Clark nodded as if this was merely some trivial detail when Bethany had, in fact, just solved one small mystery for them. Clark had tested it herself this morning: all the killer would have needed to open Dylan’s phone and reset his security settings was a single press of the boy’s finger. Once the security was reset the killer could do anything with that phone—send messages to the victim’s brother, for example.

The finger didn’t have to be warm.

“Can you tell us when you last saw Dylan?”

Bethany seemed much more confident answering this. She’d last seen Dylan when he and the other boys left the game to head for the coast on Friday night, Bethany told her, sometime around ten thirty. Dylan left alone in his truck while Jamal hitched a ride with KT Staler. The last Bethany saw of Dylan, she said, he was heading up the highway.

“Up?” Clark said. “As in north?”

The girl hesitated. “I think so.”

This interview was proving productive. On the way back to Bentley this afternoon, Clark had finally seen what had nagged at her in the crime scene photographs. The boot prints of the officers working the scene were clearly visible in the mud. So where were the tracks left by the person (or persons) who had dumped the body? Upon closer inspection, she’d seen that several pictures revealed a muddy patch near the bank of the creek in which Dylan’s body had been discovered.

“I think this muddy smudge on the other side of the creek is our tire track,” Clark had said to Mayfield. “No one ever took the Spearsons’s road. Someone brought a truck in over the Flats on Friday night, during that storm. They stopped at the side of the creek, dumped the body and then let the rain wash away the tracks where their wheels had pulled up the grass.”

Galveston was two hundred miles south of Bentley, but according to Bethany, Dylan had last been heading in the opposite direction. The girl had just cleared any doubt for Clark and Mayfield: wherever Dylan had been murdered, he’d never had any intention of going to the coast before he got there.

“And when did these trips to the coast begin?” Clark said.

“Back in May.” Bethany gave her an elegant shrug. “Right around the start of the summer games, I remember that. I didn’t pay them much mind.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know the exact dates of these trips, would you?” Clark said, and to her surprise Bethany opened her phone and read aloud a list of dates from her calendar. Clark was further surprised when she realized just how often these trips to the coast had been: Dylan Whitley had left town with KT Staler almost every other weekend during the summer, departing late if there was an off-season game on a Friday night and leaving early if not. He had spent the last three consecutive weekends away. A total of ten trips, over twenty days of unaccounted time.