Marley called me at 10 on Sunday morning. He roused me from some primordial state, dreamless and black. When God first spoke to Adam, I wondered, did Adam hear the same clawed, scarecrow voice?

“Weren’t at Meeting,” said Marley, without so much as “hello.”

I was lying on the ratty, sagging couch my landlords provide. A phone sets on a teetering end table at the head of the couch. I had knocked over the table when I reached for the phone. Before I spoke, it seemed like a good idea to catch my breath, take stock, maybe put my jump-started heart back in my chest. I was fully clothed—indeed, I recognized the threads as the same I’d worn the day before—and a Pentecostal preacher barked at me from the TV.

“Apparently not,” I said a fraction above a hoarse whisper.

“Well, where were you?”

I swallowed and said, “Looks like asleep on the couch.”

“Asleep or passed out?”

I am not offended by legitimate questions; I’d done a blackout or two in my day. An answer would require inventory. No bottles in sight; dull, aching pain in my lower back, probably from the couch not blown kidneys or liver; no headache; no chills or shakes; unpleasant but moist taste in my mouth; reasonably rested and now alert.

“I’d have to say asleep, Bob.”

“There’s another Meeting tonight. Better go. Find the woman?” said Marley, a victim of transition deficit disorder.

“Not yet. I’m working on it.”

“You do that. I’m going to the press conference.”

“What press conference would that be?”

“The one Crandall and Modine called today.”

I had not been queasy when I woke up, but I was beginning to think I could be quite easily.

“They called you? Why not me?”

“Oh, they didn’t call me,” Marley said. “They called the GM, about a half hour ago. As he was getting ready for church. He called me. You know how he feels about doing business on Sundays.”

“So he’s pissed, you’re pissed. Shit rolls downhill. That doesn’t explain why you’d go to this gathering of the clans and I wouldn’t.”

“Because it seems they’re not talking to you.”

When Wood answered the phone, I said, “I hear you’re not talking to me.”

He hung up.

I’d heard right.

The gray season began that Sunday, the first day of November. The air was thick, damp, and chill, and the sky, when I finally saw it, was overcast, its clouds haggard and bruised. Some days, it’s hard to be a jolly fat man.

The press conference was to be held on the courthouse steps at noon. I showered, donned a very slimming, striped, sport coat to wear with my standard-issue white shirt and chinos, and arrived at the paper about 11. Framed against the black interior, swamped in a long, orange rain coat, a beacon against an otherwise colorless day, stood a female figure peering, a hand to her brow, through the front door.

My size and my income require that I drive a rather large beater, an ‘82 Olds 88 that I picked up for a song the last time the State restored my driving privileges. One or two belts are worn, and its muffler was ravaged by elements and time. Thus, the woman, like so many before her, wheeled at the chorus of my approach.

I was not feeling charming, so when I got out, I said, “We’re closed.”

“I know that.”

“Then go away.”

Instead, she stuck out her hand. Her name was Janelle, she said, as she marched toward me, Janelle Wheeler, Janelle S. Wheeler. She wanted very much to appear confident, but three shots at her own name tended to undermine that impression.

I suspected her politely aggressive demeanor was more an act to cover insecurity for she was young, to my eyes very young, maybe no more than 22, 23. She was also tall, and beneath the orange tent she wore, I suspected, skinny and a little gawky. Her face was long and narrow as was her nose, which was also a little beaky. The hand she aimed at me consisted of long, tapered fingers on a long, narrow palm on a celery-stalk wrist. She stood with one foot cocked on the outside edge as though she had foundered.

But her eyes never wavered. They were a deep, dark brown, almost black, and her gaze was so intense it seemed a black hole that sucked in your awareness. If I were not a trained and experienced observer, I might not have noticed that her hair was the same color as her eyes and cut in a curt, utilitarian wedge and that her skin was olive and unblemished. If I were not a man of some imagination, I might not have thought that she would be one of those women for whom the manifestations of age—a few more pounds, some laugh lines, and a little silver in her hair—would only serve to make her more striking and appealing. And if I had not been a person of some practicality or a drunk, take your pick, I might not have considered such thoughts a pure waste of time.

