We turned on the radio to listen to the weather. Storms were predicted, with heavy downpour and thunder and lightning. What a surprise. Flash flood warnings—which you had to take seriously in a terrain that included roads that dipped so deeply before rising again—in an area where all the streams and ponds were already full from plentiful rainfall earlier in the season.

We reached a little chain restaurant within ten minutes and went in, taking our raincoats with us. Inside, there was an older couple sitting close to the kitchen door; there was a single guy reading a newspaper, a dirty plate shoved across the table. A young couple, in their early twenties, sat with their two children in a booth by the big window. They were pale and fat, both wearing sweats from Wal-Mart. He wore a gimme cap with his. Her hair was pulled back into a curly ponytail, and her eyelids were blue with makeup. The little boy, maybe six, was wearing camo and carrying a plastic gun. The little girl was a pretty thing, with lots of light brown hair like her mother’s, and a sweet and vacant face. She was coloring.

A waitress in jeans and a blouse strolled over to take our order. Her hair was dressed in a formidable bleached bubble, and she was chewing gum. She told us she was pleased to help us, but I doubted her sincerity. After we’d looked at the menus for a minute, she took our orders and strolled over to the window to the kitchen to turn them in.

After she’d gotten our iced tea, she vanished.

The couple started arguing about whether or not to enter their daughter in the next beauty pageant. It cost quite a bit to enter a child in a pageant, I learned, and to rent a dress and take time off from work to do the girl’s hair and makeup cost even more.

I raised my eyebrows at Tolliver, who suppressed a smile. My mother had tried to get Cameron to do the pageant circuit. At the very first one, Cameron had told the judges she thought the pageant system was very close to white slavery. She had accused the judges of many unpleasant perversions. Needless to say, that had ended Cameron’s career as a beauty contestant. Of course, Cameron was fourteen at the time. The little girl across the room was maybe eight and didn’t look like she’d say boo to a goose.

Our cell rang again, and this time Tolliver answered it.

“Hello?” He paused and listened for a moment. “Hey, Sascha. What’s the word?” Ah. The hair samples. The DNA test.

He listened for a few moments, then turned to me.

“No match,” he said. “The male is not the father. Female One is the mother of Female Two.” That was the way I’d marked the samples.

“Thanks, Sascha. I owe you,” he said.