It came out sounding like more of a dig than Darren had intended. It was no secret that Greg’s career had lagged behind Darren’s and Lisa’s. As a civil litigator, she outearned them both. Her clients were local and national corporations who paid handsomely for the services of her firm. But success for both Darren and Greg was measured in winning cases, in the number of assholes sitting in prison cells somewhere cursing their names. Greg, at forty-two, had yet to land a big case, not even the first unsteady rung in the ladder of advancement within the Bureau. The arrests in Lark in the fall had finally gotten him involved in something he desperately wanted to be doing: investigating hate crimes, annihilating a racist Southern legacy. These things mattered to Greg; they were part of why he joined the FBI. But Darren wasn’t blind. He knew as well as Greg did that charging an elderly black man with a hate crime would make a career; it was so odd as to guarantee national attention if he built an actual case, if he sent the last descendant of a freedmen’s community to prison for killing a child with ties to the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas. It would bring Dateline and 20/20 and a salivating Fox News to Greg’s front door. Darren could practically see the Netflix true-crime documentary they would make. And he thought he could smell the ambition on Greg, a rank cynicism that was practically seeping from the man’s pores, so overheated was he with the possibility of a big case. Greg drummed his short fingernails on the bar top. “At the very least, he’s a suspect, and you know it,” he said when he saw the look of wariness on Darren’s face. “Maybe the old man had had enough.”

“But murder? A nine-year-old?”

“Who knows what happened out by the boathouse that night. Maybe the kid attacked him, made some threat about what his mama’s boyfriend would do—”

“Self-defense,” Darren said. “Which is all Mr. Page and the Native folks out there have been doing, protecting themselves from bullies. Let me ask you this, has there been any evidence that Leroy Page has expressed racist views?”

Greg gave Darren a rueful smile, before he said, “HCIC, head cracker in charge, that’s a direct quote from Mr. Page during our interview.”

Darren shook his head. Greg was being grossly unfair.

“Look, I’m not any more happy about this than you, but—”

“Cracker and nigger are not the same, and you know it,” Darren said.