She adjusted the strength of her grip to equal mine when we shook. I hooked a cheek on the front fender of my car.

“So what do you want, Janelle S. Wheeler?”

“I work for The Chronicle,” she said, as though that should explain it.

The Chronicle is the state’s largest newspaper, whether you’re talking number of subscribers, pages published, or area of circulation. And truly it is the state’s paper. You can buy it in damned near every godforsaken mom-and-pop grocery in the state, and since it is a morning paper, farmers in outlying areas can get it the same day it’s published through the mail. Since telephones and gossip are what the circulation types call effective means for delivery of local news in a place like Failey, when people around here must choose between subscribing to The Chronicle or The Mirror-Press, they usually choose The Chronicle. It is the competition for any other paper within a 100-mile radius of the capital, and the people who own it and work for it know it. I was not surprised by a certain lack of deference on the part of Janelle S. Wheeler.

“So?” I said.

“I’m kind of new. They’ve got me doing regional stuff. I was hoping to get here a little early and do some background.” She clasped her hands in front of her, suddenly demure. “You’re Clay Ambrose, aren’t you? The guy who wrote yesterday’s story?”

I admitted I was.

“Well, I’ve heard of you. They say you’re very good. Yesterday’s stories certainly were.”

I enjoy a good buttering as much as the next guy, but I’m too old, ugly, and alcoholic for it to be more than momentarily effective. I knew where this was going. When they’re young or work in cities where there isn’t a lot of competition, some reporters think we’re all in this together and that we should share. My reportorial childhood had been spent in Chicago, which probably explained why I tended toward a less generous view of my relationship with competitors.

“If you’ve read my story, then you know what I know,” I said. “If you want to see the scene, maybe talk to the neighbors, I suppose I could give you directions.”

She hesitated, probably because she knew I was lying about her knowing all I knew.

“I thought I’d do all that after the press conference,” she said, the implication being that she would just pick my brain until then.

“You’ve got time now. Apparently, you didn’t get the word they postponed the proceedings until 1. The cops have a lot on their plate right now, as I’m sure you can imagine.”

She hesitated again. “Nobody told me about a postponement.”

I liked that, a certain instinctive skepticism; it showed potential.

“Well, call the sheriff. Check it out,” I said, but I knew the reply.

“He’s not taking calls,” she said.

I shrugged and looked at my watch. “And there’s nobody in the newsroom this time on a Sunday morning to tell you if anybody called there. I just found out about it myself actually. I’m not surprised. You want directions or not?”

Of course, she did. She produced a narrow, spiral-bound notepad from somewhere out of the depths of that damned coat. I thought about steering her to the opposite end of the county. But it occurred to me that between coercing Moze, blackmailing the ambulance director, browbeating Ruthie, manipulating Naomi, and lying about the time change of the press conference maybe I was close to exceeding my usual quota of sins working this story.

Janelle S. Wheeler drove an M & M, one of those small, brightly colored, perky cars that nice girls fresh out of high school receive as gifts from their dads. Hoping to mitigate karma, I gave her the right directions, but if I am to be honest, I will admit to a certain degree of low-rent satisfaction as she pointed it out of town.

The courthouse square is a block in the center of town, just a short alley’s walk from the newspaper office. The building itself sits on a rise in the middle of the block. A monument to nineteenth-century, civic pride, it is square in shape and formidable, constructed of gray granite to a height of three stories with a disproportionately slender and delicate dome of black slate rising another story and a half. The building is surrounded by what amounts to a park: a wide, green lawn bordered at the sidewalks that surround the block by elderly oaks and maples. On the lawn are benches on which old loafers frequently sit and lie and a boulder upon which, it is said, a handful of forebears one day polished off a bottle of fine whiskey, smashed the bottle, and declared this the seat of our civilization. All in all, it was too pretty a place to hold such an ugly event.

First, there were the numbers. This was a story with lots of angles and unknowns and therefore a boatload of appeal, so every newspaper in the counties surrounding Austin County, a couple of the larger newspapers from farther away, and a wire service or two sent a reporter and some sent a photographer as well. The nature of the medium requires that twinks travel in pairs or trios—a reporter, a camera guy, and maybe a producer or someone on sound—and I counted six twink teams from the capital and two of the larger cities nearby. Plus, there were a couple of people armed only with tape recorders, the radio guys.

