Page 39 of The Bright Lands

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 milessouthof 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.”