“They found him on Tuesday, in a motel up outside that town Mexia. You know the place?”

“A couple of hours north. What was he doing up there?”

“Precisely. His mother knew how to find me. She asked me to go identify him. As a friend of the family.”

“An overdose?”

“That’s what they told her. Oxy. Oxycodone. You know what it is?”

Oh, did Joel ever. A breeze stirred an army blanket that had been nailed over a busted window. Joel thought of the bottle of pills he’d discovered in his brother’s nightstand, wondered if he and Clark had been too hasty to assume Dylan hadn’t been involved in drugs after all. “It’s a painkiller.”

“Makes you loopier than morphine, yeah. But downers like Oxy was never Jason’s style,” Ranger said. “He might have got a little wired on ice every now and then but lately he hadn’t even been using that. He said he was clean the last time I saw him.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t feel bad for the man, that game had already ruined him. The busted ankle he had? Nobody likes to remember he got that at the play-offs. If he’d been any use to the team the school wouldn’t have given two shits about his grades, but after that injury—” Ranger snickered his old snicker. “You want to know the sorry part? Jason been allergic all his life to that sticky shit on the back of tape. Glue. What’s the word?”

“Adhesive?”

“Bless you. Adhesive. That shit so much as grazed him, Jason got himself these awful red hives all on his skin. I’d seen it before.”

Ranger drank.

“The cops up in Mexia say it must have been suicide, all the pills he took. But I want to know why he would have taped over his own mouth once he’d swallowed the damn bottle. Because sure enough he had them hives all the way around his cheeks. They let me see his wrists. His ankles. Same thing. Somebody had trussed him up like a pig and tore all the tape off when they was done, Whitley. I’m sure it were an accident.”

Joel said, “There’s been a lot of those lately. Officer Grissom suddenly took up smoking last night and forgot to turn off his oxygen.”

“Hmph.”

“I know that Grissom arrested your brother in July for dealing drugs with KT Staler. The deputy had an accident on his horse a few weeks later. And then last night, after he started talking again, his house burns down. Am I crazy for wondering if these aren’t quite coincidences?”

“I’ll never understand that Grissom. He knew better.”

“Knew better than to arrest one of the golden boys?”

A grackle squawked outside. The drone of cicadas resonated in the small crevices of Joel’s ears. The only decoration Joel saw anywhere in the shack was a long shelf of football trophies that had gone dull with age. One had lost its arm.

“Wesley said you were one of them,” Joel said.