He kept the words to himself, wouldn’t call out his friend like that. But a gulf had opened up between them. After twenty-some years of friendship, had race finally dumped a swamp of quicksand at their feet, making it impossible for either man to reach the other without the threat of losing himself in the process? Or were they just doing their jobs the best way they knew how? “What about Thomason?” Darren said. “What about the drugs?”

“Oh, he ain’t going home no time soon,” Quinn said.

“And you don’t think he knows that? He’s saying anything, trying to save his own ass.”

Wasn’t that, in fact, what Darren had been counting on? Using a criminal’s natural instinct for butt-preservation to get Thomason to name Bill King in the Ronnie Malvo homicide? Lazy police work could cut both ways, he guessed. “He’s telling tales on Leroy Page just to save himself on the drug charges he knows are coming.”

“It’s not just him,” Greg said. “Marnie King confirmed Leroy Page has been terrorizing folks out in Hopetown, riding with an armed posse, and that he had a particular dislike for her son. The two had had words, a grown man cussing a kid.”

“A kid who’d spray-painted nigger on his house, who’d tried to burn down what the Indians hold as sacred, their place of worship.”

“All of which is going in the indictment,” Greg said. “Goes to motive.”

Darren felt like he’d walked in at the tail end of a horror movie, the plot of which he couldn’t quite follow. But he was sure everyone on-screen was making a terrible mistake. Stop this, he wanted to scream. “Talk to the daughter. Dana, Marnie’s other kid,” he said, speaking directly to Greg now. “She says Gil and Marnie weren’t home all night. She was the one looking for Levi and she says Leroy Page wasn’t out that night, that there’s no way he saw Levi.”

“So the old man lied about seeing him alive?” Quinn said. “Well, that sure as shit don’t clear him.”

Darren said, “The only way you got to Page as a suspect is him saying he’d seen the kid. If he was confused, got his nights mixed up—”