The link led to an escorting website. Across the top of the page was the profile name REALTXQB99. Beneath the name were all the tedious statistics.

6'1. 185 lbs.

8 inches cut.

$200/hour. Your place.

I’m a fucking horny Texas Teen who loves to FUCK and SERVICE mature men.

Happy to serve the Dallas/Austin/Houston areas.

Available most weekends just give me heads-up.

And there, right in the center, was Dylan Whitley, shirtless, chiseled, smiling with his hand disappearing into a thick darkness at the bottom edge of a bathroom mirror.

JOEL

Milam Municipal Park was a glorified ditch. There was a strip of road to park your car, some rough-hewn steps cut into limestone, but there was nothing at the bottom of those steps but wild holly and poison oak all running tangled through a gully.

At nine o’clock, well past dark, Joel took four steps down the side of the ditch and refused to take another. The night breeze, warm with the last traces of summer, stirred a heap of dead leaves. This was possibly the last place in Bentley he wanted to be. If you walked all the way to the bottom of those steps you could find the exact location he’d been standing when the photos had been taken ten years ago. This gully could be a landmark in Pettis County.

Clark texted him:

I just want you there in case he tries to run. Stay out of sight.

Joel’s mind was not well. He was so strung out after a week of no sleep he believed—really believed—that he could feel a single thought as it dragged itself sluggishly from one synapse to another. He’d spent a long afternoon spinning his wheels about the escorting ad. He had lost count of the Adderall tablets he’d eaten today. Blood beat against the back of his eyes.

$200/hour. Your place.

He considered telling Clark that if Luke tried to escape from her down these steps, the boy would have nowhere to run once he reached the gully, as Joel’s arrest record could attest. Instead he wrote back, I’m covert af.

AF?

Kimbra texted Joel:

Luke says he’s fifteen minutes away. I told him to please hurry I really need to see him etc etc.

Meeting here at the park had been Clark’s idea but it was Kimbra who had made it possible: the girl had devised (with enthusiasm and few questions) some story to lure Luke here. She was remarkably crafty. She’d told Joel that Evers was so desperate for friends he’d show up anywhere someone promised him a secret.

Joel had yet to tell the girl that KT had been found, safe and dubiously sound. He didn’t want her getting second thoughts.

Clark texted Joel: I’m 10 min away.

Joel glanced at the brambles that overgrew the gully. There was nothing but danger down there.

He typed, Hurry.

He touched his brother’s knife, strapped to his ankle above his jeans. Just to be safe.

I’m a fucking horny Texas Teen who loves to FUCK and SERVICE mature men, the ad read. Could his brother have really written that? Could it explain the Oxy in his room? Had Dylan popped those pills to forget all the things he had let these mature men do to him? Or, instead, had he done all of those things to afford all of those pills?