Quentin said, “You don’t think it had anything to do with you?”

“I know it didn’t.”

“How can you know?”

“I just do.”

“Mr. Pollard,” Quentin said. “Even if LeRoy went to your station out of revenge or jealousy. Or if April Cooper secretly wanted to see you again—”

“She didn’t.”

“I’m saying it isn’t your fault.” He kept his tone low, measured. “None of it is your fault. Just like it wasn’t my grandfather’s fault for taking Kimmy to the Arco station. You can be honest with us. It will go no further than here.”

Pollard’s jaw flexed. “Are you recording this conversation?”

Quentin felt Summer’s gaze on him. “I’d never record you without your permission,” he said.

“I’m going to need you to take your phones out and turn them off.”

Summer removed her phone from her purse and placed it on his desk. “It’s turned off already, sir,” she said.

Quentin removed his phone from his jacket pocket. He powered it down and set it next to Summer’s, longing for his pen recorder, his eyes fixed on Pollard’s neat desk, lest someone look into them and read his thoughts. “You aren’t being recorded, Mr. Pollard,” he said. Which technically was not a lie.

Pollard glanced at the door, then turned his attention back to Quentin, his gaze intense enough to give off heat. When he finally spoke, it was in a voice so low it was barely audible. “I met April after the shooting took place.”

“What?” Quentin and Summer said it in unison.

Pollard was staring at his hands, clasped against the polished desk as though he were praying for the strength to say more. “I met her,” he said, “after the Gideon fire.”

DURING THE SUMMER between his junior and senior year in high school, an honors student, varsity quarterback, and part-time gas station attendant fell in love with a presumed-dead, fugitive murderer and harbored her for twenty-four hours, his parents and younger brother never the wiser. She’d shown up at the gas station where he worked, half dead from hunger and exhaustion. And instead of calling the police, he’d made a gut decision and hustled her out of there before anyone took notice. He’d given her food, shown her around town, shared his deepest secrets with her, and made sure she got out safely, after which he’d gone on with his life, telling no one about his “first love” for more than forty years. It sounded like a pitch for some ill-conceived romance novel, but Pollard swore it was true. Every word of it. And, during the brief time Quentin spent in his presence, he was inclined to believe him.