Mayfield caught Clark’s yawn and pressed a fist to his own mouth. “Lordy,” he said. “I ain’t slept this bad since I was coming to this school.”

Clark paused, a hand on her lighter. “Are you having dreams too?”

“They’ll pass,” he said, and handed her a thick file without another word.

Clark studied the autopsy photos inside. She could handle the gore well enough; she’d seen her share of suicides and traffic pileups and had never been much bothered by them. What hurt were the little details: chewed nails, streaks from an inexpert fade in the hair. The soles of Dylan’s feet, calloused from a life spent in cleats.

Time of death was still difficult to determine, even after the autopsy, but Clark and Mayfield had settled on sometime between ten thirty Friday, when Dylan and his friends were seen leaving the game, and two o’clock Saturday morning when the storm had stopped, after which there would have been tracks near the creek where the body was found. The ME had seemed satisfied with this.

It confirmed, at least, Joel Whitley’s suspicion: whoever had texted him Saturday morning hadn’t been his brother.

The cause of death had been simple enough to establish: a blade, serrated, between four and six inches long, had opened the carotid artery. A hunting knife, most likely, which hardly narrowed it down: there were three of those in every truck and closet in Pettis County.

“Russ Tanner, the cheerleader’s dad, was apparently at some cattle function when Jones went by to confirm his daughter’s story yesterday,” said Mayfield. “We’ll try and get hold of him again this afternoon.”

Clark thought of the nervous way Bethany’s green nail had tap-tap-tapped the table at the end of her interview. She made a note to drive by the Tanner ranch herself, see if its gate was monitored by a camera and, if so, figure out how she could obtain that camera’s footage from Friday night. She was curious to know when precisely Bethany had gotten home after the game.

There was a whistle on the practice field, and the Bison threw themselves at each other with a clatter. Clark watched as Jamal Reynolds was brought down hard by Garrett Mason, the team’s enormous defensive safety. It took Reynolds a very long time to return to his feet.

“They’re beating the shit out of that kid,” Clark said.

“It’s like they already made up their mind about him.”

“A little quickly, no?”

She’d been saying it all day and she’d say it again. Her logic was simple: Jamal’s potential motives for killing Dylan didn’t make any sense under scrutiny. The fact that Dylan had been discovered without a shirt or underwear perhaps suggested that he had been partially undressed at the time of the murder. This, combined with KT Staler’s suggestion that Dylan had a girl on the side, had brought the detectives, tenuously, to some idea that Jamal might have killed Dylan out of jealousy for this girl. A love triangle gone sour, maybe. Perhaps—perhaps—this explained the condom that Jamal had apparently asked stuttering Benny Garcia for at halftime on Friday, though Mayfield had found that tip more than a little dubious. The whole theory was built on a shaky heap of assumptions.