The man nodded an opening, and rather than instantly start asking questions, which would have felt suspicious, Beaufort talked and talked like he really didn’t want to hear what the other fellow had to say. He talked about Sarasota, and the weather in early December, how it makes everyone cranky because the summer should be over but wasn’t. How the whole west coast of Florida had grown from the time he had lived there as a child. How he had been away from the area for a long time, working in Mississippi.

After a while Meadows’s look, formerly melting with the bourbon, got a little icy, like he suspected Beaufort was going to put the touch on him, but he didn’t shift his eyes away. So Beaufort kept going, how he was an old man now. How he was making a pilgrimage to all his old haunts now that his wife had died a year ago, God rest her soul. How he grew up in a small town not too far from Sarasota. Osprey, did the man ever hear of Osprey? He was headed there next.

“Where in Osprey?” Meadows asked.

Beaufort was ready for this one, having found Google Maps. He named an address about a quarter mile from where the Walker family had lived.

Like any other cop, as long as he wasn’t going against confidentiality rules, Meadows couldn’t help spilling about the case he was working on. He said, “How old are you, if you don’t mind my asking.”

“I’m sixty-three, and proud of it,” Beaufort said, shaving a few years off just in case at some point Meadows was to do some math to find out how old Beaufort was at the time of the crime. “But why do you ask?”

“Ever hear about the Walker family murders?” Meadows asked.

“Hell, yeah,” Beaufort said. “I was just knee-high to a grasshopper when it all happened, the Clutters and then the Walkers, and I was living in the same town. Remember the Clutters?”

“I guess I do,” Meadows said.

“The Clutters was scary enough, and then blam, the Walkers happened like a one-two punch just a month or so later. I remember my parents locking the doors for the first time and not letting me go out by myself after dark. Everyone was scared that it would happen again. Times like that, the whole country changed, didn’t it?” Beaufort mentioned how he had read In Cold Blood when it first came out, and that everyone in Osprey talked about how their town was made famous in that book, just because the men who committed the Clutter family murders were suspected of killing the Walkers, too. “You’d think I could remember the names of those guys. What was their names again?”