“I didn’t know you cared so much,” Lee said finally, taking slow, steady breaths. “Jesus, Ig, she’s trash. I mean, she has a good heart, but Glenna’s always been trash. I thought the only reason you were living with her was to get out of your parents’ house.”

Ig had no idea what he was talking about. For a moment the day seemed to catch in place; even the dreadful sawing of the locusts seemed to pause. Then Ig understood, remembered what Glenna had admitted to him that morning, the first confession the horns had compelled. It seemed impossible it had been only that morning.

“I’m not talking about her,” Ig said. “How could you think I’m talking about her?”

“Who are you talking about, then?”

Ig didn’t understand. They all told. As soon as they saw Ig, saw his horns, the secrets tumbled forth. They couldn’t help themselves. The receptionist wanted to wear his mother’s underwear, and Eric Hannity wanted an excuse to shoot Ig and get in the paper, and now it was Lee’s turn, and the only thing Lee had to confess to was being on the receiving end of a drunken blow job.

“Merrin,” Ig said hoarsely. “I’m talking about what you did to Merrin.”

Lee tilted his head, just a little, so his right ear was pointed toward the sky-like a dog listening for a faraway sound. He let out a soft, sighing breath. Then he gave his head the tiniest shake.

“Lost me, Ig. What am I supposed to have done to-”

“Fucking killed her. I know it was you. You killed her and made Terry keep quiet about it.”

Lee gave Ig a long, measured look. He glanced again toward Eric Hannity-checking, Ig thought, to see if Eric was close enough to hear their conversation. He was not. Then Lee looked back, and when he did, his face was dead and blank. The change was so jarring that Ig almost shouted in fear-a comical reaction, a devil afraid of a man, when it was supposed to be the other way around.

“Terry told you this?” Lee said. “If he did, he’s a goddamn liar.”

Lee was closed off from the horns in some way Ig didn’t understand. There was a wall up, and the horns couldn’t poke through. Ig tried to will the horns to work, and for a moment they filled with a dense swell of heat and blood and pressure, but it didn’t last. It was like trying to play a trumpet with a mass of rags stuffed into it. Force as much air into it as you liked, it wasn’t going to blow.

Lee went on, “I hope he hasn’t been telling anyone else that. And I hope you haven’t either.”

“Not yet. But soon everyone will know what you did.” Could Lee even see the horns? He hadn’t mentioned them. Hadn’t even seemed to look at them.

“They’d better not,” Lee said. Then the muscles flexed at the corners of his jaw as an idea occurred to him, and he said, “Are you recording this?”

“Yes,” Ig said, but he was too slow, and anyway, that was the wrong answer; no one who was attempting entrapment would admit to recording a conversation.

“No you aren’t. You never did learn to lie, Ig,” Lee said, and smiled. His left hand was fingering the gold chain around his throat. The other was in his pocket. “Too bad for you, though. If you were recording this conversation, you might get somewhere. As it is, I don’t think you can prove anything. Maybe your brother said something to you while he was drunk, I don’t know, but whatever he told you, I’d just put it out of your mind. I definitely wouldn’t go around repeating it. Tales out of school never do anyone any good. Think about it. Can you imagine Terry going to the police with some crazy story about me killing Merrin, with nothing but his word against mine, and him silent a whole year? No evidence to back him up? ’Cause there isn’t any, Ig, it’s all gone. If he goes out with that story, best-case scenario it’s the end of his career. Worst-case scenario maybe we both wind up in jail. I promise there’s no way I’d be going without him.”

Lee slipped a hand out of his pocket long enough to rub a knuckle in his good eye, as if to clear some dust from it. For a moment the right eye was shut, and he was staring at Ig through the damaged eye, the eye shot through with those spokes of white. And for the first time, Ig understood what was so terrible about that eye, what had always been so terrible about it. It wasn’t that it was dead. It was just…occupied with other matters. As if there were two Lee Tourneaus. The first was the man who’d been Ig’s friend for more than a decade, a man who could admit to children he was a sinner and who donated blood to the Red Cross three times a year. The second Lee was a person who gazed at the world around him with all the empathy of a trout.

Lee cleared whatever was in his right eye and let the hand fall to his side. He casually replaced it in his pocket. He was coming forward again. Ig retreated, staying out of arm’s reach. He wasn’t sure why he was backing off, didn’t know why it suddenly seemed a matter of life and death to keep at least a few feet of blacktop between himself and Lee Tourneau. The locusts droned in the trees, a terrible, maddening buzz that filled Ig’s head.

“She was your friend, Lee,” Ig said as he retreated around the front end of the car. “She trusted you, and you raped her and killed her and left her in the woods. How could you do that?”

“You’ve got one thing wrong, Ig,” Lee said in a calm, steady, low voice. “It wasn’t rape. I’m sure you’d like to believe that, but honestly, she wanted me to fuck her. She was coming on to me for months. Sending me messages. Playing little word games. She had this whole cocktease business going on behind your back. She was just waiting for you to go to London so we could have our thing.”

“No,” Ig said, a sick heat rising to his face, rising behind the horns. “She might’ve slept with someone else, but she wouldn’t have slept with you, Lee.”

“She told you that she wanted to sleep with other people. Who do you think she was talking about? I mean, honestly, this seems to be a running theme with your girls, Ig. Merrin, Glenna-sooner or later they all wind up on the end of my dick.” Opening his mouth in a toothy, aggressive grin that had no humor in it.

“She fought you.”

“I know you probably won’t believe this, Ig, but she wanted that, too, wanted me to take the lead, push past her objections. Maybe she needed that. It was the only way she could get over her inhibitions. Everybody has a dark side. That was hers. You know she came when we fucked, don’t you? Out there in the woods with me? She came hard. I think it was a fantasy of hers. Being taken in the gloomy ol’ forest. A little bit of scratch and wrestle.”

“And then a rock in the head?” Ig asked. He had by now backed all the way around the front end of the Gremlin to the passenger side, and Lee had followed him step by step. “That part of the fantasy?”

Lee stopped walking and stood there. “You’ll have to ask Terry. He was the one who did that part.”

“That’s a lie,” Ig whispered.

“But there really is no truth. None that matters,” Lee said. His left hand came out of his shirt. He wore a gold cross, which flashed in the sunlight. He put it in his mouth and sucked on it for a moment, then let it fall and said, “No one knows what went down that evening. If I smashed her with the rock, or if Terry did it, or if you did it…no one is ever going to know what really happened. You don’t have a case to make, and I’m not going to cut some deal with either of you, so what do you want?”

“I want to see you die hopeless and scared in the dirt,” Ig said. “Just like she did.”

Lee smiled, as if he had been offered a compliment.

“Do it, then,” he said. “Come on and do it.” He took a quick step forward, lunging at Ig, and Ig opened the passenger-side door between them, flinging it into Lee.

It crashed into Lee’s legs with a bang, and something hit the asphalt-rattle-clatter-tchok! Ig had a glimpse of a red Swiss Army knife with a three-inch blade, spinning away across the ground. Lee staggered and made a harsh whuffing sound, exhaling sharply, and Ig used the chance to scramble into the car, across the passenger seat, and behind the wheel. He didn’t even bother to close the passenger door.