“Who the hell are you and what the hell are you doing in my house?” she asked.

“What’s a pretty little thing like you doing with a big gun like that?” Ladarius asked, smiling. Trying to do his best and most charming Will Smith.

“If you don’t put up your hands and step away from the T-bone,” the blonde girl said, “you sure as hell are gonna find out.”

FOURTEEN

Lillie had a rare few hours off and had taken Rose and their new pit bull, Jerry Lee, down to Tom Lee Park along the Mississippi River. She knew at any moment the marshals might get a lead on those kids and anxiously walked the riverside with her phone in her hand. They hadn’t been at the park fifteen minutes when Quinn called, Lillie hoping this would finally be it, that someone down in Tibbehah knew where they’d gone over in Arkansas.

“Let me guess,” Lillie said. “Those little bastards came down to the SO and turned themselves in?”

“No such luck,” Quinn said. “But I am hearing a few things that trouble me.”

“Troubling you?” Lillie said. “If you don’t know where they’ve run off to, I don’t much give a damn.”

“You need to hear this.”

“Oh, hell,” Lillie said. “You think TJ Byrd may be innocent. Right? May I remind you I don’t give two shits. You investigate. I bring ’em in. And it’s not up to either of us whether they’re guilty or not. Damn. I sure was hoping you were Charlie Hodge. He’s been running down no-tell motels in West Memphis while I get a little time with Miss Rose.”

“And how is she?”

“More beautiful and perfect than her momma deserves,” Lillie said. “She also eats like a horse and cusses like a sailor. Fluently, I might add, in two languages.”

“Wonder where she gets it?”

Lillie had on a Redbirds ball cap and a puffy black coat. It was colder than a witch’s tit along the Mississippi, but the sun was high and bright, not a cloud in the sky. Rose ran in circles with Jerry Lee, that muscly dog wanting back the rope bone she’d been tossing to him.

“Okay,” Lillie said. “I’ll bite. Tell me why you called, Sheriff. Won’t make a damn difference to me, but I’d be glad to listen while I spend precious family time with my daughter and our dog.”

“When did y’all get a dog?”

“Christmas,” Lillie said. “From the shelter. You’d like him. Big, brindle-coated pit named Jerry Lee. He’d tear a man’s nuts off as quick as I can snap my fingers.”

The wind blew hard across the bluffs, scattering dead leaves down around the wide-open grassy spaces and causing static on her phone.