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He goes into the bathroom, pours the whiskey into the toilet, and flushes it away. Then he starts packing his clothes into boxes. He can’t beat Jalbert except by leaving, so that’s what he’s going to do. He’ll get to spend time with Stevie, who knows where everything is in the Table Mesa King Soopers. As for Darla Jean… she’ll have to find her way. In the end, most kids do. So he tells himself.

50

I’m not angry, Jalbert thinks as he drives back to his hotel in Lyons. Just upset.

The meeting in Wichita didn’t go well. He argued for taking Coughlin in. Forty-eight hours, he said. We can call it protective custody. Just let me sweat him. I’ll break him down. He’s ready. I know it.

Protective custody from who? That was Tishman, the Director in Charge. Neville, the Assistant Director, sat next to him nodding like a puppet. The killer? Coughlin doesn’t claim to know him. He only claims to know where the body was because of the dream he had.

Jalbert asked those in attendance—including Ramsey, the stolid, close-mouthed detective from Oklahoma—if any of them believed Coughlin’s dream story. The unanimous belief was that no one did. Coughlin was the killer. But with no confession and no physical evidence tying him to the crime…

And so on.

Jalbert needs to do some counting. That would settle him. With a clear head he’ll be able to decide on his next move. When he gets back to the hotel he’ll run the chairs, take a shower, and call Ella. Maybe she’s picked up a lead at the trailer park. Or possibly Coughlin has given something away, but probably not. He’s a sly one—got rid of the drugs, didn’t he?—but he’s paying a price. He’s out of a job and his neighbors have turned against him. He’s got to be angry, and angry people make mistakes.

But I’m not angry. Just upset, and why? Because he did it, and he’ll do it again.

“Don’t they see that?” he asks, and bangs on the steering wheel. “Are they really that blind?”

Answer: they are not.

Every video feed between Arkansas City, where Miss Yvonne spent her last night, and the Gas-n-Go where she was last seen has been checked. Several Tundras were spotted, but none were white and all were newer than Danny’s.

He used a different vehicle when he took her, Jalbert thinks. That’s why we didn’t find any DNA or other evidence in his truck. Clever, so clever.

Jalbert began—Ella did, too—by believing that Danny wanted either to be a media star or to confess. Ella may still believe those things, but Jalbert no longer does. It’s a game to him. He’s sticking it in our faces and saying prove it, prove it, arrest me, arrest me, ha-ha, you can’t, can you? You know my story is bullshit and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.

Jalbert bangs the steering wheel again.

Fifteen years ago, even ten, it was a different playing field with different rules. Coughlin would have been in a little room with Jalbert and Davis and they’d sweat him until he gave it up. Ten hours, twelve, it wouldn’t matter. Turn and turn about, whap-whap-whap. They were advocates for poor Miss Yvonne and all the girls that might follow her, they’d go at him tirelessly in a room with no clock.

You have to be hungry. Give us something and we’ll send someone out for chow. You like Burger King? There’s one right up the street. Whopper, fries, chocolate shake, how does that sound? At least tell us when you buried her. Day or night? No? Okay, let’s start again, from the beginning.

Like that.

Jalbert begins counting barns and silos and farmhouses to pass the time. He’s up to twenty-three (which, added in arithmetical progression, totals 276) when his phone rings. It’s Ella. He expects her to ask how it went in Wichita, but she doesn’t. Instead she asks when he expects to get back to his hotel. Her voice is clipped and tight, she hardly sounds like herself. Could it be excitement because she has something?

Just a thread, that’s all I ask. We’ll follow it. We’ll follow it all the way through hell, if that’s what it takes.

“I should be there in forty minutes. What have you got?”

“I’m on the road from Manitou now. I’ll meet you there.”

“Come on, give.” He runs his hand through the peninsula of his hair. “Did Coughlin tell you something?”

“Not on the phone.”

“Make that half an hour,” Jalbert says, and speeds up.

51

Ella is waiting in the lobby when Frank comes in. She dreads the impending conversation, but will do what has to be done. It would be worse if she liked Frank. She’s tried to do that and failed, but until the last couple of days she respected him. In a way she respects him still. He is fiercely dedicated to the job, to getting justice for the woman he calls “poor Miss Yvonne.” It’s just that his dedication has crossed a line and when it did, it turned into something else.

He gives her a smile, showing those eroded teeth that really need caps. The thick triangle of his widow’s peak is disarranged, as if he’s been running a hand through it. Perhaps pulling at it. “Let’s go to my so-called suite. It’s not great—the only view is of the parking lot—but it fits the expense account.”

Ella follows. She doesn’t know why he’s formed such a fierce connection with the Wicker girl—or is it Coughlin he’s made a connection with?—but she knows it’s put pressure on some fundamental crack in his personality. What was once a hairline is now a fissure.

He unlocks the door. She goes in ahead of him and stops, looking around the suite’s boxy little living room. “What’s up with the folding chairs?”