Then there were the conditions: outside, in the cold, on a gray day against the gray background of a ponderous courthouse, with no place to set up microphones and no place to plug in electronic equipment. The pictures would be static and flat, the audio dirty and faint, and the potential for error even greater than usual because you couldn’t hear or write well.

Then there were the games played at any gathering of the clans. The twinks and the print people jostled for position. The twinks bitched about the print people standing in front of their cameras and bumping their equipment. The print people bitched about the principals not starting the press conference on time because the twinks were, as usual, twenty minutes late and required another ten minutes to set up.

Jesus, why wait, the print people screeched at Wood. He and Moze stood guard in front of three strands of police tape that had been strung between the handrails at the bottom of the courthouse steps to hold us back. The twinks used press conferences as excuses, the print people said, to snag sources and make them repeat what they said in the one-on-one standup interviews they always did after the conference was over. It all fell on deaf ears. Wood was not running the show, Crandall was, and that was the real mistake.

I spotted Marley in his favorite position, at the front and to one side so he could get his questions in and still have the widest view of what was going on. His lips moved as his eyes swept the group behind him: an old habit, counting the crowd. He spotted me at my favorite position, the back of the pack, nodded, and moved on, still counting.

When it looked like the twinks were set up, Wood nodded up at the door to the courthouse fourteen steep steps above us. A deputy, who had been watching through the window in the tall, oak door, turned away. A moment later, Crandall came out.

He wore the same rumpled, brown trench coat and dopey blue porkpie he had worn the other night at Aunt Lotty’s. He stopped at the top of the stairs and tilted his head so that he could glare dyspeptically at us over his glasses. For just an instant, his gaze lingered on me. I nodded back at him, but he did not respond.

Crandall waddled like a penguin down to the bottom of the stairs. At the tape, he paused once more to consider the sound people and reporters who knelt in front of him like supplicants, their arms raised to reach him with microphones and recorders. He closed his eyes momentarily, shook his head slightly, and said, “My name is Potter Crandall. Spelled like it sounds. I am the prosecuting attorney of Austin County. This is what we know.” Gazing over the heads of the crowd in front of him, he recited with perfect precision and accuracy the basic facts that everybody there had already printed or broadcast: the names and ages of dead, when they died, the nature of the injuries that killed them, the name of the survivor, and a description of her injury.

“The investigation is continuing,” Crandall said, bringing his eyes down for one last sweeping gaze across the faces and lenses that stared back at him. “Until there is an arrest, do not call us. Until there is an arrest, we will have no more to say.” He turned to go back up the stairs.

Crandall evidently chose to ignore how press conferences work. The deal is that the source gets to tell a lot of reporters the same thing at the same time so that he doesn’t have to waste his time repeating himself. In exchange for this efficiency, the source has to actually say some damned thing and the newer the better. Crandall had apparently decided to hold a press conference and say nothing, or at least nothing that was new.

It was, in the way of revolutionary thinking, not immediately comprehendible. Indeed, the clans were, at first, nonplussed. They stared at Crandall and then at each other. Then, en masse, they surged forward, nearly pinning Wood and Moze against the tape.

“Hey,” shouted one of the quicker-thinking twinks, “Wait a minute.”

“Who are your suspects?” This from Marley, a pro with enough wit and intelligence to ask an actual question.

Crandall had climbed a couple of steps when he started to pull a cigar from his coat pocket. As he peeled the cellophane, he stopped, turned halfway back to us, and gave us a smirking, sidelong look.

The clans moved forward again to follow. Moze, who had been avoiding eye contact with me with conviction, nearly fell backward over the tape. He straightened up and put his hand on the chest of a cameraman who was crowding him. His face was getting red, and his eyes were darting back and forth between the pack and Wood, who was having his own problems keeping the clans back and at bay. By that time, the reporters had recovered and started shouting questions, jostling for position against the tape as they did.

“Will you confirm that the telephone lines were cut?”

“Did Aunt Lotty escape because of her wig?”

“Will you arrest Orlo Ratliff?”

