Ten minutes earlier, Clark had been on her way to the station, so jittery she could barely drive. She and Joel hadn’t even bothered trying to sleep the night before. They’d stayed up comparing notes over the phone, and by the time Joel had finished telling her his side of Dylan’s story Clark’s tired mind had been kicked into overdrive.
“They were gay,” Joel had said, and Clark had sunk into her chair.
Dylan had set up Bethany with Jamal because he hadn’t slept with her in months. It made a sort of sense to Clark. Bethany, Joel said, had had suspicions about Dylan for years, had wondered if Dylan might not be something the girl called “bisexual-ish,” but, last May, Dylan had come to her and said he couldn’t pretend anymore: he loved her, but he was hopelessly, “totally gay.”
“I have to tread so careful around here, Star.”
“And Troy?” she’d asked.
The line went silent. Joel finally said, “You mean you never guessed about all those afternoons?”
“Was that the only reason you dated me? To get near my brother?” She was surprised to hear how coolly she asked it. How little it had even upset her to consider the question. Maybe it was all the rum.
“I don’t think so. I’d had a crush on him for ages but—Listen, can we talk about this later?”
“Did Troy take those pictures of you?”
“No.”
“Was he the other man at the park? The one that got away?”
Joel had hesitated, but Clark had been willing to wait all night for his answer. The identity of “the other man” had long been a subject of speculation in Bentley. Deputy Grissom, the officer who’d arrested Joel, had stated repeatedly that Joel had been “in the act” when he was discovered but the other man involved had escaped before Grissom could get a good look at him.
Finally, Joel said only, “No.”
“Joel, I don’t mean to sound closed-minded but if that wasn’t Troy in those bushes how many queers do we have here in Pettis County?”
“Look, I need your help.” The anxiety in his voice was unmistakable—she let her question pass. “This can’t be a coincidence, Clark. Two Bentley Bison, both closeted gays, both vanish. One turns up dead, the other’s still missing a decade later. Be honest—does the sheriff’s department actually have any evidence against Jamal Reynolds?”
“Are you suggesting we’re railroading him?” she said, as if she hadn’t been asking the same thing all day yesterday.
“I’m suggesting this investigation is a lot more complicated than you thought. If news of my brother gets out nobody will care what happened to him. It’ll be just like the pictures of me all over again. I was seventeen, Clark—those photos were child pornography and the department hardly even acknowledged they existed. There must have been witnesses—you can’t stick photos inside two hundred newspapers and not leave some kind of evidence. But it went nowhere. All anybody cares about here is something to gossip over. Clark, are you—”
“After my brother disappeared, did the cops ever come to talk to you?” She couldn’t stop thinking of her interview with Mayfield at her kitchen table a decade ago.
“What are you talking about? Of course they didn’t.”
“You can’t follow every lead in a case like this,” Mayfield had said yesterday afternoon in the car, justifying the baffling fact he wasn’t pursuing the missing KT Staler more aggressively even though the boy’s disappearance set off every obvious alarm in a case like this. Why hadn’t Mayfield followed up the obvious lead that Clark had given him in the wake of her brother’s disappearance: “You could ask Joel Whitley about Troy.”
Clark suspected that Mayfield was going to regret telling her she had a knack for this work.
“Okay,” Clark said, her scalp tingling.
She wasn’t certain she agreed with every step in Joel’s logic, wasn’t certain he’d even told her the entire truth about that night in the park, but it was enough for now. She wanted to find Dylan’s killer, of course she did, but Clark was wise enough to know her motives weren’t entirely altruistic. If Joel was right and Dylan’s death was connected to Troy’s disappearance then maybe—maybe—she would find something in Dylan’s case she could use to finally staple closed her brother’s. She was willing to try.
“Okay,” Joel said.
Driving now to the sheriff’s station, Clark walked herself through what she knew. Jamal Reynolds was likely innocent, just as she’d always suspected, though she wasn’t sure how exactly she could help him. She doubted she could confirm Bethany’s story about sneaking Reynolds into her house without in turn alerting the girl’s father that something was amiss, but Clark figured she could do her best.
The fact that Dylan had possessed a bottle of painkillers, apparently without a prescription, was not, on its own, especially damning. The fact that he’d been seen counting two thousand dollars in his room, cash about which he’d lied and said was from his brother, might even have had an innocuous explanation. But when Clark held the two facts together—along with the mysterious gold wristwatch in Dylan’s bedside table, or Bethany Tanner’s expensive bracelet—Clark came to the same conclusion as Joel: it looked like Dylan Whitley had gotten himself tangled up in the drug business.
Just like Troy.
Clark had a theory that went a long way toward explaining the “weekends at the coast.” If Dylan had gotten involved in the drugs through KT Staler—and if ever a boy came from a family with a disposition toward narcotics it was KT Staler—then it stood to reason the two boys might have left town to move their product, perhaps at someone’s behest. She’d told Joel how Jason Ovelle, at the game on Friday, had been caught searching KT’s Tacoma, with Jason insisting KT owed him money. Just a few minutes before, on the sidelines, she’d noticed that KT had lost several pounds in just a week, which was a textbook consequence of consuming methamphetamine. Most meth dealers, in Clark’s experience, tended to be addicts themselves, addicts with an unfortunate tendency to dip into the product they were supposed to be selling.
