“He ain’t come home Friday afternoon,” she said, bony chin jutting forward. Darren glanced at his wristwatch, as if it had only just occurred to him that it was Monday. “Well, ma’am,” he said, “the odds of finding a missing child who’s been gone longer than forty-eight hours are very slim. We want to help you find your boy.”

It wasn’t his real mission here, but they didn’t need to know that.

And anyway, locating the missing kid would make him feel better about the plan that had hatched in his brain when he was about a hundred miles shy of Marion County: if he could find any evidence—real or manufactured—to connect Bill King to the murder of Ronnie Malvo, both he and Mack would be off the hook with San Jacinto County and DA Frank Vaughn, and Wilson would have what he needed to nail Bill “Big Kill” King. Ordering a hit on a criminal informant would make for a sweet indictment to add to the federal case against the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas. Darren had already worked out a twisted quid pro quo in his mind, had had a debate with his uncle William on the drive up. Bill would get his kid back in exchange for the rest of his life in prison, which was where he belonged. William, because he was dead, hadn’t said a word, and yet Darren could feel his disapproval, cold as haint’s breath on his neck. He’d turned up the radio and rolled down the windows in his truck—anything to drown out his fear of falling off the cliff of his own morality. The music was Lightnin’ Hopkins and Jessie Mae Hemphill, single-string, sharecropping blues from a time when there was no sense of right and wrong when it came to dealing with white folks. There was only survival.

“He’s not missing,” Marnie insisted. “His grandmother’s got him.”

Softly, Darren said, “And if she doesn’t?”

And that’s when he saw the fear, saw that beneath her repeated insistence that the boy’s grandmother had taken him, Marnie King wasn’t so sure, that it was merely a theory she was clinging to because the alternative, when it flashed across her mind just now, made her shudder. Darren could feel her struggling to hold on to her outrage; he saw a quiver of terror in her knitted brow. It was radiating off her body. She glanced up at her boyfriend, Gil, standing next to the stairs, and clamped it down quick. “This was Rosemary’s doing,” she said.