“Sheriff, are you or the state police running the investigation?”

If Wood answered, I couldn’t hear it. The clans were in mortar mode, lobbing questions in, each drowned out by the next. Crandall lit his cigar, shook his head in disgust, and continued his climb.

In those situations, the best you can hope for is a question that will capture the source’s attention, make him want to stop and answer it, maybe stay for another. From the back, as loud as I could, I shouted, “Why’re you hiding Aunt Lotty?”

It almost worked. Crandall stopped. Wood craned his neck to see over the crowd.

I might’ve got an answer if it hadn’t been for the twink cameraman who was crowding Moze, shooting Crandall climbing the steps over Moze’s shoulder. Marley told me later that when I shouted my question the cameraman turned in my direction. As he did, a long mike that extended over the front of the camera caught Moze in the back of the head.

Youthful and nervous, Moze reacted. Gently, as though he wished to do no more damage than necessary to either of them, Moze brushed the camera aside from the twink’s face with the back of one hand. With the other, he punched the cameraman in the mouth.

The clans surged forward to capture the scene. Moze and the cameraman went down, out of view, like they’d been sucked into the sidewalk. Wood waded in, plucking bodies off them like chicken feathers, to break it up. He knocked a female twink to her knees. She screamed about assault and torn hose. At the top of the stairs, Crandall fixed me with one of his more malevolent stares before he went inside.

Since the atmosphere was no longer conducive to effective newsgathering, the press conference broke up. A couple of the younger reporters drifted over my way to find out who I was and what I knew, but I shooed them away.

Wood sent Moze off while he talked with the cameraman and his crew over to one side, trying smooth things out. In addition to a public relations fiasco, he was probably looking at a lawsuit. The other twink crews spread out around the courthouse to film standups.

Marley sidled up to me, grinning. If he wasn’t the cat who ate the canary, he at least had feathers on his lips.

“There’s always news when you’re around,” Marley said, knowing full well how much I hated that whole idea being part of the story.

“I didn’t start that.”

“Good question, though. Are they hiding the old woman?”

I told Marley about what I’d learned. He was professional enough not to ask me how I knew what I told him.

“I’m not asking you to kiss anybody’s ass,” Marley said when I finished. “But you’re going to have to get this—whatever this is—straightened out with the sheriff and the prosecutor. I can’t cover this stuff for you, and there’s too much going on for us to operate without at least some official sources.”

I allowed myself a sigh. I wanted to hang my head and rub my neck, but that would’ve been too much of a cliché for an old kidder like Marley. My first instinct was screw ‘em: If Wood and Crandall wouldn’t tell me what I needed to know, I’d find somebody else who would. But in the long run, Marley was right.

“So what’re you going to do about it?” Marley asked. He is a great believer in personal responsibility; I imagine it’s got something to do with the Program.

“Try Wood.” I said. “At least find out what the problem is. Then figure out what to do about it?”

“I’ll write the story,” Marley said. “I’ll try and keep your name out of it.”

As Marley headed back toward the paper, a cameraman turned and began tracking him, probably filming for continuity or file footage or filler. Marley rarely misses a trick. Without turning, he slowly raised a fist above his head. As he extended the middle digit of that fist, the cameraman yanked his lens toward the sky.

Wood’s office is in the jail, which is located on one corner of the square across the street from the courthouse. As I went around the other side of the courthouse, Moze appeared from the basement entryway cops use to bring prisoners in and out of the building. When he saw me, he started, like maybe I was a ghost. Then he walked right up to me and put his hand on my elbow.

“You arresting me, Moze?”

A bruise was blooming on his left cheekbone, and his uniform was wrinkled and smudged.

“Well,” he said, trying to decide just what he was doing. “No,” he said finally.

“Then what’re you doing?”

“Crandall wants to see you.”

“Are we in trouble?”

“Well, goddamn it, I am.”

“For that little fracas a minute ago or for letting me into Aunt Lotty’s? Or both?”

“Oh, sweet Jesus,” Moze said.

He bit his lips. Apparently, he’d forgotten about Aunt Lotty’s. He shook his head in eternal regret.

“Don’t make this any worse for me than it already is.”

