“Just come out for a minute. I’m not looking for trouble; I just want to settle some things in my mind, and I’ll pay you for information.” With that the door chain came undone, and Vonda stepped out onto the landing and lit up a cigarette.

“Okay, whaddya want to know?”

Now that he had the long-awaited object of his manhunt in front of him, Mitch realized he had been obsessing over a poor, pathetic wreck of a kid, chasing him all the way across the country, and he was probably nothing more than the cops had figured. A dupe. But Mitch had him in his sights, so he pressed on.

“Why do you think Danny asked you to come to his house that night?”

Vonda was obviously nervous; he repeatedly took off his baseball cap, ran his fingers through his unkempt hair, and put the cap back on. He had told this story many times, yet he was acting like someone who was afraid he was going to slip and say the wrong thing.

“Didn’t you hear what I told the cops?”

“I did, but I wanted to hear it from you, because, well, you know the whole thing seems sort of crazy, and Danny was my good friend. I’m just trying to figure out what set him off.” Mitch was still suspicious of Vonda, but he had just identified exactly what was driving him. It was that unknowable “why” question.

“I don’t know for sure. I only know what he told me, and that was just some made-up stuff, but it’s probably just like the cops said. He wanted to make it look like I did it, and then he was gonna use that shotgun on me after he killed Rachel, and say it was self-defense, or make it look like he was trying to save his wife and had to kill me.”

“But you must have gone into the house at some point, didn’t you?”

“No way. No, man, I didn’t! After Danny said he was gonna kill her and then went back inside, I wasn’t gonna set foot in there. And before that, I was just supposed to be outside trying to make it look like a break-in.”

“Okay, but I don’t get how you could have just gone to sleep after he said something like that, even if you thought he didn’t mean it. How do you sleep through all the screaming and yelling that must have been going on?”

“You want to know the truth?” Vonda looked defeated and a bit embarrassed.

“Yeah,” Mitch said. “That’s exactly what I want.”

“I had a few Oxys I’d been saving because I thought I would be going home, and I wanted to pop them there. When Danny went back in the last time, I swallowed them and nodded off.”