“Were they speaking in English?” I asked.

“I dunno. I think so, yeah.”

We’d gotten everything we could from Nina and left.

Walking across 914, we found the liquor store manager unhelpful, and the front door to Tandy’s locked.

Standing in the parking lot, I stared down the highway, imagining the men crossing this road. The land out this way was flatter than a gander’s arch, and largely white and rural. These three would’ve stood out. Been remembered.

We suddenly heard a garbage truck pull out from the back of the bar, and began crossing the street.

Other than the noise of the truck, the area was quiet and desolate, at noon on a Friday.

From behind Tandy’s came the noise of a dumpster rolling. We turned. Was someone working at this hour and had ignored our knocking on the front of the bar?

We walked around to the back of the place.

A rolling steel garage door was pulled open behind Tandy’s, and a man was pushing industrial trash cans full of empty booze bottles and crushed beer cans over to a dumpster. Filling it back up.

“How ya doing?” I said.

The guy glanced up for a moment, but kept to his work. He was sixtyish and Black—heavyset with a wrinkled face and graying hair, cut short. He wore a black sweater with a red O on it, outlined in white. Ohio State.

“Buckeyes gonna be any good this year?” I asked.

The man sized me up as harmless. “Favored to win the Big Ten,” he said. “Hung forty-two on Cincinnati last Saturday.”

Remy badged him as we walked closer. “Detective Morgan,” she said. “This is my partner, Detective Marsh. You work in the bar here?”

“I’m the manager,” he said.

Remy took out her phone, which had the same pictures of the DOAs as mine.

“We’re looking for a couple guys,” she said. “We heard they were in here in the last couple days.”

The man glanced at Remy’s phone for a quick second and nodded, moving back to his chore.

“Yeah, they were here.”

“You remember when?” she asked.

My partner always began with fidelity: test out one fact that we already know. Then go to other questions. I had come up under a different training: always begin with connective tissue. Find rapport.

“I dunno.” The man shrugged. “Two days ago?”

He grabbed another trash can. Started wheeling it away from us and toward the dumpster. Cans rattled around inside, and Remy gave me a “what the fuck” look. The guy was ignoring us.

My eyes glinted at my partner. It’s an odd thing—when you’re young and time stretches out endlessly across the horizon, your only desire is to will it to move faster.

“I was trying to remember that quarterback’s name from 2018,” I said to the man. “Was it Haskins? Must’ve completed seventy percent of his passes last year. You guys lost him, right?”

“Drafted by Washington,” the man said. “But I didn’t watch the Buckeyes before this year.”