“Agent Solomon, who shares the name of a wise and wealthy king of antiquity, deserves a chance to prove himself as a man of justice. I am going to step back inside God’s house, and in the event anyone has any insight to share with him, they should feel free and unfettered to do so.”

With that, the pastor stepped back inside the church and closed the door. Solomon thought it strange that the man seemed reluctant to bear witness to what those among his flock might have to say. The reason for this became apparent after much quiet consultation among an extended family huddled near the older woman in the blue dress—who regarded them with a look of cutting disapproval only one’s elder can muster.

A man in his thirties pulled off his straw hat, revealing a glistening bald head and the sweat-yellowed band inside the crown of the hat. He wore a tie pin with a small cross containing a glass jewel where the silver lines intersected. He gave one long look at the lawmen waiting anxiously across the street, before turning his attention back to Solomon.

He said, almost in a whisper, “You maybe need to know about the boy.”

The white agent, whose name was revealed to be Tyler, drove, with SAIC Macklin in the passenger seat, Solomon sitting alone in back. They followed the sheriff’s official car, a tan-on-white hardtop station wagon with the county star emblazoned on the door.

They rode along a soft country road past miles of sugarcane fields. With the windows down for ventilation, Macklin had to shout his questions back at Solomon over the gusty hot air and road dust and cigarette smoke, but Solomon had no answers for him. He didn’t know what awaited them at the address, whether it was a potential suspect, a witness to the crime, or something else altogether. The straw hat man wouldn’t say any more, having been silently shamed into submission by his fellow churchgoers.

The sheriff’s car slowed to a stop, asking directions from a boy of thirteen or fourteen, walking shirtless and barefoot, whacking at road grass with a thin switch of cut sugarcane. The boy pointed up the road with the stalk, telling them where to go. Solomon noticed Tyler’s eyes watching him in the rearview mirror the way an agent dead-eyes a suspect or a complainant.

The sharecropper’s house was a low-slung, rambling structure with no foundation, set back from a path in the field. It was constructed of unpainted wood that seemed better suited for tinder than shelter. The structure itself was decades old, though it seemed to Solomon that one good summer storm would shred it to matchsticks.