Twelve hours later, Clark stifled a yawn in the hot cruiser and wondered what armless Dylan Whitley had tried to tell her last night when he’d led her to the edge of a black hole in the ground and showed her... What? The other details of the dream had evaporated when she awoke, leaving behind nothing but a cool dread in her chest.
What was it her crazy mother used to say? “Dreams are just our souls going for a swim at night.” Jesus, Mom. If that was true, what the hell had happened to the swimming hole this week?
Mayfield caught Clark’s yawn and pressed a fist to his own mouth. “Lordy,” he said. “I ain’t slept this bad since I was coming to this school.”
Clark paused, a hand on her lighter. “Are you having dreams too?”
“They’ll pass,” he said, and handed her a thick file without another word.
Clark studied the autopsy photos inside. She could handle the gore well enough; she’d seen her share of suicides and traffic pileups and had never been much bothered by them. What hurt were the little details: chewed nails, streaks from an inexpert fade in the hair. The soles of Dylan’s feet, calloused from a life spent in cleats.
Time of death was still difficult to determine, even after the autopsy, but Clark and Mayfield had settled on sometime between ten thirty Friday, when Dylan and his friends were seen leaving the game, and two o’clock Saturday morning when the storm had stopped, after which there would have been tracks near the creek where the body was found. The ME had seemed satisfied with this.
It confirmed, at least, Joel Whitley’s suspicion: whoever had texted him Saturday morning hadn’t been his brother.
The cause of death had been simple enough to establish: a blade, serrated, between four and six inches long, had opened the carotid artery. A hunting knife, most likely, which hardly narrowed it down: there were three of those in every truck and closet in Pettis County.
“Russ Tanner, the cheerleader’s dad, was apparently at some cattle function when Jones went by to confirm his daughter’s story yesterday,” said Mayfield. “We’ll try and get hold of him again this afternoon.”
Clark thought of the nervous way Bethany’s green nail had tap-tap-tapped the table at the end of her interview. She made a note to drive by the Tanner ranch herself, see if its gate was monitored by a camera and, if so, figure out how she could obtain that camera’s footage from Friday night. She was curious to know when precisely Bethany had gotten home after the game.
There was a whistle on the practice field, and the Bison threw themselves at each other with a clatter. Clark watched as Jamal Reynolds was brought down hard by Garrett Mason, the team’s enormous defensive safety. It took Reynolds a very long time to return to his feet.
“They’re beating the shit out of that kid,” Clark said.
“It’s like they already made up their mind about him.”
“A little quickly, no?”
She’d been saying it all day and she’d say it again. Her logic was simple: Jamal’s potential motives for killing Dylan didn’t make any sense under scrutiny. The fact that Dylan had been discovered without a shirt or underwear perhaps suggested that he had been partially undressed at the time of the murder. This, combined with KT Staler’s suggestion that Dylan had a girl on the side, had brought the detectives, tenuously, to some idea that Jamal might have killed Dylan out of jealousy for this girl. A love triangle gone sour, maybe. Perhaps—perhaps—this explained the condom that Jamal had apparently asked stuttering Benny Garcia for at halftime on Friday, though Mayfield had found that tip more than a little dubious. The whole theory was built on a shaky heap of assumptions.
Putting aside the mysterious side-girl for a moment, Clark thought even less of the idea that Jamal might have killed his close friend for the chance to steal some glory for himself. Even in a town that worshipped its quarterbacks, this felt like a stretch. For one thing, the other boys on the team had all stated that Jamal and Dylan were fast friends, hanging out often and studying together on school nights. Paulette Whitley had attested to this. Jamal’s parents had attested to this. And Jamal was a senior—he had only a handful of football games in his future. Would he really kill a close friend—not mention risk the death penalty—for a few hours of field time?
Clark didn’t buy either theory. From the moment they’d told Jamal that Dylan was dead he’d been shocked, disgusted, bereft—but he hadn’t betrayed a moment’s concern for his own safety until Mayfield started putting the screws to him. Clark didn’t buy this boy as a killer.
Dylan’s other friend, however, she had trouble with.
“You do realize that both of the possible motives we’ve given to Jamal come from statements made by KT Staler, a boy who’s now conveniently vanished to leave his friend in the soup.”
Mayfield shrugged. “Sometimes these things are easy.”
“Would it be so easy if the roles were reversed?” she said. “If KT were stuck here and Jamal had disappeared?”
“I’m not sure what you’re implying, Deputy.”
“What if Jamal’s skin was a little lighter? KT’s a little darker?”
