Browder filled the glasses to their rims, propped himself against her counter. “Drink,” he said. “Be merry.”

The neat rum tasted wrong on her tongue, too jaunty for a week so somber. She drank more. “It’s quiet on patrol tonight?”

Browder shrugged. “Jones is running the squawk box. I ain’t heard nothing in hours.”

The squawk box was the department’s name for the software that forwarded any local 911 calls to an officer on duty. In the wake of the town’s latest budget cut they couldn’t afford a dedicated dispatcher.

“No sign of KT Staler, I take it?” he said.

“He’d have to walk through the door for us to find him, it seems. I can’t help but wonder if—”

“What?”

“It’s nothing.”

“You mean you can’t help but wonder why no one seems too worried about chasing a white boy with no alibi?”

She smiled, though there was nothing good about it. “Something like that.”

They sipped their drinks. Browder’s eye settled on a file. “‘Troy Clark,’” he read aloud. “That was your brother’s name, no?”

When Clark had returned home from the station this evening she hadn’t been able to help herself. She’d pulled her brother’s file from her closet and scoured the thin record of his missing person’s investigation for any sign of the eight-thousand-dollar debt Mayfield had told her about this afternoon and, just like the investigator had said, she’d found no trace of it. No record of drug use, no mention of known drug users in the few skimpy interviews that had been conducted with Hannah Szilack, the girlfriend who had reported Troy missing, nor in the interviews that had been conducted with Clark’s father or herself.

“It still is his name, as far as I’m aware,” Clark said.

“Sorry.” Browder pulled his eyes up from the file. “He was really something till he hurt his neck. Did they ever talk to any of the guys who was on the team with him?”

“Not that I know of. He hadn’t played for a few years by the time he disappeared.” Clark leaned back to check her phone, saw that it really had died. She plugged it into a charger by her toaster.

Browder chuckled. “It probably wouldn’t have done no good. They say girls is secretive, but shit—some of the Bison I played with had more tricks than a deck of cards.”

“I think the same’s true today.” Clark frowned. “How do I talk to those kids, Browder? How do I make them open up?”

The deputy gave her an exaggerated shrug. “Torture? I don’t know, man. If those boys know anything about what happened to Dylan they’re probably settling their own scores.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Clark finished her rum.

Browder refilled her glass before she could stop him. A funny look came into his eye as he filled his own. “I’m thinking of getting another tattoo,” he said abruptly, and he eased the shirt of his uniform up from beneath his belt to reveal a pale, firm stretch of stomach. He indicated the band of muscle that ran along his hip. “I want it to say Lead the Charge. Like inside of a football, maybe? Or is that corny?”