He slides into his suit jacket, which is black and shiny like it’s coated in oil. “I fucking hate these white-trash cases,” he says. He leaves the door open when he goes. Outside, there’s a flutter of flash as he gets into his car.

Kateri feigns working late. Hurt comes into her office at six and asks if she wants a beer, stammers, and adds, “Or whatever,” as she clicks away on her keyboard without actually typing anything. She looks up from the screen. “Nah, I need to follow this thread,” she tells him.

In fact, she’s sure there is a thread she should be following, and she has a feeling it goes back to Park Jenkins and Pearl’s desperate fear of him. She wishes there were an easier way to take their fucking white-trash case and zoom out—to the county, the state, the nation. Something that might illuminate the connections for her. Might light up a line whose hook ends in Bear Miller.

They have an all-points bulletin on the Buick. There are Amber Alerts for Sparrow Annie Jenkins, age five, 38 inches tall, 38 pounds, blue eyes, red curly hair, mixed race. No one is sure what she’s wearing. Or if it matters.

Kateri tries first to narrow the number of old-style Buicks on the road. Hurt told her it was an early-’90s model. Old, but not that old. Just enough to stand out. No one got plates. And there is no telling if the plates might be New York or Vermont or even Ontario or Quebec. Searching is slow and turns up a lot of nothing.

“How’s it going?” Hurt asks from her doorway.

“Not great,” she says without thinking.

He leans in, and his body softens, his eyes warm. “It’s the course of the case,” he says. “It’s what happens. People get tired and discouraged.”

“Is that how I seem?” Kateri asks.

“Not in a bad way,” Hurt says. He comes all the way in and takes the chair across from her desk, sits with his ankle crossed over the opposite knee.

Kateri looks at the ceiling, thinking.

“I brought you something,” Hurt says then, beginning to smile.

She jumps, and her phone clatters from the desk to the floor. She’s wary of men bringing her gifts. “What is it?”

He places a fat folder on her desk.

“It’s Bear Miller’s sealed file,” he tells her.

It’s from the mid-’90s. Kateri goes through the slick, damp-feeling facsimile pages and behind that finds a handwritten report from an officer in Vermont. Bear Miller was arrested at seventeen for assault on another boy, also seventeen.

It’s written in careful cursive. Began as a fight. Boys were acquainted. Happened in the parking lot of a Kinney Drugs. Miller swung a bat in self-defense. This part is underlined. The other boy, Beaulieau, was knocked out.

Charges were dropped.

She looks at the date, and the town and the county, and opens her laptop. There must have been something else. Drugs. Money. A girl, maybe. Someone knows the rest of this story, she thinks. Otherwise, why seal it? It seems incomplete. Petty, even.