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talking to Sheriff Sumner and a deputy, Ollie Gibson, scribbling something down. It’s funny, when you spend your whole life in a small town, people who don’t belong stand out like ten-foot aliens belting show tunes.
    “Came up from the city,” Turley said. “Detective.”
    “Why is a Concord detective up here investigating a dead junkie behind a truck stop?” I asked.
    Turley shrugged.
    The detective briefly glanced my way. Aromas from the crappy fried food they served in the Peachtree drifted over, mixing with the cigarette smoke and diesel emissions; it smelled nauseous.
    I gestured toward the detective, who’d already returned to jotting notes. “Is he going to want to talk to me?”
    “Eventually, I guess,” Turley said. He looked me squarely in the eyes. “I’m granting you a courtesy.”
    “A courtesy?”
    “Yeah,” Turley said, testily. “A courtesy. A favor. Now do
yourself
a favor. Find Chris. Get him to come down on his own so we can straighten this out. I don’t know why they sent a detective all the way from Concord. But you’re right. It’s weird. The drug shit must really begetting folks riled up. Last thing Michael Lombardi’s campaign needs is a drug-related murder in his hometown.” Anticipating what I was about to say next, Turley quickly added, “No one is saying Chris is guilty of anything. But Naginis
was
killed. And your brother was heard making threats. It’s hardly a leap.” Turley looked me dead on. “I know what you think of me, Jay. I’m not stupid. But I’m doing you a solid here. I hope you see that.” He thumbed back at the scene and the Concord detective. “That guy isn’t messing around. He’s treating this like a big deal investigation. I don’t think you want us finding your brother first.”

    “That was fucking weird,” Charlie said as we pulled away from the TC.
    I fiddled with the knob, trying to dial in some music, news, sports, car talk—anything to put noise between my racing thoughts and the ramifications. Nothing but static, frequencies jammed, signals lost almost immediately.
    “What did he mean by that last part?” Charlie asked. “‘You don’t want us finding him first’—what the hell?”
    “Turley’s watched too many cop shows, I think.”
    Charlie chuckled, but it wasn’t funny, and neither of us thought Turley had been blowing smoke. I considered Turley a self-aggrandizing jackass when it came to most things law enforcement, but this was for real. As much as I wanted to dismiss his warning as chest puffing, I couldn’t. Chris had really fucked up this time. I knew my brother didn’t kill Pete; he didn’t have that kind of violence in him. But what he
could
do was to seriously make a mess of things. He’d made a career of it. And this was a perfect shit-storm: the wrong thing said at the wrong time, heard by the wrong person, and aided by the worst possible circumstances. My brother had threatened to kill a dead man. I needed to find him before I was powerless to help him.
    Ashton may not have been New York City, but the town was hardly a stranger to violence, especially at that truck stop. A couple summers back, a prostitute had been found badly beaten and left in a dumpster. But there’d never been a detective up from Concord to investigate before. This was bigger than some run-of-the-mill lowlife fished out of a river.
    I hadn’t mentioned the strange phone call to Turley. Charlie had obviously been listening. We’d talked about it and Chris’ visit on our way to the TC. Last night, I’d believed the computer story was another one of my brother’s myriad delusions—Chris suffered fits of paranoia like some people get heartburn after eating spicy food—but following that bizarre phone call and the discovery of Pete’s body, I knew his conspiracy theories weren’t going to be so easy to write off this time.
    If the cops were looking for Chris, that computer shop of his would be the first place they’d check out. But