Inside it smelled of lemon Pledge, of the effort to make something pretty of a thirty-year-old trailer, six hundred square feet of matted carpet, ripped and fraying in places. There were two tiny bedrooms with hampers doubling as dresser drawers, the plastic cages filled with clothes and stacked nearly to the ceiling. The sheriff’s deputies had tossed the place. There were books, VHS tapes, photocopied papers and messy piles of receipts, old toys, and a few loose car parts strewn over the floor and on every open surface. But damn if those surfaces weren’t gleaming. Someone had whitewashed the wood paneling, giving the trailer a vaguely beach cabin–like feel. And with great care, someone had sewn curtains made of blue cotton printed with tiny conch shells.

“Levi made those.” Darren turned to see a doughy teenage girl standing in the doorway to one of the bedrooms. Behind her, he saw the one double bed and its two twin-size comforters, one an aging fleece with a picture of Hannah Montana on it, parts of her peach-colored skin flaking off the fabric, the other with Pokémon on the cover. “He got kicked out of gym class, and his coach made him take a home-ec class as punishment. But I think they look nice.” Softly, she said, “I’m Dana.”

“Your brother seemed to get into his share of trouble.”

“He’s just a stupid kid, bored out of his mind out here.”

“Lot of bored kids don’t terrorize folks.” He turned away from her then, continued his inspection of the trailer, finding no more connection to the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas than a copy of Mein Kampf that no one had so much as cracked the spine on, dixie-flag tea towels, and a few sketches of SS Bolts and the ABT crest on the back of a bill for a refill of the family’s propane tank. Gil Thomason was a poser, it seemed, a wannabe ABT tough who didn’t seem to hold much connection to the organization’s inner circles of power. The photocopied papers in the folders he found weren’t member rosters or notes from meetings but song lyrics and sheet music. Someone was learning to play “Cry, Cry, Cry” by Johnny Cash on a guitar that Darren saw nowhere in the trailer. He’d seen enough. The rest of his work would take place inside an interrogation room back at the sheriff’s office in Jefferson. In fact, the blankness of Gil’s association with the Brotherhood might make it all the easier to use him to tie Bill King to Ronnie Malvo’s murder. Maybe justice is poetry, he told himself again, maybe it was whatever art you could make of it.

“I was the only one here, you know,” Dana said behind him.