The courtrooms are in two corners of the square third floor. For convenience, the judges’ offices are in the third corner and Crandall has a suite of offices in the fourth. There are a law library, two jury rooms, and a lawyers conference room in the spaces between each corner.

There was plenty of room for me to wait in one of those places, but they left me instead in the hall. By the time Wood stepped out of the elevator, I had twice noted that the institutional green paint on the walls was water stained and peeling near the ceiling and memorized for the fourth time the room numbers of the office directory on the wall in front of me.

“Congratulations, Clay,” Wood said. “You just cost the county about five thousand dollars.”

“I hope that includes pantyhose.”

Wood opened his mouth, then closed it without saying anything. I was sorry I’d said it. While waiting, I obviously had forgotten my mission. Wood went into Crandall’s offices.

A couple of minutes later, Moze appeared at the door and jerked his head for me to come in. I raised my eyebrows at him, but his grim expression did not change and nothing in it offered a clue as to what I could expect other than something serious.

Moze led me through the receptionist’s area into Crandall’s office. You’d think a place so spacious, windowed, and lofty would be light and airy, but by accident or design—knowing Crandall, I’d bet design—it was subterranean and dim.

It is a long room, about half the size of one of the courtrooms with maybe a 15-foot ceiling. The only light entered from the two narrow windows at the far end of the room, but most of it was blocked by the back of a tall chair and a wide table silhouetted against the windows.

In the shadows on either side of me, as Moze marched me forward, were shelves to the ceiling. I was vaguely aware that on the shelves were thick black, khaki, and blue statute and case books, the prosecutor’s toolboxes, collected over a hundred some years by Crandall’s predecessors, and haphazard piles of papers and files.

I was more aware of the smell: musty books and cheroots. It should’ve smelled of bear.

Crandall sat deep and inscrutable in the shadow of the high-backed chair. He had removed his coat, and his tie was loose. His white shirt glowed in the shadow, striped at the shoulders by his suspenders. The table was empty except for a corner at Crandall’s left elbow. A copy of Saturday’s edition of The Mirror-Press folded in quarters lay under a glass ashtray the size of a Frisbee. Crandall had perched a half-smoked, dead cigar on the edge.

Wood looked to have put some distance between himself and Crandall. In one corner, hidden in deeper shadow, he leaned on the corner of a small conference table. He nodded and looked away.

Two chairs faced the table, but Crandall let Moze and me stand in front of him for a while before he reached across the table and crisply pulled a chain to light a brass desk lamp. His pug features popped out of the shadow, underlit, like he was about to tell ghost stories to Boy Scouts.

“Nice effect, Potter,” I said. “What do you do for an encore? Turn the light in my eyes and grill me?”

Crandall did not smile.

“Do I need to, Mr. Ambrose?”

It didn’t seem like a question that I could answer in any satisfactory way, so I kept my mouth shut.

“I’ve been doing some reading,” Crandall said. He reached over, lifted the ashtray, and pulled the paper to him. He unfolded it and spread it out flat on the table. A couple of paragraphs of my front-page stories were highlighted in yellow.

“I’m very disappointed,” Crandall said.

He opened the paper, turning each page, scanning it, until he reached the page where Marley had jumped the front-page stories inside to connect them with more photographs and the third story we ran. That page was speckled yellow.

“I mean, I’m a fairly articulate man,” Crandall said. He ran his finger down one column, reached a highlighted paragraph, tapped his finger on it, then looked up at me. “But I don’t believe I have the fucking words to tell you just how goddamned angry I am.”

He had not raised his voice, but the struggle to keep it that way was obvious.

“We’re going to be here a while. Have a seat.”

“No,” I said, “I think I’ll stand.”

“Sit down.”

Slowly and without looking at me, Wood had come off the table. Moze had turned and squared up. We considered each other for a moment. I decided that a beating was unlikely, but being made to sit was not out of the question, so I took one of the two chairs.

Crandall turned his chair so that the light from the window hit me full in the face. I put a hand up, but I still had to blink and look away.

