“The police won’t listen to her and the last guy her brother hired didn’t get far.”

He looked through me into some bleak distance.

“Early on with the Bureau, I was assigned to a joint taskforce hunting for a serial killer on the Gulf Coast. The search had gone on for a while before I arrived and it went on and on after I was reassigned. Fifteen years of murders, disappearances, false leads, dead ends. The team filled a shipping container with reports, interviews, photographs, and small pieces of evidence collected from the death sites. People graduated from Quantico and joined the case, like me. Agents were reassigned, like me. Agents retired and bequeathed their notes to an ever-dwindling pool of investigators. Marriages, divorces, firings, heart attacks, strokes, suicides.”

Bellow swallowed his drink in one go. Didn’t even shudder as it hit bottom.

“You pursue a case for years; sludge through marshes, scoop bodies out of rivers, flatten your arches tracking down witnesses; your hair thins and your sanity does too. The faces of victims haunt your nightmares. Finally, a traffic cop in the Midwest pulls the perp over for a busted taillight and cracks it wide open. Instead of relief, you feel emptiness. Instead of elation, there’s a nagging sense of disappointment.”

“The gist of that story being . . . ?”

“I understand being the next man up. I understand your stubbornness. I understand irrationality. Chasing ghosts isn’t for people who want to stay in their right minds.”

“Another round?” I said.

“Sold,” he said.

■■■

I brought the drinks and we sipped and watched Lionel and the women shoot pool. The lady in the halter top touched her hair and laughed frequently. The blonde wore Lionel’s hat. They took turns chalking his cue and blowing off the excess dust. Meanwhile, the throng of bikers reminded me of a dormant volcano grumbling to life.

“What made you decide to become a cop?” I said.

Bellow held his glass and turned it in the dim light. Those ghosts he’d invoked swam beneath the surface of his skin, jostling for primacy, blending, then separating. His child self, young agent, family man, widower, jaded professional.

“Ask what made me stay a cop.”

“I’ll bite.”

“It’s 1971, I’m at the breakfast table and my dad is reading the paper. I see a photo with a headline that doesn’t match until I get a chance to read the fine print later. A black-and-white media shot of convicted murderer Juan Corona. Owned a peach ranch in California. Maybe you never heard of him. He’s in a suit and tie. Cuffed, but the chain is almost slack. Grinning like a comedian. He’s clowning for reporters. A deputy sticks a hand in his short ribs, guiding him forward. The cop scowls in weary disgust, but Corona gobbles the attention as he does the cha-cha-cha toward the prison bus and a permanent stay at the crossbar hotel.

“I study the photo and think he doesn’t look like a bad guy. Nah, he looks like my dad’s pal from work, a fella we called Uncle Jim. Jim swaggered into the family barbecue, several margaritas under his belt, and entertained the kids with a slapstick routine. That’s how Corona seemed in that photo. He murdered twenty-five people with a machete, did Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky, Mr. Vaudeville, Mr. Psychopath. Itinerant laborers on the ol’ peach farm. Dig a hole, plant a tree. In college, I reacquainted myself with his lurid case history in a true-crime magazine. An inmate welcomed Corona to prison by stabbing him good and proper. Another disgruntled con gouged out Corona’s eye.”