “But making the choice to run away from home with just the clothes on your back ain’t much more reasonable than the choice to kill yourself.”
“Fair enough. But then what? Dylan leaves out of Galveston at six, changes his mind again, turns around, comes back to Bentley, drives twenty miles north of town to a spit of empty land and gets his throat cut? What happened to his truck? What—”
Something occurred to her. She flipped through the case file until she found the page she wanted. “Listen to this: Dylan was found wearing ‘one pair of Levi’s jeans (heavily bloodstained), no underwear, one leather belt and one Bentley Bison synthetic leather team jacket (also bloodstained).’ What happened to his shoes and his socks? His shirt? Hell, why wasn’t he wearing underwear?”
Mayfield made a satisfied little noise. “Why indeed?”
Clark read over the notes again to be certain her memory was correct. It was. A forensics search of the area in which Dylan’s body was discovered had not been fruitful. There was no trace of blood, no boot prints or tire tracks, no signs of a struggle. Deputies Jones and Browder had not discovered a scrap of clothing.
“Reynolds is lying about something. But if he killed Dylan for a piece of the spotlight, why would Whitley be half-naked when his throat was cut?” Clark said.
Mayfield said nothing.
“Sir—” Clark looked at the map on her phone’s screen, at the little red pin on the coast toward which she and Mayfield were crawling, one little town at a time. “What the hell happened at this house?”