He shakes his head. “Wrong. To show you. Like I showed him. I’m showing you that I can get to anybody. I can hurt the people you love. You’re a troubled girl, and troubled girls make trouble for everybody else. I can’t have that. We can’t have that. This is a warning. It may not be my last, but you’re nearly at the end of your rope just as Chris was at the end of his. Cross us and get in our way, and I will hurt everyone around you. You want to blame somebody for Chris Coyne’s death, blame yourself. You had to go shaking the trees, and now you’re wondering why the branches came crashing down on your head.”

She growls, cries out in grief and rage, bangs the heels of both hands against the wire.

Then Atlanta buries her face in her hands.

Petry says nothing and backs the car out of the dirt lot and back onto the road, leaving the burned-out building behind and heading back toward Boxelder Road.

Atlanta sits at Holger’s desk, waiting. Trying not to shake. Trying not to scream. Her hands hold onto the detective’s desk, fingers gone bloodless like she’s holding the safety bar of a rollercoaster.

When they arrived at the station, Petry left her alone. Just walked off like it was no big thing. Another officer, a young buck with a wispy mustache, took the dog away toward the basement steps. Whitey didn’t want to go, but she knelt and kissed his brow and promised him they’d get someone to look at his shoulder soon. Here under the lights the wound didn’t look too bad—she hopes a few antibiotics will be good enough.

Whitey rested his head on her shoulder and made a small sound in the back of his throat—a growl of sorts, but not aggressive, not really. She took it to be a promise, or something like one: he’s got her back.

“Go on,” she told him, and the officer—Landis was his name—took the dog away.

Down the hall, Petry stood by a coffee machine and gave her a look and a small, sinister nod. A reminder. I can get you wherever you are.

Now here she is. In Holger’s office. Waiting for the woman to arrive and trying her damnedest not to grab a stapler off the desk, march over to Petry, and staple his mouth and nose closed.

In her mind’s eye she keeps replaying Chris’s suicide. The march to the tree. The slow, creeping realization afforded by that recording. The rope. The decision. Choking and kicking and emptying your bowels and then—

Holger enters.

“You okay?” she asks Atlanta.