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to play hall monitor, to bark orders at people who didn’t matter while Raney investigated the deaths Bay felt he had caused or at least failed to prevent. He’d sent a child to protect a woman from a killer. He hadn’t taken Raney seriously—or not seriously enough. The notion of a Mexican assassin prowling a remote county road seemed too far-fetched. He hadn’t been able to make the image real, had thought Junior would be grateful for the easy overtime. He should have been parked out on that road himself, a shotgun across his knees.
    “Don’t make me tell you again,” Bay snapped.
    The cameraman looked confused: Bay hadn’t told him anything to begin with.
      
    Raney walked back through the house, scrub booties on his feet, lab techs swarming, following his instructions to swab this, photograph that. There were two unfinished cups of coffee on the kitchen table, two wineglasses in the sink. He crouched over Mavis’s body, tilted her head back with the eraser end of a pencil, just far enough to discern the trajectory of the blade. He had one of the techs take a Polaroid, then carried the photo out to the squad car, walking back through the pampas grass.
    A lab tech was kneeling on the hood, photographing Junior through the windshield. Raney showed her the image. She climbed down, held it up beside Junior’s neck.
    “Do you see it?” Raney asked.
    “A different angle from the others,” she said.
    “Different angle, different blade.”
    “It’s too early to say for sure.”
    “The deputy’s cut runs straight across, and deep. The head is nearly severed. Mavis’s wound is superficial by comparison. It’s jagged, diagonal.”
    “Maybe because she’s a woman. Or maybe the killer was interrupted.”
    “Maybe. But there were two men fighting in that living room. Both of them were wounded, and neither of them stuck around. Neither of them called for help.”
    “What are you thinking?”
    “I’m not thinking so much as wondering.”
    “Wondering what?”
    “How two separate knifemen wound up in the Wilkins home at the same time.”
    Raney walked back toward the house, stopped to peer in the garage window. The Jaguar was gone. He went around to the front, found the roll-up door shut, the handle locked. He speed-dialed Bay.
    “Come take a look at this, would you?” he said. “I’m by the garage.”
    Bay crossed the gravel, his head hung low, as though he were searching the ground for clues.
    “What is it?” he said.
    Raney pointed to the garage door.
    “No blood on the handle, no blood on the ground. No broken panels. Someone even took the time to lock it.”
    “So?”
    “Now look inside.”
    They walked around to the window. Bay pressed his face to the glass.
    “It’s gone.”
    “Uh-huh. The question is who took it and when. It had to have been gone before the fight or else the garage would look like another crime scene.”
    “So someone drove the Jag right past Junior while he was still alive?” Bay said.
    “Looks like it.”
    “Someone who came back later and killed him?”
    “Maybe. Or maybe that was someone else.”
    “Shit,” Bay said. “This don’t make a damn bit of sense.”
    “Not yet, but it will.”
    Bay nodded.
    “This wasn’t your fault,” Raney said. “None of it.”
    “I’ll tell that to Junior’s folks.”

12
    C lara answered the door in sweatpants and a T-shirt, one hand clutching a wad of tissue. The hallway reeked of pot.
    “It’s all over the news,” she said.
    “I should have called,” Raney said. “I’m sorry.”
    “You have more questions?”
    Her affect was numb, but her eyes were welling.
    “No,” he said. “I just need to borrow the keys to the store.”
    “Christ,” she said. “What the fuck am I supposed to do with that place?”
      
    Mavis kept an office at the back of the shop, a converted storage space with no window. Her desk was overflowing with junk mail, the only bookcase in disarray. Stacks of paper teetered along the