I would have called it freelancing, but whatever. One of the nicest things about Texas is how far it is from Silicon Valley, but that distance seems to shrink every day.

‘I assume you tell your employers about your criminal record?’ Thistle says.

‘If they ask,’ Black says warily.

‘Do these jobs ever require you to get in someone else’s car?’

Black hesitates. ‘Maybe. If I’m washing it, I guess.’

‘In the past month, have you been in the car of someone who hadn’t employed you?’

Black looks even more cagey now. ‘I’m not sure.’

‘If you have, it would make sense to tell us.’

‘Look,’ Black says. ‘Sometimes you need to give a ride to get a ride, you know what I’m saying?’

‘Elaborate,’ Thistle says.

‘I live outside the loop. Once or twice I’ve needed someone to take me home. A cab would have bankrupted me. But if I can find a straight dude with a car, I have another way of paying.’ She glares at us. ‘That’s not illegal, by the way. No money changed hands.’

I wonder if she’s telling the truth about that.

‘These jobs,’ I say, ‘the paid jobs, are they recorded? You can tell us where and when each one was?’

‘Why?’

Cards on the table time. ‘Because the car of one of the Crawdad Man’s victims turned up at a dump in Louisiana with your DNA inside,’ I say. ‘A witness can put a woman matching your description at the crime scene. Another witness saw someone—also matching your description—pick up a separate victim from his home.’

Black has gone pale. ‘That wasn’t me,’ she says. ‘I never visited any dump.’

‘Let’s say a man propositions you,’ Thistle says.

‘I never took any money.’

Thistle ignores this. ‘He says it’s his birthday. He’s got some cash fresh from the ATM. You agree to help him out. But he has some weird role-play thing going on—he wants to pretend you’re a giant. And he’s rougher than you were expecting. So you panic. You do something … regrettable.’

Black looks from Thistle to me and back. ‘This is all bullshit,’ she says.

‘Sex workers get treated like shit,’ Thistle says. ‘They get robbed, assaulted—’

‘I’m not a sex worker anymore.’

‘They get targeted by serial killers. Sometimes men do things the hooker didn’t consent to—they see it as theft rather than rape. It wouldn’t be the first time a woman fought back, found herself with a dead body on her hands. And maybe a little extra spending money.’

‘Jesus,’ Black says. ‘I didn’t do anything.’

‘Let’s start on January ninth last year,’ I say.

‘Sure. Give me back my phone, and I’ll tell you exactly what I was doing.’