Finally, Joel said only, “No.”

“Joel, I don’t mean to sound closed-minded but if that wasn’t Troy in those bushes how many queers do we have here in Pettis County?”

“Look, I need your help.” The anxiety in his voice was unmistakable—she let her question pass. “This can’t be a coincidence, Clark. Two Bentley Bison, both closeted gays, both vanish. One turns up dead, the other’s still missing a decade later. Be honest—does the sheriff’s department actually have any evidence against Jamal Reynolds?”

“Are you suggesting we’re railroading him?” she said, as if she hadn’t been asking the same thing all day yesterday.

“I’m suggesting this investigation is a lot more complicated than you thought. If news of my brother gets out nobody will care what happened to him. It’ll be just like the pictures of me all over again. I was seventeen, Clark—those photos were child pornography and the department hardly even acknowledged they existed. There must have been witnesses—you can’t stick photos inside two hundred newspapers and not leave some kind of evidence. But it went nowhere. All anybody cares about here is something to gossip over. Clark, are you—”

“After my brother disappeared, did the cops ever come to talk to you?” She couldn’t stop thinking of her interview with Mayfield at her kitchen table a decade ago.

“What are you talking about? Of course they didn’t.”

“You can’t follow every lead in a case like this,” Mayfield had said yesterday afternoon in the car, justifying the baffling fact he wasn’t pursuing the missing KT Staler more aggressively even though the boy’s disappearance set off every obvious alarm in a case like this. Why hadn’t Mayfield followed up the obvious lead that Clark had given him in the wake of her brother’s disappearance: “You could ask Joel Whitley about Troy.”

Clark suspected that Mayfield was going to regret telling her she had a knack for this work.

“Okay,” Clark said, her scalp tingling.

She wasn’t certain she agreed with every step in Joel’s logic, wasn’t certain he’d even told her the entire truth about that night in the park, but it was enough for now. She wanted to find Dylan’s killer, of course she did, but Clark was wise enough to know her motives weren’t entirely altruistic. If Joel was right and Dylan’s death was connected to Troy’s disappearance then maybe—maybe—she would find something in Dylan’s case she could use to finally staple closed her brother’s. She was willing to try.

“Okay,” Joel said.

Driving now to the sheriff’s station, Clark walked herself through what she knew. Jamal Reynolds was likely innocent, just as she’d always suspected, though she wasn’t sure how exactly she could help him. She doubted she could confirm Bethany’s story about sneaking Reynolds into her house without in turn alerting the girl’s father that something was amiss, but Clark figured she could do her best.

The fact that Dylan had possessed a bottle of painkillers, apparently without a prescription, was not, on its own, especially damning. The fact that he’d been seen counting two thousand dollars in his room, cash about which he’d lied and said was from his brother, might even have had an innocuous explanation. But when Clark held the two facts together—along with the mysterious gold wristwatch in Dylan’s bedside table, or Bethany Tanner’s expensive bracelet—Clark came to the same conclusion as Joel: it looked like Dylan Whitley had gotten himself tangled up in the drug business.