The game kicks off: a blur of green and white bodied players collide on the field. I find Monty and lose him again in a scrum of players. I know little about football except what I’ve absorbed from years of living in Indiana and from watching Friday Night Lights, and he seems like a more than decent player, although after he fumbles a pass from the quarterback his coach benches him for a quarter. High school cheerleaders shimmy with their pom-poms, and every time they leap or backflip, they seem to remain suspended momentarily in the air, hung like Christmas ornaments on a dark backdrop of sky. I always think about what will happen if they twist a few inches in the wrong direction; I see them landing on their necks, breaking like porcelain dolls.

“We weren’t that small when we were in high school, were we?” Brent leans in to speak to me over the roar of the crowd and the stamping. “Do you think they’re shrinking? I definitely think they’re shrinking.”

That makes me laugh. I never knew that Brent was funny, but he is. He tells me that when he played football, he invented a technique so he wouldn’t be nervous: he’d pick a random guardian angel from the crowd, a stranger, the weirder the better, and name him or her. If he ever got nervous he’d just find the Angel of Lost ’90s Hats or the Patron Saint of Handlebar Mustaches and say a quick prayer.

“Did it work?” I ask him.

He winks. “We were undefeated our senior year.”

Weirdly, I find that I’m almost enjoying myself. With Brent. At a football game. In Barrens.

I have to remind myself again and again that I’m here for information. And yet the first quarter slips by, then the second, and then the third, and though we’ve talked almost continuously, the closest we’ve come to discussing the investigation is to debate the best junk food for powering through a long work night. Brent swears by Skittles. I’m a peanut M&M’s girl. Protein and caffeine—can’t beat it.

It’s not until the fourth quarter, when the conversation turns to our families, that I see an opening. And by then, I’m almost sorry to take it.

“You told me you have a cousin at Optimal, too, right?” I ask, as casually as I can. “Byron Grafton?”

“You are good.” Brent looks at me with either admiration or exasperation or a little bit of both. “Byron’s not at Optimal, though. He’s a subcontractor. But I bet you know that. Byron’s the one who got me in with the CFO, Wally Rush. They went to college together.”

Of course, I know this, too. “Byron’s a good guy deep down. He had some problems back when he was drinking. Married, divorced, married again, had a kid, made some bad business decisions. Pie-in-the-sky kind of things, too much ambition and too little sense. Wally helped push him in a new direction.”

And promised him a fluffed-up contract for waste disposal services that, as far as I can tell, never took place: a cozy arrangement. “So Optimal is a real family kind of operation, huh?”