“Those trips would be a perfect chance to scratch an itch,” Joel had said.
And the fact that Dylan was gay? Well, she told Joel, the boy sure seemed to spend an awful lot of time with KT. It wouldn’t be the first time a pair of young lovers had gone into some sort of business together.
A few things still concerned her. For one, the drug game today was different than it had been in Troy’s time. Back then, as Mayfield had mentioned, a cartel representative named Benicio Dos had controlled most of the supplies of meth and opioids sold in central Texas. Benicio, to put it bluntly, had been a very bad man, rumored to have killed an informant by injecting radiator fluid into the woman’s brain stem.
But Benicio had been arrested by the Feds three years ago. Clark remembered the day of the arrest well—it had come during her first week on the job. An air of relief had filled the department for a few months as drug arrests finally trended down.
Yet lately things had started to change. Over the last nine months or so Clark had discovered more and more baggies of ice and handfuls of pills while making traffic stops and house calls. Someone new had taken up shop.
Clark’s stomach turned. If her brother had stolen money from Benicio, could it possibly follow that Dylan had gotten involved with whatever reprobate had replaced Señor Dos? She’d taken an Introduction to Forensic Accounting course in school, passed it by the skin of her teeth and brought home only one lesson: drug money had a habit of turning up in even the most dignified of pockets.
Clark’s truck began to buck and she realized with a jolt of panic that she’d somehow veered onto the rough shoulder—when had she started to drift? She jerked the wheel, returned to the highway, let out a shaky breath. Had she just fallen asleep with her eyes open? Did that really happen to people?
“These dreams, they started the night your brother died,” she’d said as a flat yellow dawn had teased the Flats through her kitchen window. “Don’t that seem odd?”
“They’re dreams, Clark. You think the government’s putting them in our head?”
“My mom used to talk about stuff like this. She used to say there was a monster that gave us nightmares when it moved.”
“Your mother also thought the Pope was sending her messages in the Dillard’s catalogue.”
She’d also correctly predicted the day of her own death, but Clark wasn’t sure that would hold much water with Joel. It was true, Margo had believed in a number of strange things; perhaps with enough predictions and assertions you were bound to get lucky and have one pay off eventually (if you could call a head-on collision with a hay truck lucky). Stopped clocks are right morning and night, et cetera, et cetera.
Clark had let it go. Or, rather, she hadn’t fully acknowledged, to either Joel or herself, what she’d become so frightened of last night before he’d called: an awful suspicion that whether they were talking about drugs or secret gay affairs or boys dumped in creeks, something far uglier was at work here than either of them was quite prepared to accept.
She was a half mile from the school when she saw the flashing lights. She heard the sirens a moment later. She picked up speed, saw a cruiser and two unmarked cars screaming in her direction. One of those cars, if she wasn’t much mistaken, belonged to Investigator Mayfield.
The three cars swerved toward the school’s parking lot. She followed them to the front door, her pulse thudding in her ears.
Jamal Reynolds stood frozen on the curb a few yards away.
As Clark sped across the lot, she saw Investigator Mayfield, Sheriff Lopez and County Attorney Boone stepping out of their vehicles.
And Jones, climbing out of the flashing cruiser with his gun drawn.
“Hands in the air!” Jones bellowed. When Jamal only stared at him, wide-eyed, mouth agape, Jones shouted it again.
Clark parked behind the cruiser, threw herself from her truck without killing the ignition. Jamal Reynolds raised his hands. Mayfield turned back to give her a quick blank look and started toward Jamal.
“Mr. Reynolds,” Investigator Mayfield shouted. He held a plastic bag in his hand. “Are you the owner of a red Ford Explorer SUV?”
“What?”
“A red Ford, Mr. Reynolds. Currently being serviced at Sparks’s Auto Body?”
“That’s mine, but—”
“You have the right to remain silent, Mr. Reynolds,” Mayfield said, and rattled off the rest of it. As the investigator spoke, Jones made his way across the lot, pushed the boy to his knees, cuffed him.
Bethany Tanner burst from the front door of the school, her blond hair flying. “Stop!” she shouted. “He was with me!”
“That’s enough, darling,” said Mr. Boone sharply.
“But it’s true!” Bethany shouted. Clark saw faces in the classroom windows watching them, saw sashes sliding up so the folks inside could listen. Bethany repeated, “Jamal was with me all weekend!”
“Mayfield, what the fuck is this?” asked Clark. “Why didn’t you call me?”
Without a word, Mayfield tossed her the bag in his hand.
It was an evidence bag, she saw. Her first thought was of protocol: why was there evidence floating out here in the wild and not locked up, logged and tagged, in the station? Then she saw what was inside.
A sock, so stained with blood Clark thought at first the fabric had been brown when it was bought. Only the upper hem of the sock remained white. Written along the hem in black marker were the initials DW.