I knew these columns, this porch. Even the bushes. Trey had a picture of this place in his own office. It was his old frat house.

I ripped the photo from the wall, held it in two hands. A row of boys stood on the lawn, young, grinning, arms around one another. New pledges? Adam Wilkerson was on the end. No beard back then, but his hairline had already been receding. He’d tried to hide it with a buzz cut. I recognized the round egg of his head and his small, sharp nose. I leaned in close to peer at his new brothers lined up on the lawn.

No Trey. No Spence either. No one I knew. But all that mattered was that my husband wasn’t there. I was dizzy with relief.

Then I looked past the pledges. To the place where my eyes did not want to go. The porch, where three older boys were grinning. The officers, I thought. Trey had been VP his senior year. Spence had been treasurer. Their faces were smaller than dimes, out of focus, but I knew my husband. I knew the shape of him, the body language. The young man to his right was Spencer Shaw.

This was a Trey I’d only seen in photos, young and cocky. Why was he here, small and blurry, grinning at me from the wall of Adam Wilkerson’s office?

My husband’s eyes were dark dots, unreadable. They held no answers. Meanwhile, up the hall, Marshall was asking Adam Wilkerson all the wrong questions.

This wasn’t about a law case. This was something so much older. This was something personal.

14

Marshall saw it, the moment Adam Wilkerson recognized Spencer and Trey. A micro-tic of the head, too small to be a flinch, but it was the ghost of one. Adam knew exactly who they were. More than that, Adam knew what the three of them had done to jump-start every awful thing that was happening now. Marshall would have bet his house on it.

Still, Adam kept staring at the picture. He pressed his lips together deliberately, then pushed his eyebrows into a puzzled shape. Pure theater.

Marshall was glad to know he could still call bullshit with such inner certainty. Back in his cop days, sitting one-on-one in small gray rooms, Marshall could smell fear and worry and self-justification coming off the guilty. He could almost hear their brains scrabbling against their skulls like little mice, the frantic scritch of claw on bone.

He’d been worried he had lost his knack for sniffing out dishonesty, ever since Bree had snowed him so hard at the party. He thought if she lied to him again, he might catch it, though. Her face and body language sold her words, note perfect, but her old stage charisma leaked when she was lying.