Just a message left on his voice mail a while back to say she’d taken his advice and buried her husband’s remains in the East Texas town where he was born. You were right. It had moved him then, as it did now, to think of her journey from hating Texas to recognizing the part it had played in making the man she’d loved, realizing that it mattered to honor that for her husband, Michael, but also for herself. Drunk as he was, the whole thing made him misty. It was one of his proudest moments as a Ranger. He laughed at some story Buddy was telling even though he hadn’t heard half of it. And then he told himself he knew what he had to do. Tonight.

He waited until they were passed out or sleeping, Patricia in Darren’s childhood bedroom and the others sprawled across various pieces of furniture throughout the living room, their grease-soaked paper plates and beer bottles littering the hardwood floor. It was nearly two in the morning when he walked to his Chevy truck parked on the grass out front of the house. This late—or early, depending on which side of midnight you felt at home—the air was thin and chilly in Camilla, sweet with dew, and it cooled his heated state of mind to ride with the windows down. He was careful, going ten under the speed limit the whole way and cutting his headlights off as soon as he started down the twin tire ruts behind Bell’s landlord’s house that led to her trailer.

Though he’d been prepared for a confrontation if one was necessary, Bell’s ’92 Chevette was not in front of her home, nor were there any lights on in the trailer. A couple of nights a week, she and Fisher, her boyfriend, stayed in one of the empty cabins by Lake Livingston where she worked as a cleaner; he guessed he’d gotten lucky tonight. By the low light of a pocket Maglite, he searched every inch of the one-bedroom trailer, performing the task with the methodical care in which he’d been trained. He started in the kitchen and worked his way from one end of the tin-can house to the other. He went through every cabinet, every drawer, and every countertop canister; he searched the refrigerator and the freezer, taking the time to put a thick, grayish block of ice in the sink and run hot water over it. It was brisket, easily three years old.

The gun wasn’t in the kitchen.

The living room either.