“He’s with the Lakehaven police. Iris is with him.”

“Is Ned all right?”

“Physically he’s fine.They’re talking to him about who might have wanted to hurt her.”

“Hurt her. Wait. Are you saying she was murdered?” Mike’s accent, a weird mix of his childhood in his native Slovakia and then long years in Canada, thickens in a way Kyle has never heard before.

This was not how he wanted to tell his friend. “Yes. I am so sorry, man.”

Mike Horvath takes several long, gasping breaths. “Why was she in the park? She never goes there.”

“We don’t know.”

“I have to talk to the police.”

“The station is off Old Travis. On Raymond Road.”

“I’ll find it.” Then another long pause. “They don’t think Ned hurt her, do they?”

Is that a possibility? Why would Mike think that of his girlfriend’s son? Ned Frimpong likes to play video games. He watches a lot of English soccer. His grades are average, not great. He had gotten drunk last year at a party with some older kids who’d been expelled from Lakehaven High and the Lakehaven police brought him home and Danielle took his car away for a month. That was his worst offense, at least that Kyle knows about. Kids like that don’t kill their mothers. Do they?

Kyle uses the cover of the dense growth of trees along the winding greenbelt to move down to Danielle’s house. “No, I’m sure not,” he says.

Mike, sounding now like he is crying, hangs up just as Kyle goes into Danielle’s backyard. He knocks on the door; he’s got a story ready in case someone is there, but no one is.

He tries the knob, using the hem of his shirt. It’s unlocked. He listens for the ping or soft hum of an alarm system being activated, but there’s only silence. He walks across the den; he heads into her first-floor bedroom.

If there is anything to tie them together in this house, it will be there, he thinks. He has to know. He is nearly drunk with fear at the idea of the police arriving at any second.

He hurries into her closet. Organized on a shelf are boxes—ones for hats, more for sweaters, even though the weather has turned cool by Austin standards. He searches the boxes. Nothing. There are also photo albums there, placed in plastic storage bins. He takes them out, looks through them.

Where would she keep anything that could hurt him? He puts them back on the shelf, thinking.