She held his eye. “He did. But he didn’t say what it was. And now he’s gone.”

The two boys exchanged looks.

“I didn’t send that to nobody,” Whiskey said.

“Who’s asking?” T-Bay asked Kimbra.

“Nobody but me.”

T-Bay raised an eyebrow. “Then what did Joel Whitley want to know at the diner yesterday?”

“Nothing.” She blinked. “Just where KT had gone.”

“I mean it had to have been a joke, right?” said Whiskey, sounding a little pathetic. “Those pictures.”

“You mean the ones of Joel back in the day?” Kimbra said.

The two boys looked at each other again. “You might as well show her,” T-Bay said.

Whiskey hesitated before he pulled his phone from his pocket.

“It’s some racist shit anyway,” T-Bay said. “Jamal’s not the only guy on the team without an alibi.”

Kimbra felt her phone buzz again. She didn’t move. “What?”

“Can’t nobody know that came from us,” Whiskey said, locking his own phone and gathering up his book.

Kimbra opened the message she’d just received. At first it wasn’t as bad as she thought. Then she clicked the link, let her browser load and gasped. She looked up at the two boys. “Who sent you this?”

T-Bay narrowed his eyes. “It doesn’t matter. If you’re talking to Joel there’s something else he needs to know.”

JOEL

The morning had been a wash. The employees at Sparks’s Auto Body had refused to talk to Joel about the discovery of the bloody sock in Jamal’s Ford Explorer. A grungy man with an ugly dash of a scar under one eye had asked him, “You want us to buff them words off your door?” Joel had declined.

He drove to the Varsity Motel, a peeling cinder block horseshoe south of town on the highway, and asked after Jason Ovelle, just as Clark had recommended. The woman behind the counter said she didn’t know a man by that name. Joel slid her two twenties and she told him she hadn’t seen him all week. Joel asked to see Ovelle’s room, hoping to discover some trace of where he might have gone, but the woman said that it had been rented to another party. When Joel pointed out that his was the only car in the parking lot, the lady only shrugged and turned back to her magazine.

On South Street, Joel passed Mrs. Mason, his mother’s friend, walking out of the bank with her terrier in her purse. She did a bad job of hiding her surprise at seeing him. When he asked her how her nephews Garrett and Ranger were doing these days, she invented a hair appointment in Temple and climbed into her car.

He went to the diner. Waiting for a fried sandwich—years of self-deprivation, and all it took was some violent grief to finally forget about his abs—he overheard a man in the booth behind him say, “It all feels a little familiar, don’t it?”

“You mean like it was with the Clark boy?” replied a second man.