“And Page—what all’s he got to do with this?”

“I don’t know, but he clearly had some contact with the woman.”

“You’re saying we got a serial killer in this county?” Something in the idea amused Quinn rather than frightened him. “You sure know how to make trouble out in Hopetown, don’t you.”

“Excuse me?”

“Mr. Page.”

“It was Sandler Gaines who was the last one to see her, I said.”

Sheriff Quinn lowered his arms and rested them on his desk, his face taking on a sober quality. “I never had no trouble with Leroy Page before all this,” Quinn said, speaking as if he hadn’t heard Darren at all. “And truth be told, I never wanted to believe he’d hurt that boy, but the talk out there, the rumors and suspicions now, it’s a bell you can’t un-ring, Ranger. You’da done well to remember that before you went mentioning his name anywhere near Gil Thomason and his trailer-park posse. You damn near signed that man’s death warrant before the feds even had a chance to make an arrest.”

Darren felt his stomach drop. He heard a sharp note ringing in his ear, so Quinn’s words, when they came, sounded distant. He felt his long legs go weak and wiggly as pepper jelly as Sheriff Quinn said matter-of-factly, “Leroy Page was shot last night.”

Darren shook his head, at first in numb disbelief and then in anger. “What happened to the men you had posted outside his place?”

“They got past ’em somehow,” Quinn said, a little too businesslike for Darren’s taste, as if he were conceding the deputies out front of Page’s house had only been for show. “We think they got in around the back some kind of way.”

“And who’s ‘they’?”

“I got deputies going through the trailer park like a tight comb picking for lice. I’m not stupid, Ranger. I put this on the trash out there.”

“And Mr. Page, is he—”

“He’s alive,” Quinn said, suddenly standing. “They got him to Marion County Hospital in time. With his age, though, it’s touch-and-go. He got them Caddos praying over him up there on the third floor. He may make it.” He shrugged to indicate that he could not understand the ways and means of a narrow band of Caddo Indians who’d lived among black folks for well over a hundred years, but he refused to question their divine authority lest he tempt exemption from heaven by starting any new shit with Indians.

“Talk to Sandler Gaines,” Darren said on his way out of the sheriff’s office. “He knows what happened to Monica Maldonado. I’d bet my badge on it.”