Clark spotted the poster when she raised herself from the school’s water fountain. MEMORIAL SERVICE 2NITE FOR THE BEST DAMN QB WE EVER SAW it read over a blurry picture of Dylan’s smiling face. BRING CANDLES.
“Officer?” said a boy’s voice at her shoulder. She turned and saw Benny Garcia, one of the backbenchers, standing at her elbow with an anxious frown on his pockmarked face. “Exc-c-cuse me, Officer. C-c-can I speak t-to you?”
“Of course.”
The halls were glutted with students after the final bell. He leaned in and said quietly, “It’s about F-F-Friday night.”
“Would you like to step—”
The boy seemed not to notice the attention they were drawing. “You know J-Jamal? It’s j-j-just that he s-s-said s-something weird at h-h-halftime. At the g-g-game.”
“In the locker room?”
“Y-yeah. H-h-he asked me if I had a c-c-condom.”
Clark blinked. She saw Benny’s eyes track a cluster of Bison players as they filed down the hall, their gym bags slapping their hips. Saw the way Garrett Mason, the team’s hulking defensive safety, caught Benny’s eye and held it for a long, charged second.
Clark frowned. This didn’t feel right. “Jamal asked you for a what?”
Benny nodded. “I d-d-didn’t have one, of c-course. B-b-but it’s w-weird, right?”
Before she could thank Benny for his time, the scrawny boy had slipped away to catch up with the bigger Bison who’d passed them earlier. He said something to Garrett Mason as they rounded a corner and Mason responded with a single, curt nod.
That nod bothered her. She’d always imagined that some foundation of discreet loyalty underpinned the team—an impression which her interviews with the players yesterday morning had only strengthened—but Benny didn’t look at all bothered by what he had just told her. Strange, she thought. To whom was that loyalty extended? To whom was it withheld?
Bethany Tanner was already seated in the interview room with Mayfield when Clark arrived.
“Sorry for the wait,” Clark said. They had decided on the way back from Galveston that she would take the lead with the girls this afternoon. Her interview with Kimbra Lott had been smooth, if uninformative. Kimbra had been weirdly inscrutable, clearly concerned about KT’s whereabouts, generous in her answers but seemingly unaware of anything that failed to occur outside her line of sight.
Bethany Tanner studied Clark with an elevated air, her face a perfect balance of grief and boredom. Something about the girl put Clark on edge.
“Thank you for coming, Bethany. I imagine this must be difficult for you.”
The girl gave her a sad little smile. “Of course.”
“We won’t keep you long. But firstly, wouldn’t you like an adult sitting with you? You are under eighteen, yes?”
“I’m eighteen next month,” Bethany said, as if that settled it.
“Sure. But this is a murder investigation. What you say here you might be called on to repeat in court. It’s customary for a minor to have—”
“I don’t have anything to hide.” The girl cut her off smoothly, toying with an expensive-looking silver bracelet on her wrist. “But I do have to get to practice.”
“You’ll be performing at halftime this Friday?” Mayfield asked.
“Of course. Dylan wouldn’t want us to stop. There’s still the championship to think about.”
“Alright, then,” Clark said, already anxious to get away from this girl. “To start, can you tell me if Dylan kept a lock on his cell phone?”
Bethany had clearly not expected this. “He used the thumbprint scanner. Why?”
Clark nodded as if this was merely some trivial detail when Bethany had, in fact, just solved one small mystery for them. Clark had tested it herself this morning: all the killer would have needed to open Dylan’s phone and reset his security settings was a single press of the boy’s finger. Once the security was reset the killer could do anything with that phone—send messages to the victim’s brother, for example.
The finger didn’t have to be warm.
“Can you tell us when you last saw Dylan?”
Bethany seemed much more confident answering this. She’d last seen Dylan when he and the other boys left the game to head for the coast on Friday night, Bethany told her, sometime around ten thirty. Dylan left alone in his truck while Jamal hitched a ride with KT Staler. The last Bethany saw of Dylan, she said, he was heading up the highway.
“Up?” Clark said. “As in north?”
The girl hesitated. “I think so.”
This interview was proving productive. On the way back to Bentley this afternoon, Clark had finally seen what had nagged at her in the crime scene photographs. The boot prints of the officers working the scene were clearly visible in the mud. So where were the tracks left by the person (or persons) who had dumped the body? Upon closer inspection, she’d seen that several pictures revealed a muddy patch near the bank of the creek in which Dylan’s body had been discovered.
“I think this muddy smudge on the other side of the creek is our tire track,” Clark had said to Mayfield. “No one ever took the Spearsons’s road. Someone brought a truck in over the Flats on Friday night, during that storm. They stopped at the side of the creek, dumped the body and then let the rain wash away the tracks where their wheels had pulled up the grass.”
Galveston was two hundred miles south of Bentley, but according to Bethany, Dylan had last been heading in the opposite direction. The girl had just cleared any doubt for Clark and Mayfield: wherever Dylan had been murdered, he’d never had any intention of going to the coast before he got there.
“And when did these trips to the coast begin?” Clark said.
“Back in May.” Bethany gave her an elegant shrug. “Right around the start of the summer games, I remember that. I didn’t pay them much mind.”
“You wouldn’t happen to know the exact dates of these trips, would you?” Clark said, and to her surprise Bethany opened her phone and read aloud a list of dates from her calendar. Clark was further surprised when she realized just how often these trips to the coast had been: Dylan Whitley had left town with KT Staler almost every other weekend during the summer, departing late if there was an off-season game on a Friday night and leaving early if not. He had spent the last three consecutive weekends away. A total of ten trips, over twenty days of unaccounted time.
