“I see.” Curtis’s eyes went to the file folder again. “Mr. Flamont, are you an acquaintance of one Nina Hernandez?”

“What’s she got to do with any of this?”

“Two of my deputies spoke with her this morning. She claims you were with her between the hours of twelve midnight and three a.m. Saturday.”

“That bitch!”

“And according to the transcript . . .” Curtis slipped on his reading glasses and read from the sheet in his hand. “Miss Hernandez didn’t go anywhere near your balls.”

CHAPTER 28

CURTIS scanned the crowd as he mouthed the last lines of the national anthem, his Stetson pressed against his heart. The stands on both sides of the basketball court were filled to capacity with parents, school faculty, students, city officials, and members of the local media. All were on their feet, most of them staring through glistening eyes at the Stars and Stripes above the scoreboard.

It took seeing them all together for Curtis to realize just how many people he had personally dealt with in some way or another over the years. He saw grown men he used to discipline as children. Some he had helped. Others he had arrested. Many he had just let slide, like the young man he spotted in the student section who had simply been too embarrassed to pay for his skin mag at the 7-Eleven last month. He saw two college-age girls he’d recently booked for shoplifting pantyhose from Eckerd. He also spotted a familiar middle-age woman at midcourt. Just last week he’d let her off the hook for doing forty-one in a twenty when she’d told him she had a roast burning in the oven. Cashiers and cowboys, pastors and plumbers. Every walk of life was in attendance, all of them linked by the town’s single common denominator: the Killington Jackrabbits.

The anthem finished and the crowd took their seats. Principal Hodges emerged from the locker room and made his way to the podium, which stood under the south backboard, enclosed by a ring of plastic poinsettias. As the principal shuffled through a stack of note cards, Curtis set his Stetson back on his head and took his seat a few feet away.

Mr. Hodges tilted the microphone down. “First of all, I want to say that, as principal of this great institution, my heart goes out to the families of all of our beloved players. And that goes for the families of the assistant coaching staff and of Mr. Jim Tom Grady, our esteemed bus driver, as well. Secondly, I want to say to the student body that in the face of adversity, Killington High School has always been a frontrunner in—”

“Cut the shit!”

“Yeah, we want answers! Who the hell did this?”

Curtis cringed as shouting heads popped up across the bleachers. The assembly was only three minutes old, and already his worst fears were coming true.