Shannon looks at her through the cab of the truck.

“You can drop him off first,” she says, testing. “Then you can meet me, and we’ll go together.”

Shannon looks down at his feet, and Kateri sees the muscles in his jaw set. There’s a chance he’ll bail. He’ll say he’s taking the dog home and will never show, and she’ll lose track of him again for days, or for good. He’s got friends, she thinks. He has someone protecting him. He’s not alone.

“Where?” he asks.

“Meet me at the station,” she says. “In thirty.”

She waits while he pulls out and goes left, the opposite way from his own house, up toward the new construction. The dog pokes his muzzle out the window, sniffing and appearing to smile. He has the loose lips of a hound. But not the soft mouth.

At the station, both Albany and Burlington newspeople approach her on her way in. Behind them is a truck from a Syracuse station.

“Detective!” the reporter calls. She’s a young woman with that gloss of TV news: perfect hair, shining lips.

Kateri holds up her hand and shakes her head. She ducks in before they can barrage her with questions about the murdered cop.

Inside, Hurt and the chief are working on a statement. There’s very little they can actually say, but they need to confirm publicly that yes, a young deputy has been murdered. And yes, they are also working on the disappearance of local woman Pearl Jenkins.

“We need a DNA sample from one of the kids to match the blood at the house.”

“I’m taking Shannon Jenkins to the morgue,” she tells them. The chief stands over Hurt’s desk.

“Did you arrest him?” Hurt asks.

“I don’t have anything to arrest him for,” Kateri answers.

Chief Whittaker rubs his face with his hand. Everything about him, Kateri thinks, is a square. His head, his crew cut, his hands, his torso.

“I know you have urban training,” he says to Kateri. “But things are pretty simple up here,” he tells her.

“I’ll decide that,” she says. “I can’t connect him to the crime yet.” She smiles by way of a frown and leaves them to collect files from her office before she takes Shannon Jenkins to the morgue.

She smokes half a cigarette on the sidewalk beside the building, watching the road. She remembers the direction he drove off in, the make and model of the truck, the sight of the dog. But she waits, tapping her shoe, smoking too quickly. It gives her a head rush. She thinks, I shouldn’t have let him go. She watches every car that goes by, every car that’s not his. He didn’t have the look, she thinks, that look that says run. Something about him seemed resigned.

His blue truck, empty of the dog and the firewood, pulls in on time and parks in the back of the station where the employee cars are. She watches him sit in the driver’s seat for a moment, ruffling his hands through his hair, looking down at his lap, probably at his phone. She sees him take a deep breath and try to relax his shoulders before he gets out.