The best years of my life.
Clark, jotting down the last date, pushing the voice of her dream away, asked Bethany, “You recorded when Dylan was out of town even though you didn’t pay the trips any mind?”
“So I’d know when I had the weekend to spend with my girls.” Bethany stared at her like the answer was obvious. “I’m a very organized person.”
“Did Dylan and KT travel separately when they left town over the summer?” Mayfield asked.
“No. They took Dylan’s truck. KT’s Tacoma’s barely safer than Jamal’s Explorer—it leaks oil like a motherfucker. They had to take extra last weekend to be safe.”
“Then why not all go together in Dylan’s truck?”
Bethany chuckled. “Because it doesn’t have a back seat. Can you imagine one of those guys riding bitch for three hours?”
“But, Bethany, why did Dylan make all these trips in the first place?” Clark said, waving this away. “You must have been curious.”
She didn’t answer immediately. She returned her phone to her bag, pushed back a strand of hair, regarded Clark and Mayfield with a piteous frown.
“Being quarterback is very stressful, you know.” The girl spoke as if she were explaining this to a child. “People around here worship Dylan—they stop him at the gas station and the Egg House, they always want something from him. After we made it to the semifinals it was batshit around here. He had to get away. To clear his head. He said he’d forget who he was otherwise.”
Clark opened her mouth, hesitated. Kimbra Lott had given her basically the same answer to the same question. And, unless Clark were much mistaken, her brother, Troy, had once told her the same thing about being a successful running back, long before the neck injury in his senior year had brought out an uglier side of the town’s devotion. She supposed, in some strange way, it was a blessing to Dylan that he’d died beloved.
Clark noticed, also, that Bethany was speaking about Dylan as if he were still alive.
“I think I understand,” Clark said. “But, Bethany—why wouldn’t Dylan take you with him?”
“My dad would never let me.”
“You must have missed your boy, though.”
“It’s not like that.”
“Not like what?”
The briefest glimpse of a scowl crossed Bethany’s face. “Dylan didn’t have anything to hide from me.”
Clark frowned. That wasn’t what she’d asked.
Mayfield cleared his throat. “Dylan never went alone?”
“No. He and KT are good friends.”
“But this was the first weekend all three of the boys went together,” Clark said. “Dylan, KT and Jamal?”
It was, Bethany said.
“And whose idea was it to bring Jamal?” Clark asked.
“It was Dylan’s. They’d always wanted to bring him but Jamal’s dad is real strict. It took some convincing him.”
“And what did Jamal do on those weekends over the summer when his friends left him here?”
Bethany shrugged. He spent the time with his family, she guessed. Jamal was single, Bethany said, and had been so since spring. Past that, she swore she didn’t know a great deal about him. “Dylan has his friends,” Bethany said. “And I have mine.”
“Be that as it may—” Clark made a show of turning over a page in her notebook. “You must be worried about KT Staler. We hear he never made it to class today.”
At that, Bethany very clearly frowned. “You should ask Kimbra about him. Staler and I were never close.”
“Was there any particular reason for that?”
Bethany shrugged, glanced at the blinded window. “His family’s garbage.”
“They’ve had their troubles.” Clark arched an eyebrow. “Did you ever get the impression KT took after his siblings?”
“You mean did I think he was on drugs?” Bethany said, meeting Clark’s eye. “No.”
Clark’s mind returned to KT’s insistence yesterday that Dylan had had a girl on the side. Clark wondered how Bethany would react to such a claim. Did this girl with the perfect skin and the sheet of golden hair have it in her to kill her boyfriend and dump his body in a creek?
Watching the way Bethany smoothed the hem of her sleeve with a muted precision, the same precision with which she appeared to smooth down every inch of herself, Clark’s answer was obvious.
Of course.
“It must have been difficult to watch your man get so much attention,” Clark said. “I bet there’s plenty of girls hoping to catch his eye.”
Bethany gave Clark a quizzical look. “They might have hoped. Dylan had his priorities straight.”
“Really? A boy his age? A boy that handsome?”
“Really.” Bethany chuckled, shook her head. “Dylan and I had something real. We—”
“You never had reason to suspect there was another girl in his life?”
Bethany refused to be flustered. “No.”
Mayfield scratched at his cuff. If Bethany knew anything else, she wasn’t going to reveal it today.
Clark smiled, clicked shut her pen, closed her notebook. “Thank you for your time, Miss Tanner.”
Something curious happened as Bethany readied herself to go. A long, painful-looking yawn brought tears to her eyes, a little tremor to her fingers. For the first time since she walked through the door, the girl looked unguarded. Off balance. Scared.
Clark couldn’t have chosen a better moment to ask her final question.
“You said you last saw Dylan leave the game at ten thirty Friday night, yes? What did you do with yourself for the rest of the weekend?”
“Me?”
“Yes. I just need something to put in the notes.”
“I went home by myself.” The girl sounded distracted when she said it, preoccupied by something else in her head—grief? pyramid drills?—but the moment the words were out of her mouth Bethany went very tense. Clark would have sworn she saw a flash of panic across her eyes.
“Your father wasn’t with you?”
A long pause. “No. He had business in Dallas.”
“Did he make it back that night?”
A tight smile. A green nail playing on the table. “No.”
“So you were home all weekend? Alone?” Mayfield said.
“I was sick.”
An idea occurred to Clark. “Your house doesn’t have a security system, does it? Cameras on the fences, maybe watching the doors?”
That green Bisonette nail on the table: tap-tap-tap. “You’d have to ask Dad.”