'I cain't take it. The guy in the other cell, Jimmy Cole, he told me this morning what he done to a little boy in Georgia.'

He started to cry, unashamedly, his arms stiff on his knees, his eyes squinted shut, the tears streaming down his cheeks.

The sheriff kept his office behind the courthouse in the squat, one-story yellow sandstone building that had been the original county jail in the 1870s. He was six and a half feet tall and weighed over three hundred pounds, ate five meals a day, chainsmoked cigars, kept a spittoon by his desk, and hung framed pictures on the ancient log walls of every man his department had helped the state of Texas execute.

With no more than a fourth grade education, he had managed to remain sheriff for twenty-seven years.

He spun a poker chip on his desk blotter while I talked. The brow of his granite head was furrowed, his massive upper arms red with sunburn.

'Evidence disappearing? No, sir, not in this department. Where'd you hear this?' His eyes, which were flat and gray, lifted into mine.

'It happens, sheriff. Things get misplaced sometimes.'

'My response to you is simple. The sonofabitch told you it is a goddamn liar. But-' He picked up a pencil stub in his huge hand and started writing on a legal pad. 'I'll make a note to myself and get back to you. How's that?'

'I want my client moved.'

'Why's that?'

'Harley Sweet makes nighttime visits to some of the cells. I don't want my client involved as a witness in any other kind of court proceeding.'

He leaned back in his swivel chair, the ends of the pencil stub crimped in the fingers of each hand.

'You telling me Harley's abusing a prisoner?' he asked.

'In my view, he's a sick man.'

He looked at me hard for a moment, then burst out laughing. 'Hell, he's got to do something, son. I cain't have the whole goddamn county on welfare.'

'I'll see you, sheriff.'

'Don't get your tallywhacker out of joint. I'll move the boy and I'll talk to Harley. Go get laid or develop a sense of humor. I swear you depress the hell out of me every time you come in here.'

That evening my investigator, Temple Carrol, and I drove out to Shorty's on the river. The parking lot was filled with rusted gas-guzzlers, customized hot rods like kids built in the 1950s, chopped-down motorcycles, gleaming new convertibles, vans with bubble windows, and pickup trucks scrolled with chrome.

The interior was deafening. From the screen porches and elevated bandstand to the dance floor and the long, railed bar, the faces of the patrons were rippled with neon, their voices hoarse with their own conversation, their eyes lighted like people who had survived a highway catastrophe and knew they were eternal. When people went to Shorty's, they went to score-booze, barbecue, homegrown reefer, crystal meth, a stomp-ass brawl out in the trees, or the horizontal bop in the backseat-and they came from every background to do it: ranchers, sawmill workers, oil field roughnecks, businessmen, ex-cons, dope mules, college kids, blue-collar housewives dumping their husbands, pipeliners, hillbilly musicians, pool hustlers, steroid freaks with butchwax in their hair, and biker girls in black leather whose purple makeup bloomed like a death wish on their cheeks.

But the revelers were two nights' distance from the rape and murder of a girl in an abandoned picnic ground down the road, and their unfocused smiles never left their faces at the mention of her name.

Temple and I finally gave it up and walked back outside into the coolness of the evening. Far in the distance, the green land seemed to cup and flow off the earth's edge into an arroyo lighted by the sun's last dying spark.

'Billy Bob, if anybody could help out, it'd be the guys in the band,' she said.

'So?'

'They turn to stone.' She averted her eyes. 'The girl came here alone. She left with Lucas. They were both drunk. We're going to have to go at it from another angle.'

'He's a gentle boy, Temple. He didn't do this.'

'You know what a state psychologist is going to say on the stand? About a boy who was controlled and abused all his life by a father like Vernon Smothers?'

An elderly black man with a thin white mustache and a stub of pipe between his teeth was spearing trash amidst the chopped-down motorcycles with a stick that had a nail on the end. He pulled each piece of trash off the nail and stuck it in a cloth bag that hung from his shoulder.

'I'll buy you a Mexican dinner,' I said to Temple.

'I think I'll just go home and take a shower. I feel like somebody rubbed nicotine in my hair.'.

I backed the Avalon around and started to pull out of the parking lot. I saw her eyes watching the black man, a tooth working on the corner of her lip.

'You didn't interview him?' I said.

'No, he wasn't here before.'

I stopped the car, and we both got out and walked over to him. He kept at his work and paid little attention to us. Temple held out a photo she had gotten from the dead girl's high school.

'Have you seen this girl before, sir?' she asked.

He took the photo from her and looked at it briefly, then handed it back.

'Yeah, I seen her. She the one killed up the road,' he said.

'Did you know her?' I asked.

'No, I didn't know her. But I seen her, all right.'

'When?' I asked.

'Night she got killed. She come here in a cab. Some boys was fixing to leave, then they seen her and axed her to go off with them. She had her own mind about it, though.'

'Sir?' I said.

'She hit this one boy right 'cross the face, whap. He stood there, holding his jaw, just like he had a toothache. Then she give him the finger while she was walking back inside. Didn't even bother to turn around when she done it, just held it up in the air for him to see.'

'Who was the boy?' I said.

'Ain't seen him befo'. Ain't sure I'd know him again.' His eyes drifted off my face.

'Yeah, you would,' Temple said.

'Why didn't you tell this to someone?' I said.

'They come to a place like this more than once, it's for a reason. The wrong one, too. What I say ain't gonna change that.'

'What kind of car did this boy have?' Temple said.

'What reason I got to watch his car?'

'Who was he with?' Temple said.

'I ain't seen them befo'.'

'Give me your name,' she said. She wrote it down, then stuck a business card in his hand. 'You just became a witness in a murder trial. Stay in touch. Work on your memory, too. I know you can do it.'

I followed the two-lane county road along the river, past a cornfield that was green and dented with wind under the moon.

'That's kind of a tough statement to make to an old fellow,' I said.

'I don't like people who're cutesy about a raped and murdered girl,' Temple said.

After I had dropped her off, I made a call to the jail and then drove to the house of Marvin Pomroy, the prosecutor. He lived in a white gingerbread house, shaded by live oaks, in the old affluent district of Deaf Smith. His St Augustine grass was wet with soak hoses and iridescent in the glare of the flood lamps that lit and shadowed his property.

His wife answered the door and invited me in, but I thanked her and asked if Marvin could simply step outside a minute. He still had a dinner napkin in his hand when.he came out on the gallery.

'I've got a problem with some missing evidence,' I said.

'See the sheriff.'

'You're an honest man, Marvin. Don't jerk me around.'

'Same response. You shouldn't try to do business on my gallery.'

'Somebody's sandbagging the investigation and setting up my client.'

He reached behind him and closed the front door. His well-shaped head and steel-rimmed glasses and neatly combed short hair were covered with the yellow glow of the bug light overhead.