Mae came out of the bar and took my hand and fed it to her dog.

I watched my blood foam in the dog’s mouth, and it didn’t hurt—it was almost sweet.

“See,” Mae said, “he likes you, Patrick.”

The last week of October, we bailed out of the Jason Warren case by mutual agreement with Diandra and Eric. I know guys who would’ve milked it, played up to the fears of a worried mother, but I don’t milk cases. Not because I’m particularly moral, but because it’s bad business when half your living comes from repeat clients. We had files on all of Jason’s teachers since he’d come to Bryce (eleven) and all his known acquaintances (Jade, Gabrielle, Lauren, and his roommate) except the guy with the goatee, and nothing about any of them suggested they were a threat to Jason. We had write-ups of our daily observation work, as well as synopses of our meeting with Fat Freddy, Jack Rouse, and Kevin Hurlihy, and my own telephone discussion with Stan Timpson.

Diandra had received no more threats, phone calls, or pictures in the mail. She’d spoken with Jason in New Hampshire, mentioned that a friend of hers had seen him with a guy in the Sunset Grill the previous week, and Jason had described him as “just a friend” and offered no more information.

We spent another week tailing him, and it was more of the same—explosions of sexual activity, solitude, studying.

Diandra agreed that we were all getting nowhere, that there was nothing outside of her having received that photograph to suggest Jason was in any danger whatsoever, and we finally came to the conclusion that maybe our original perception—that Diandra had inadvertently angered Kevin Hurlihy—had been correct after all. Once we’d met with Fat Freddy, every hint of threat had disappeared; maybe Freddy, Kevin, Jack and the whole mob had decided to back off, but hadn’t wished to lose face to a couple of PIs.

Whatever the situation, it was over now, and Diandra paid us for our time and thanked us, and we left our cards and home numbers in case anything sprang back up and went back to our lives during our business’s dullest season.

A few days later, at his behest, we met Devin in The Black Emerald at two o’clock in the afternoon. There was a “Closed” sign in the doorway, but we knocked and Devin opened the door, locked it behind us after we came in.

Gerry Glynn was behind the bar, sitting on the cooler, not looking very happy, and Oscar sat by a plate of food at the bar, and Devin took his seat beside him and bit into the bloodiest cheeseburger this side of an open flame.

I took the seat beside Devin, and Angie took the one beside Oscar and stole one of his fries.

I looked at Devin’s cheeseburger. “They just lean the cow against a radiator?”

He growled and stuffed some more in his mouth.