“I don’t know. I do know that Reynolds didn’t even know the name of this mysterious Tillery man.”

“Then why go to the trouble of leaving with his friends at the game Friday night if he wasn’t going to the coast with them?”

Mayfield shrugged. He seemed just as disappointed by their interviews with the rest of the team yesterday as she did. Other than confirming the fact that Dylan, KT and Jamal had all three left together on Friday night, Clark and Mayfield had learned little else from the Bison.

“Let’s play with hypotheticals,” Mayfield said. “Maybe all three boys came down here after all, and Jamal somehow forgot Floyd’s every detail. Maybe Dylan was upset when he texted his brother on Saturday morning but then he calmed down and didn’t leave.” Mayfield reached for his coffee. “Jamal said Dylan had been acting hot and cold since the start of the summer. Maybe something set him off Sunday, and this time he was upset enough to go through with it.”

“‘Go through with it.’ Like suicide,” Clark said and, not for the first time since Saturday at the bar with Joel, she thought of her brother. Suicide had long since become the popular theory to explain Troy’s disappearance. There was enough empty country in Pettis County a man could drive twenty minutes in any direction and put a gun in his mouth and run good odds of never being found. A search for Troy in the Flats east of Bentley had been mounted a decade ago—Clark remembered that much, though the search party had somehow gotten turned around and returned to town almost without realizing it, empty-handed and unsettled. A second search had not been mounted.

“Not suicide. Dylan Whitley couldn’t have cut his own throat so deep on his own,” Mayfield said, steering their car around a rickety horse trailer. “But making the choice to run away from home with just the clothes on your back ain’t much more reasonable than the choice to kill yourself.”

“Fair enough. But then what? Dylan leaves out of Galveston at six, changes his mind again, turns around, comes back to Bentley, drives twenty miles north of town to a spit of empty land and gets his throat cut? What happened to his truck? What—”

Something occurred to her. She flipped through the case file until she found the page she wanted. “Listen to this: Dylan was found wearing ‘one pair of Levi’s jeans (heavily bloodstained), no underwear, one leather belt and one Bentley Bison synthetic leather team jacket (also bloodstained).’ What happened to his shoes and his socks? His shirt? Hell, why wasn’t he wearing underwear?”

Mayfield made a satisfied little noise. “Why indeed?”

Clark read over the notes again to be certain her memory was correct. It was. A forensics search of the area in which Dylan’s body was discovered had not been fruitful. There was no trace of blood, no boot prints or tire tracks, no signs of a struggle. Deputies Jones and Browder had not discovered a scrap of clothing.