Alarms are ringing now. I don’t know the significance of what I am seeing, but I know with utter certainty that it is significant. And I know a man who can tell me why. While researching my third novel, I spent two days with a BATF explosives expert named Huey Moak. Huey showed me a lot of photographs and even more pieces of stretched and twisted metal. What I’m seeing now, I saw in some of those photos.

“Do you mind if I borrow a piece of this engine?”

“Take the whole car if it will help.”

Reaching down into the mass of metal debris, I pull out a flat piece about two inches square, sheared off as cleanly as if it had been cut by a blowtorch. I slip this into my pocket, then rake a handful of tiny shrapnel off the top of a smashed and corroded Triton battery. Like his coworkers, Del Payton got his batteries at a sixty percent discount from the company.

“May I borrow your bandanna?”

Althea unties the red cloth from her head and hands it to me. I lay it on the roof of the Fairlane, set the shrapnel in it, and tie the cloth into a tight sack.

“Thanks. I’d better get going.”

“You’ve seen something,” she says. “You’re excited. I can tell.”

“Yes, but I don’t know what it means. I’ll let you know as soon as I do.”

She looks into my eyes, then nods. “All right. I’ll walk you to your car.”

As we round the house, a battered pickup pulls into the drive. Three black kids stand in back, looking over the roof of the cab. Two girls and a boy. The truck wheezes to a stop, and a black man a few years younger than I gets out wearing a grease-stained jumpsuit. As he approaches, I see a white patch on his breast pocket. The word DEL is stenciled on it in red. Over his shoulder, Georgia Payton continues her purposeful rocking.

“Penn,” says Althea, “this is my son, Del Junior. Del, this is Mr. Penn Cage.”

I offer my hand, but the man makes no move to shake it.

“You shake this man’s hand,” Althea snaps in a voice crackling with maternal authority. “This the man who’s going to find out who killed your daddy.”

Del Jr. grudgingly holds out his hand, and I shake it. You’d have to cut a quarter inch into his palm to draw blood.

“Take the kids inside,” Althea tells him.

Del Jr. jerks his head toward the house, and the children walk backward to the front door, staring at me as they go. Del looks at my father’s BMW, and it’s painfully easy to read his face. The money that car cost would keep his family fed and sheltered for five years. He turns and follows his kids into the house.