“You’re going to stop that kind of talk right now.” Mayfield twisted slowly in his seat to fix her eye. “The fact stands that every other boy on the team but Reynolds and Staler has himself an alibi for Friday night. Furthermore, Joel Whitley was spotted by a half-dozen people in town right after the game. He’s got a nosy old crow of a neighbor who swears Joel woke her up when he pulled in just after eleven. The mother’s boyfriend, Darren, he woke the lady up again at two fifteen, and we’ve got him on a video at a gas station in College Station an hour before, driving back from working on an oil rig in Corpus Christi. Maybe there’s a hole in that man’s story somewhere but I don’t see it. So the family’s out. The team is out. We’ve got an APB in every station looking for KT Staler’s teal-green Tacoma but that’s about all the resources we can give that boy. You can’t follow every lead in a case like this, Deputy. He’ll turn up if he turns up.”
“But he’s our prime suspect.”
“Correction—that would be Reynolds, the only boy—white or black—left in town without an alibi,” Mayfield said. “For what it’s worth, Mr. Boone says the county attorney’s office is going to file subpoenas for KT Staler’s phone records to help us track him down.”
“If he’s alive,” Clark said. “I still don’t like the fact that Jason Ovelle was rooting around in Staler’s truck. He said something about KT owing him money.”
“Ovelle’s got holes in his brain from all the tweak he’s cooked. Funny you mention him, though. Browder swung by his old room in that rat’s nest motel down the highway and apparently nobody’s seen Ovelle since Friday. God willing, we never will again.” Mayfield studied a printout from a stack of folders.
“Go back. Nobody’s seen Ovelle since Friday night? The night Whitley was murdered?”
“No, they haven’t, but before you ask I already have the APBs filed for him too. Like I said, you chase one bird at a time.” Mayfield studied the field. “And when you have it in your hand, you squeeze it till it chirps.”
Clark followed his eyes, noted the tall Turner twins and pale little Tomas Hernandez studying Jamal as their new quarterback struggled again to his feet. They shook their heads and turned away.
She said, “What if we’re looking at killers. Plural. Like you said yesterday. I’m thinking about the phone.”
“The phone?”
“Dylan died in a nasty fight—look at these bruises. If you’ve just beat a boy black-and-blue and cut his throat deep enough to slice the vocal cords then you’re going to be high as a kite on adrenaline. You ain’t going to have the sense to take the boy’s phone and unlock it with his thumb so you can start covering your tracks the next day. You need a cool head for that sort of forward planning. Someone to look at what you’ve done and see a way out.”
“Hence why we wait for Jamal to crack. If he and Staler were in it together, he’ll lead us to him, one way or the other. Dead or alive.”
Clark spotted something in one of the autopsy photographs. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing.
A thin, pale mark ran straight across the back of Dylan’s left thigh. It looked like an old scar, but Clark couldn’t imagine what sort of accident could produce such a clean, even line.
Mayfield studied the photo. “Any record of a surgery?”
“None that I’m aware of.”
“A play of the light,” the investigator said, sounding unconvinced. They were hitting a wall.
“Have you ever investigated a murder before?” Clark asked.
“Open-and-shuts.” Mayfield shrugged. “An ugly bar fight. A man beat his wife with her own iron for burning his shirt. Only a few real mysteries. A disappearance. As you remember.”
Mayfield let the word hang in the car’s hot air. She knew perfectly well what he meant.
Clark watched as the players on the field lined up to throw themselves at each other again. Big Coach Parter himself stood at the thirty yard line, bellowing something to Jamal—“No strength in your goddamn legs, Reynolds!”—his mouth inches from the boy’s helmet grill. Clark wasn’t sure she’d ever seen the school’s athletic director actually coach. With a player like Dylan on the team, he’d probably never had to.
“You must have wanted to ask,” Mayfield said. “Don’t tell me you didn’t print off your brother’s case the first day you had a password to the computers here.”
He was right, of course. “Possibly,” she said.
“And you remember it was me who came around looking for Troy back in the day,” Mayfield said. Clark nodded with a bemused smile—her first meeting with Investigator Mayfield years ago had not been a pleasant one. “Be honest now. Was all that business with your brother the reason you wanted to join up with the sheriff’s in the first place?”
“You mean did I spend three years in school so I could print off case notes from a missing person’s report?”
Mayfield shrugged. “Folks have done more for less.”
Clark considered this with an odd mixture of pain and frustration. She’d asked herself the same question many times since her return to Bentley and had yet to arrive at a convincing answer.
She only trusted herself enough to say, “Maybe. In some tricksy way.”
Mayfield seemed satisfied. “Well, you’ve got a good career ahead of you. You’re made for more than speeding tickets.”
Clark lit a cigarette. His praise felt coarser this afternoon than it had yesterday: appeasing, cheap. She couldn’t shake the feeling that his single-minded interest in Jamal Reynolds had an air of expediency to it, as if Mayfield weren’t looking for Dylan’s murderer but rather for the boy the town would most willingly believe fit the role. From their theories about the crime to Mayfield’s encouragement, everything today was coming just a little too easy.
“You know,” Mayfield added. “There was some things we kept out of your brother’s file.”