The velvet drapes were thrown open to a view of the same courtyard garden that was outside Darren’s suite downstairs. From a floor up, he saw a few guests taking their coffee outside, one of whom was Sandler Gaines, his pomaded pompadour shining in the golden morning light. Darren stepped away from the window quickly, so as not to be seen snooping in this room, and felt a crunch underfoot. He looked down to see a hair comb cracked into pieces under the heel of his boot. It had been peeking out from under the bed, and as Darren knelt to get a closer look, he realized the hair comb, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, had already been broken. The other half of it was a few inches farther under the bed. Even in shadow, Darren could see hair tangled in the teeth of the comb. He lifted the tails of his white button-down and grabbed both pieces of the comb with the fabric. He dropped them both into a laundry bag from the room’s closet, but not before inspecting the clump of hair. It was the same shiny black color as the hair of the woman he’d seen with Sandler Gaines.

He walked all of it the few blocks to the sheriff’s office on Austin Street.

The hair comb, the scuffle he’d heard in room 207, the lady he’d seen with Sandler Gaines, the notary who’d called looking for Monica Maldonado, and the fact that after Darren had spent the night calling rental car companies at DFW and Love Field, the nearest major airport to Jefferson, Texas, striking out every time, he’d hit the jackpot when he called the Avis car-rental agency at the Shreveport airport, just over the Texas/Louisiana border. It had taken little convincing for the young woman working the desk on the graveyard shift to give up information to a Texas Ranger over the phone. Monica Maldonado, who lived on Russell Road in Alexandria, Virginia, had rented a white Pontiac Sunfire that should have been returned to that airport location yesterday. Inside Sheriff Quinn’s small office with the MAGA hat and the mason jar filled with buffalo nickels, Darren also added the fact that he’d seen the woman’s business card in Leroy Page’s kitchen in Hopetown, offering it as proof that Ms. Maldonado did exist and had indeed been in Marion County at some point.

Quinn, who appeared to be wearing the same clothes as he’d been wearing last night at the steak house, leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head, showing two large yellowing pit stains. “So what is it you’re trying to say there, Ranger?”

“I think this woman may be missing,” Darren said. “And I think Sandler Gaines was the last one to see her. I saw the two of them together.”

“You can identify this woman?”

Darren hesitated, then lied. “Yes.”