“Your stories contain a wealth of information about my case,” Crandall said. He crossed his arms on the paper and leaned forward. “Why, there’s even a fucking tidbit or two that our own investigators did not know.” He directed a sour glance to Wood. “Or did not bother to tell me.” With the light in my eyes I could not see Wood’s reaction. “I’ve already told you I’m concerned about you compromising this investigation and the eventual prosecution of this case. I’m now concerned about your goddamned reporting tainting my jury pool.”

Crandall sat back and turned his chair to the block the window light. Once more my eyes had to adjust. The guy had spent a professional lifetime manipulating witnesses. I had little doubt it was deliberate.

“I’d like the good people of Austin County to hear this case,” Crandall said. He waved one hand. “You’ve been around enough to understand my thinking, I’m sure: It seems to me that the good people of Austin County would sooner hang the son of bitch who killed Austin County children and shot an old Austin County woman than the good people of anywhere else. So if some fucking defense attorney convinces our judge this case should be moved out of this county because too much publicity will prevent his client from getting a fair trial here, I’m not going to be happy about that. In fact, Mr. Ambrose, I will fucking hold you responsible.”

He leaned forward, closed the newspaper, and swept it to one side with the back of his hand.

“Today,” Crandall said, “in order to alleviate my concerns”—he stabbed the paper with a stiff index finger—“you’re going to tell me how you came by this shit.” He shrugged and looked away. “Tell me the right things, and I won’t charge you with interfering with a police investigation and obstruction of justice.” His eyes returned to me. “Then we’ll talk about the extent of your civic duty from now on.”

The same rage that had almost made me hit the dandelion the other night lit up my temples and made my head pound. Crandall may have seen a hint of it because he blinked and glanced at Wood. I sucked in a breath and held it.

“That’s better,” I said, exhaling. “My first instinct? Somebody threatens me? Come across the desk and smack ‘em.”

Wood and Moze were standing at red alert, feet squared, arms loose. I smiled pleasantly at each of them and shrugged. “That hardly seems appropriate here.” I hoisted a cheek, removed the notepad from my hip pocket, and with my pen poised, looked back at Crandall. “I think I’ll just take notes about our meeting instead. Official intimidation of private citizens is always good for twelve, maybe fifteen inches, front page.”

Crandall smiled, too, genuinely happy at the prospect of confronting a countermove.

“You forget where you are, Mr. Ambrose,” he said. “Austin County, a small, kind of insular place. I grew up here. Sheriff Modine grew up here. Deputy Beard grew up here. You’ve been here about a year. You’re an outsider, and in a place like Austin County, you always will be.”

He raised a hand in a dismissive wave.

“Two of us were elected to our positions by the citizens of Austin County. You weren’t. Hell, so far as I know, the only person who invited you here was your employer, an outsider himself and a man notorious for hiring drunks. I think”—he broke off for a confirming glance at Wood and Moze—“I think all three of us’d have to deny your allegation of intimidation, and you’d have a fucking problem with credibility.”

I was well aware of his point. I could not recite a native’s genealogy back five generations from the mere mention of her mother’s name. It was a password ability among many that seemed to be innate. I would always be an outsider, but I liked to think my status meant that I brought fresh eyes to a situation.

And, no pun intended, I was not blind to the stakes. Every murder is appalling, but in this case, not only the number but the place compounded the horror. In Austin County, people hold the door for you and thank you for the slightest favor. People attend church, whether they believe or not, because most think it’s the right thing to do, if not for them, then their children. I had no doubt that more than few would soon tell me they could not believe that it happened here.

But there was that promise to Moze, maybe my feelings about Crandall, and perhaps my own innate qualities, resistance to authority and direction first among them, that I had to contend with.

“Potter,” I said, “I’m not telling you one thing about how I got my information. Sometime even in the Dark Ages when you went to law school, they must’ve told you about the First Amendment.”

Arguing law with a lawyer was also a mistake.

“Indeed. They told me I couldn’t restrain you from publishing the information you had,” Crandall said. “They told me—and I’ve done a little research since then, yesterday after you published, as a matter of fact—they told me that once you’d published there wasn’t much to prevent me from prosecuting you for the illegal acts you may have committed in gathering that information or for the consequences of your having published it. You’ve published. I didn’t try and stop you.” His voice was rising. “But now, goddamn it, I will know whether you were in that old lady’s fucking house trailer, and who among our fucking police agencies let you in.”

