Joel’s eyes burned as a door opened and light spilled in from outside. The shapes of two men appeared, one tall and heavy, the other shorter, more tightly packed. The two were followed, a moment later, by a lithe, muscled form that could only be Browder.

“Don’t let that door bolt,” said Mr. Boone, the county attorney. “My key—fuck, what did you do?”

Deputy Browder closed the door softly. There was a click and a bare red light came on overhead, illuminating what looked like the inside of a small camper trailer. Joel was standing, he saw, in what had once been a living room but had long ago been emptied of all furniture but a black leather sofa. Hanging from nails across black walls were a range of instruments that Joel recognized from sex shops and some of the stranger corners his nocturnal adventures in Manhattan had taken him: riding crops, paddles, ball gags, chains.

The three men paid him no attention. They were standing in the camper’s bare kitchen, staring at the shape Joel had earlier seen on the floor. It was Kimbra Lott, he realized: her feet bound with black tape, her hands cuffed to something on the wall.

“Christ Jesus,” said Coach Parter.

“Why the hell did you bring her here?” Boone said.

“She’d been asking questions around the school,” Deputy Browder said. “I was watching the bank while Jones was on his break—I saw her go into the store. I just wanted to talk to her, figure out what she’d heard. I didn’t know she was going to scream.”

“Christ Jesus,” Parter said again.

“Has her father heard yet? That she’s here?” said Boone.

“Are you smoking that ice now too?” said Parter. “Can you imagine what the little blossom would do if he knew about this?”

A long moment of deliberation. Boone played his nails along a black metal refrigerator that rested near the kitchen’s doorway. “There might be some leverage in it.”

Parter pulled a face. Joel caught, in the coach’s scowl, decades’ worth of dissatisfaction with the county attorney. A fraying patience.

Boone rounded on Joel. “Mr. Whitley, how are you?”

Joel stared at him.

The man motioned to Browder. The tattooed young deputy slid a long knife from a sheath at his waist—“The wound to the neck was caused by a serrated blade about six inches long,” Clark had told him Wednesday night (really, you don’t say?)—and tossed it casually in the air. Caught it. Tossed it. Caught it. Browder wore only a pair of baggy jeans and a leather jacket over his bare chest.

A jacket, but no shirt. A costume like the ones these men were wearing. Like Dylan had been wearing.

“You ain’t gonna holler on us, are you?” said the deputy, drawing close, holding the point of the knife a few inches from Joel’s eye.

Joel pulled back, shook his head no.

Browder ripped the tape from Joel’s mouth. Joel didn’t make a sound.

Boone gave Browder a dismissive little flick of his hand.