KT folded his bony frame into his seat. A patchy stretch of stubble climbed his neck. His small eyes were sunk in their sockets. He looked tired, irritated, but relatively calm. He did not look, as far as Clark could tell, like a young man hoping to conceal a murder.

“If this is about Dylan I ain’t got no idea where he is,” KT said. “He told me he never wanted to come back to this shitty town again and he was going to drive till he found a new place he wanted to be. I was like whatever. Jamal and me drove back from G-town last night and I ain’t heard from D since.”

Mayfield tilted his head. His considerable gut was creased over the edge of the table. “You’re answering a question I don’t recall asking.”

“That’s what this about, right?” KT said. “The wonder boy don’t show up to practice and now the school’s bugging?”

Clark hoped her nerves didn’t show. Her experience with interviews had, until now, been limited to drunks, meth heads driving cars with hot plates, battered spouses and their battering spouses. She had never worked a murder, and the wounds on Dylan’s body left little doubt that they were dealing with a homicide, making his the first violent death reported in Pettis County in years.

Clark felt far out of her depth. She knew that these initial interviews were precious to the investigation, that Dylan’s friends and schoolmates would likely never be more honest than they were now—or more apt to fumble some unpracticed lie—and she was terrified of squandering the moment.

“Just treat this like talk,” Mayfield had told her when they’d arrived at the school. “If they’ve got something to hide they’ll do all the work for you.”

“Maybe we could back up a little,” Clark said to KT now. “What exactly did the three of you do in Galveston over the weekend?”

KT rolled his eyes. “We fished.”

Mayfield cocked his head. “You fished for two days straight?”

No, KT explained, of course they hadn’t. The three of them—Dylan, KT and Jamal—had left town straight after the game Friday night, getting into Galveston around 1:00 a.m. Dylan seemed weird from the minute they arrived, KT said, distant and moody, and had gone straight to sleep. They got up around ten the next morning, ate some breakfast with KT’s half brother, Floyd, and then took a little putter boat out into the Gulf to fish all day.

Clark jotted all of this down. “And was Dylan still acting moody when you got out on the water?”

“He’s was a fucking pain is what he was,” KT said. All day long Dylan talked about how shitty a place Bentley was for a guy who wanted any kind of future, how the only thing anybody cared about was a game that gave you brain damage, blah blah blah. By Sunday afternoon, KT had had enough. “We was out on the water again, nothing biting, and still he’s just going on and on about how he had dreams, how he wants to have a future. So finally—it must have been like around six I guess—I say, ‘Bro, if you hate that place so much, how come you don’t just leave?’ So he got real quiet, didn’t say much till we docked that night, and then he just got out of the boat, grabbed his keys and was like ‘Peace.’ He got in his truck, headed out and that was the last I heard from him.”