Crandall plucked his dead cigar from the ashtray, jammed it in his mouth, and fired it with a lighter from his shirt pocket. When he’d taken a couple of puffs and calmed down, he said, “Our prime suspect is this young troublemaker here, a promising young man who seems bent on ruining a perfectly good career.”

We both looked up at Moze. He was tougher than I would’ve have given him credit for. He kept his gaze level, looking over Crandall’s head out the window, but his Adam’s apple bounced. I wondered if this was the first he’d heard of it.

Not that it mattered. I knew Crandall’s game. He was throwing out chum.

“Potter, I don’t discuss sources,” I said, refusing to be drawn.

“You don’t deny that this boy let you in.”

“I don’t deny or admit anything. I said I don’t discuss sources.”

“We have people who can put you two together before he got the call to Aunt Lotty’s.”

Moze cleared his throat. I didn’t dare look at him, but it sounded like I needed to head Crandall off before Moze’s scruples cost him his job.

“You’ve got Hack, who saw us eating breakfast together in that dive of his. Which means you’ve also got Hack telling you that he ordered me out of his place before Deputy Beard here even left.” I smiled and, without too much of a struggle, crossed my fat legs. “I think it also means that you don’t have anything else or you’d have unloaded it by now.”

I could see Crandall’s face darken, even in the shadow. He glared at Wood, who pursed his lips and looked down. It occurred to me maybe Wood had made this point to Crandall already. That seemed like a good sign, so I continued.

“Before you go blaming young Moze here for the fact that I’m more than a little competent in my job, think about this. You’ve got a crime scene with maybe forty, fifty cops milling around. Maybe a dozen or more of those cops were inside before the bodies were removed, and who knows how many were inside after. It’s my job to know some cops. You going to question every one of those people to see if they talked to me, told me what they saw in there?”

Wood looked away. It was perhaps another point he’d made previously.

“Cause if you are, it seems like you’re wasting your resources, investigating leaks when you can’t find who killed three kids and shot an old woman.” I shrugged. “I ‘spect you’re right. A story like that’d probably find more resonance among the good people of Austin County than anything about intimidating a drunk.”

Crandall snatched up the newspaper in a wad and shook it at me.

“There’s too much here. You were in that fucking trailer.”

I did not smile. That would’ve seemed like rubbing it in. I stood.

“I’m leaving now,” I said and nodded at Wood and Moze. Neither made any move to stop me so I turned to go.

“You’ll be getting no more information about this,” Crandall hissed in a low and dangerous voice.

“Maybe not. Your call,” I said. I turned to face Crandall. “But let me give you a little insight into how these things work. I have to write something. Editors—hell, readers—expect it. If you don’t tell me anything and nobody else tells me anything, I just have to rehash what I know. Or maybe, just to keep things fresh, I have to write some stuff I didn’t write the first time.”

I gave it a beat to make sure it would register.

“Like how whoever did this maybe was smart enough to search the house for weapons. Like how he found a .22 and disabled it by sticking it in the toilet and bending its barrel in the trap. Like how he’s such a cold son of a bitch he ate an apple off Aunt Lotty’s table while he took a piss then dropped the core in the toilet.”

“You bastard,” Crandall shouted. “You were in that fucking trailer.”

“Or I have good sources.” I shrugged. “Don’t forget that.”

“Either way, you see, Potter, it looks bad. I rehash it, it looks like you guys aren’t getting anywhere. I write that other stuff—stuff I saved so you guys can use it as a flash if you want—I write that, it scares the bejesus out of folks ’cause it sounds like you got some kind of psychopath on the loose. So you decide about cutting me off. And while you’re at it, I’d be mighty careful about leaking information to some other outlet but not to me. I’m kind of sensitive to that sort of discrimination.”

Crandall’s chin crinkled he set his face so hard. Wood had leaned back on the table, his arms crossed, looking at the floor. Moze wasn’t looking at me either, but the knot in his jaw had relaxed.

