“Mr. Sells,” Mendez said, holding out his hand. “I’m Detective Mendez. This is my partner Detective Hicks.”

Unmoved by social niceties, Sells scowled up at him and said, “I ain’t got nothing to do with them cars. I don’t know how they got here.”

Mendez took a chair. Hicks leaned back against the cluttered kitchen counter, flushing out a cat that had been busy hunting for food scraps among the dirty dishes.

“You’ve never seen those cars before?” Mendez asked.

Sells shook his head. Mendez imagined what a woman’s reaction would be to this guy. What hair he had was unkempt. What looked like four or five days of beard roughened his jaw line.

“How is that, Mr. Sells?” he asked. “Your property is fenced in, isn’t it?”

“Yep.”

“So somebody had to open a gate to get those cars in.”

“I don’t know nothing about it.”

Mendez took the snapshot of Karly Vickers out of his jacket pocket. “Have you ever seen this woman?”

Sells barely glanced at it. “Nope.”

“Does the name Lisa Warwick mean anything to you?”

“Nope.”

“Those are the women who own those cars. One of them is dead. One of them is missing.”

“I don’t know nothing about that,” he said, unfazed by the terrible news.

“Do you have any employees, Mr. Sells?” Hicks asked.

“It’s me and my nephew, that’s all. He don’t know nothing either.”

“And where is he?” Hicks asked.

Sells yelled out. “Kenny! Get in here!”

Kenny emerged from the next room, a huge, stupid-looking kid of maybe twenty. He looked like he had walked right off the set of Deliverance in his coveralls with one strap hanging down and his mouth hanging open.

Mendez got up and went through the introductions again. Kenny just stared at him blankly.

“Have you ever seen this woman?” Mendez asked, showing him Karly Vickers’s photo.

Kenny shrugged.

“He don’t know nothing,” Sells said impatiently. “He’s half a retard.”

“Am not,” Kenny said in a low dull voice.

“This woman is missing,” Mendez said. “The woman that owned the other car is dead. Murdered.”

Sells scowled. “He don’t know—”

Mendez slammed his hand down on the table and leaned over him. “Shut the fuck up! I don’t want to hear how you don’t know nothing, you ignorant rube!”

“I ain’t under arrest!” Sells shouted back.

Mendez grabbed his cuffs off his belt. “You want to change that? I can change that right now.”

Hicks stepped forward calmly and put a hand on his arm. “Tony, calm down. I’m sure Mr. Sells just isn’t understanding the seriousness of the situation.”

“What part of a murder charge isn’t clear to him?” Mendez demanded.

“Take a break,” Hicks instructed.