There was no sign of the boy in the house, not even in the bedroom that had clearly been reserved for his visits, which Rosemary had said were few and far between. There was a twin bed covered with a red comforter dotted with pictures of quarter horses, saddles, and spurs. The walls were painted a pale blue. There was a desk in a corner with only a single book on its attached shelf—the King James Bible—and the only toys in the room were a plastic dump truck that would interest no child over the age of five and a stuffed cocker spaniel lying on its stomach. The room had the same desolate feel as the one that had been set up for Bill King’s return home from prison, both of them waiting empty and untouched.

They searched the carriage house too.

Clyde, Rosemary’s driver, smoked a cigarette along the side of the building that housed a copper ’53 Mercedes and a silver late-model Cadillac, both shiny as freshly minted coins. He nodded to Darren but didn’t speak either. There was nothing indicating that Levi had been in either vehicle. Still, Darren cringed watching the sheriff compromise potential evidence by running his ungloved hands inside both cars. They would need a clean sweep of the cars one day, wouldn’t they? Darren wasn’t sure where that thought had come from. Was he saying he thought the old woman was somehow connected to her grandson’s disappearance? Not exactly, but she was being cagey about something. Why the hell else had her lawyer been present? As a former law student, he knew he was wrong for thinking like that. But he didn’t like the woman. A second later, Quinn declared their work done. He neither dismissed Darren nor invited him to come along after he told Briggs he was heading back to the office. “I’ll let you know if we hear something on that warrant,” he said to Darren before turning and walking down the drive to his cruiser.

“Something’s off,” Darren told Wilson on the phone. He mentioned the odd dynamic between Marnie and her boyfriend, Gil, the way she cowered, and the fact that the boy’s grandmother had a lawyer hanging around, plus there was the bizarre lack of urgency on the part of the county for a lost kid from a trailer park. He liked Quinn, he said, but nobody seemed all that hot to find this kid. “Except for Bill King,” he said.

“I’m working with the state to get you in to talk to him as soon as possible.”

“Unless he’s hiding the kid in his cell, I don’t see what good that does.”

“Bill King’s potentially sitting on a shit-ton of evidence against the ABT.”