“Real close,” Maggie said. “Brandon gave it to me the first summer we met. I gave it back to him the next summer when we broke up. We’d had a silly fight. Just stupid. About me flirting with another boy on the Square. We made up, but I never saw him again. God, I’d forgotten all about it.”

“Maybe we can get some prints off the necklace or the photo,” Quinn said. “I’ll talk to the manager here about pulling some security footage and talk to that waitress. Just what did she tell you?”

“She said I sure had pretty hair,” Maggie said. “And then asked if I was Maggie Powers.”

“Not Maggie Colson?”

“Nope,” she said. “The waitress said the man who’d left this said I’d have real pretty hair.”

“I’m not going to sugarcoat it, Mags,” Quinn said. “That’s creepy as hell.”

“Goddamn, this pisses me off.”

“Someone’s definitely messing with your head,” Quinn said. “Don’t let ’em in.”

Maggie nodded, letting out a long breath and placing the flat of her hand against her forehead. “Promise me you’ll get this fucker, Quinn,” she said. “I’m not fifteen anymore.”

*   *   *

“Damn,” Jessica said. “We’re going to need our own box for all of Quinn Colson’s records. Disturbing the peace. Reckless driving. Assault. Another assault. Minor in possession of alcohol. More reckless driving. Can you even go a hundred on these back roads?”

“Funny how all this went away.”

“Well,” Jessica said. “He was a minor. Most of the driving offenses happened when he was sixteen and seventeen. Some kind of junior varsity Burt Reynolds tearing up the hills of Tibbehah County. I don’t know if this really tells us a whole hell of a lot other than Quinn was a wild kid, joined the Army, and got his shit straight. Good background material. Definitely tells us Sheriff Beckett was no stranger to cutting breaks for family.”

Tashi flipped through more files, most of the offenses on notecards, alphabetized when they were lucky. But some of the file cabinets had been toppled and the cards had been scattered. They’d uprighted the cabinets and sorted the cards back in order, doing a great service for Tibbehah County’s pristine recordkeeping system. She looked down at her watch—nearly six o’clock—and it was already getting dark. They’d either need to go grab dinner and some more flashlights or just come back in the morning. It scared her to leave all this tonight now that people knew what they wanted to find. All of this could disappear tomorrow. This place was a find, a stroke of luck, on account of Jessica being so damn chatty with the clerk. Sometimes it helped having blue hair. No one could play funny and inoffensive like Jessica Torres.