A different uniformed officer unlocked the gate behind us, and I let go of Hartley’s arm.

The patrolman got him to his feet, but Hartley kept muttering under his breath. How he’d been beaten by a friggin’ junkyard dog.

I sat alone in the interview room for some time. Folded the paper and put it away.

My blood was pounding in my temples, so loud that I could hear it over the electric din of the cheap fluorescent panel above me.

And then I heard another noise. The buzzing of my phone.

I pulled it from my back pocket and stared at the text that Hope had sent me.

It was a picture. The composite that Kelly Borland had described to our sketch artist of the man she’d bumped into outside of Harrington’s place.

And as much as I didn’t want to believe a word Kelly said at that coffeehouse, the picture was clearly of a man I’d seen before.

Had met in fact.

A man who’d handed me a packet of papers that helped me locate Kian Tarticoft months ago.

Kelly had said she was scared when she stumbled upon the guy, but until now it hadn’t crossed my mind that she could be telling the truth.

I thought of the empty boxes in the backhouse. The ones Kelly said she cleaned out. And I wondered if she had supplied this man with the photo of them. The one that eventually hit the news.

And as I thought of this . . . of everything I’d discovered today . . . it left me just one option.

Just one thing I had to do.

61

It was almost nine a.m. when I left the jail and walked outside.

The sky was an iridescent gray that looked like the shine off a pearl.

Getting in my truck, I headed south and let the music play. Turned off my phone and rolled down both windows, not wanting to pay attention to where I was going.

It was Sunday, and I shifted the stations from country to rock to indie. In one minute, Blake Shelton was belting out “God’s Country.” In the next, the Cordovas were singing “I’m the One Who Needs You Tonight.”

When I got to Atlanta, I switched onto 278 for a mile and then got off the highway.

As I approached the 900th block of Piedmont, traffic was backing up. I parked on a side street, threw a police placard on my dash, and huffed it on foot.

After a few minutes, I’d reached the address I was looking for: a converted mansion from the 1890s that served as the campaign headquarters of Governor Toby Monroe.

The porch of the house was set up as a stage, festooned with red, white, and blue balloons. Below it, on the curving lawn, someone had built a platform out of plywood and painted it white, a big square area for reporters and cameramen.

“Can I help you?” a deep voice asked. I had arrived at an ornate gate that let in from the street.