Hearing the word back, Wilson grimaced. He set his hands down hard on his desk and interlaced his thick fingers. “Look,” he said. “A little over a month from now we get a new man in the White House and a brand-new Justice Department, and who knows how the shit will shake out, if their priorities will line up with what we’ve been doing with the feds on this task force for six years. Six years, Ranger, we’ve been trying to take down this terrorist organization.”

Terrorist organization.

He’d never heard his lieutenant describe the ABT that way. And he was vaguely aware that the term was for his benefit, that Wilson was selling something.

“Twelve captains and twenty other Brotherhood rank and file are potentially on the hook in this deal. It’s a good case, Darren. Could be a game changer, the thing that dismantles the Aryan Brotherhood in this state once and for all.”

“What do you need from me?” Darren said.

“What we need is an indictment, sooner rather than later. The feds want this in front of a grand jury before the change of power in Washington. Before a Trump Justice Department mistakes the Aryan Brotherhood for some sort of honor guard. The feds are close, they say, to having enough to make it happen.”

This time, Wilson shoved the entire file across the desk. “Two members of the ABT caught in a pressure cooker of a domestic situation, each man pointing a finger at the other—”

“Is that what’s happening?”

Wilson nodded at the handwritten letter in Darren’s lap, instructing him to read it. “One of the men or the wife might start talking about Brotherhood goings-on they’ve previously been unwilling to discuss, information that could put the final touches on a bill of indictment. The FBI has not been able to attach Bill King to this larger Brotherhood case, mainly because he’s been in lockup for years now and claims he’s changed his ways. But if the wife and the new boyfriend get pissed enough, maybe—”

“You want to use the kid as leverage?”

Wilson winced at the implication. “We want to be delicate in the handling of the investigation, that’s all, so that if any secrets should spill in the course of tracking down that kid’s whereabouts, we might be able to use them.”

“You think he’s still alive?” Darren asked. He wasn’t entirely sure where the question had come from. He hadn’t read the file and knew next to nothing. It just seemed that if this was a domestic deal, the kid would have turned up by now.

The question shook Wilson; his face blanched to a pale gray. “I think it’s been almost three days, and the sooner you get to the sheriff’s office in Marion County, the better,” he said.

“Why me?” Darren asked finally. “For obvious reasons.”

“Not sure I follow,” Wilson said.