TWENTY-EIGHT: KATERI

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 2

“I don’t know if they can convict him,” Hurt tells her. “He’s slimy, and I’m sure he’s got resources. But you definitely have enough to arrest him.”

They sit side by side in an unmarked car, not Kateri’s and not Hurt’s, but a squad car. A big, gray sedan.

“He’s capable of anything, Fisher,” Hurt says, as if she needs reminding. It will be a long time, she thinks, before someone touches her and she doesn’t think of his urgent, searching fingers.

Hurt drives this time, stuck in traffic in the small town, where the road slows to fifteen miles per hour in front of the school. Kids come out. Kids close to Shannon’s age. Boys, laughing. They drive trucks and smoke cigarettes and call out to girls who walk over to Stewart’s.

“Don’t second-guess it,” Hurt says. “My gut is that we’d better act quick.”

“Do you think he’ll flee?” Kateri asks.

“I hope he hasn’t already,” Hurt says. “He’s got places to go. He could disappear pretty easily.”

She feels wired taut, trembling. She’s afraid of what Bear will say and is sure that he’s a sociopathic liar, that he’ll implicate her, that he’ll retell everything in his own best light. And her worst. She leans her head back against the passenger seat. I should have said something, she thinks. I should have recused myself the second it happened. But she couldn’t. She’d been waiting for months for a decent case to come along, and she’d be damned if he was going to ruin that for her.

When the traffic frees up, Hurt turns the car onto Fountain Street and heads toward the developing tract of houses, on the corn hill that sits above town. It looks down onto the village, over the train tracks. Over the ravine and over the park, which sprawls to the north of town where the house that Shannon still owns sits, empty and cordoned off, tainted with blood and tissue.

She got him to say it.

She watched Shannon steel up, his jaw clenched, his face blank of emotion when she knew inside he was crumbling.

“What exactly did Bear say to you?” she asked. It was late. The camera ran in the corner, and he didn’t even seem to notice anymore.

“That he could get me out of it,” he said. “He kept talking like I had done it, like it was obvious, but that I had blacked it out or whatever. I didn’t remember. So he kept saying it would be okay. I just needed to trust him.”

“He said he could get you out of it,” Kateri repeated.

“Yeah,” Shannon said. His lips were white around the edges. Pressed. Tight. “Because he had gotten out of it before,” he added.

He knows, she thought. She waited for him to go on.

“He’s done this before,” Shannon said. “He killed someone,” he said, and his voice broke. “You know this, right? And they covered it up—it was sealed, or whatever that means.”