“And if it really makes a difference to you, Potter,” I said, when I stopped at the door, “any fucking defense attorney who asks whether I was in that trailer or not gets the same answer you did.”

The rest of Sunday felt like any other day. I was in the office with Marley, and the phones rang all afternoon.

As usual, I called a lot of people, and as usual, a few called me back. The morbidly curious, as usual, wanted a head start on tomorrow’s edition. Marley’s wife, as usual, wanted to know when he’d be home.

Marley had stayed that afternoon to write his story and lay out some of the next day’s front page. “Get it straightened out?” was all he asked about the meeting with Crandall. I was relieved that a simple yes satisfied him. I did not want to discuss with him the fact that I and, through me, the paper might be exposed to a couple of felony charges as a result of my enthusiasms.

The decision about which story to lead with the next day distracted Marley. He favored the anguish of the Crawford family as told by Naomi. “We can top the interview with whatever the preacher says at the funeral tomorrow,” Marley said. “It’ll be the timeliest stuff we’ve got. Unless there’s an arrest, of course.”

I preferred the community reaction story. Some parents said three dead children were enough to make them keep their kids home from trick or treating. The town cops reported they had arrested a man who had fired a shot at some teenagers who were soaping his garage windows. One locksmith, two gun-shop guys, and three preachers said, in essence, that three dead children and an injured old woman made for good business. The preachers were even willing to drum up a little more. To a man, they said they would be more than happy to go into the school to counsel the youngsters who were friends of the dead children, but the school superintendent said he had staff who would handle it, now that I’d mentioned it.

“Listen, Bob,” I said to Marley. “You got more than four victims here. A whole town, a whole county’s hurt here. In this little friendly burg, people are locking their doors. They’re not only buying more guns, they’re buying different guns. Handguns, not rifles or shotguns. They’re buying guns to shoot other people, not just Bambi and Thumper like they usually do. People are scared.”

“You got somebody saying this is a ‘dagger to the heart of the community’?” Marley might not have heard about writing in the fourth person, but he knew his way around a metaphor.

“No,” I said.

“Then I’ll present your very persuasive theory to the GM, and he can write it in an editorial.”

We did not have a story on the Russells. After two more calls in which I was told to fuck off, they put on the answering machine. Going out to their house did not seem likely to change their mind, and no one else I called, including their preacher, was willing to try to persuade them otherwise.

We did not have any more on Aunt Lotty. No hospital in hundred-mile radius would admit to having received anyone by her name, McConegal’s name, Wood’s name, Moze’s name, or my name; and none of the dozen or so cops I called, including McConegal, would tell me where she was or what kind of shape she was in.

We did not have any more from the cops. Wood did not hang up on me this time, but he said in an exhausted voice he had nothing new then, and I believed him.

We did not have why. It has been my experience that execution-style murders are usually done for a reason, like for revenge or to make a point. But not one of the people who knew the victims or their families I talked to that day could think of a reason to explain why anybody’d want to kill them.

The last phone call came about quarter till seven. Marley answered it, smirked, and pointed to me.

When I picked up the first line, she said, “I’m only going to swear at you once. You son of a bitch.”

“Janelle S.,” I said.

“You nearly cost me my job.”

“You didn’t miss a thing, Janelle S.”

“Stop calling me that. And tell it to my editor. She wants to know how I could’ve missed the show, how come nobody’ll talk to me.”

“Got a copy of my last story? Use it, the facts are still good.”

“Just old.” She blew out breath. “Like you. You know, I lied about only swearing once. Fuck you, asshole.”

God, I liked her.

“So you go with what you got,” I said. “And if it helps, the first funeral’s tomorrow at ten.”

“You’re meat, asshole. You know that? Don’t turn your back, ’cause I’ll stick a fork in you.”

I laughed out loud, she was such a delight.

“Bye, Janelle,” I said and hung up. Marley was sitting back in his chair, his arms crossed, looking bemused.

“You told her when the funeral was,” he said. “You getting soft?”

His remark kind of pulled me up short. I got to thinking about the various people I’d screwed in the last 48 hours, and about how, in that same period of time, it had occurred to me not once but several times maybe scotch’d taste good.

“How ‘bout a Meeting?” I said to Marley, so we went.