Four days later there was a follow-up story about a juvenile who had been brought in for questioning about the girl's abduction. The story did not give his name but stated he had been working on a pipeline nearby the girl's home.

The juvenile was released from custody when the parents refused to bring charges.

The date on the newspaper follow-up story was August 18, the day after the date on Garland T. Moon's rap sheet.

I walked back across the street and threw Moon's file on the sheriff's desk.

'Sorry, I couldn't find Cleo,' I said. 'By the way, some exculpatory evidence disappeared from the Roseanne Hazlitt homicide investigation. I'm talking about some bottles and beer cans taken from the murder scene by your deputies. You mind going on the stand about that, Hugo?'

Pete's mother was waiting for me when I got back to the office. She wore a pink waitress uniform, her lank, colorless hair tied behind her head. She kept twisting the black plastic watchband on her wrist.

'The social worker says she's got to certify. If Pete ain't living at home no more, she cain't certify.' She sat bent forward, her eyes fastened on the tops of her hands.

'I'll talk to her,' I said.

'It won't do no good.'

'It's dangerous for him, Wilma.'

'They ain't done nothing but write that note. They sent it to you. They didn't send it to us.' The resentment in her voice was like a child's, muted, turned inward, resonant with fear.

'I'll ask Temple to bring his stuff home after school,' I said.

'You been good to Pete and all but…' She didn't finish. Her eyes looked receded, empty. 'I'm gonna move away. This town ain't ever been any good for us.'

'I don't think that's the answer.'

Then I saw the anger bloom in her face, past the fearful restraint that normally governed her life.

'Yeah? Well, why don't you just raise your own son and leave mine alone for a while?' she said.

At six that evening Mary Beth called from Denver.

'Am I going to see you again?' I asked. My throat was dry, my tone vainly ironic and preemptive, the receiver held too tightly against my ear.

'I can't come back there for a while.'

'I can get a flight to Denver… Mary Beth? Are you there?'

'Yes… I mean, yes, I'm here.'

'Did you hear what I said?' But I already knew the answer, and I could feel a weakness, a failing in my heart as though weevil worms had passed through it.

'Some people here are still upset about the way things went in Deaf Smith,' she said.

'With you and me?'

'That's part of it.'

'I think the problem is Brian Wilcox. Not you, not me, not the shooting of Sammy Mace and his bodyguard. I think Wilcox is poisoning the well everywhere he goes and your people are overlooking it to save the investigation.'

'Maybe that's true. But I can't do anything about it.'

I could hear her breathing in the silence.

'Can you give me a telephone number?' I said.

'We're leaving tonight for a meeting in Virginia.'

'Well, I hope it works out for you,' I said.

'What? What did you say?'

'Nothing. I never did well inside organizations. I hope you do. That's all I meant.'

In the silence I could hear her breath against the receiver.

'Mary Beth?'

'Yes?'

'I'll need you to testify at Lucas's trial. About the cans and bottles those other deputies lost or destroyed.'

'It's a bad time to bring that up.'

'Bad time? That's what's on your mind? It's a bad time?'

'Good-bye, Billy Bob.'

After I hung up the receiver, I stared at the telephone in the fading light through the window, as though I could will it to ring again. Then I walked outside, under an empty dome of yellow sky, into a sand-bitten wind that shredded leaves from the chinaberry tree. I got into my Avalon, the wind buffering the windows, and drove to Pete's house.

'You're by yourself?' I asked.

He stood on the porch in a pair of pin-striped overalls and a Clorox-stained purple T-shirt.

'My mother don't get off from work till nine,' he replied.

'Did you eat yet?'

'Some.'

'Like what?'

'Viennas and saltines.'

'I think we'd better get us a couple of those chicken-fried steaks at the café.'

'I knew you was gonna say that.'

It was dusk when we got to the café. We sat under a big electric fan by the window and ordered. Down the street, the sun was red behind the pines in the church yard. Pete had wet his hair and brushed it up on the sides so that it was as flat as a landing field.

'You have to be careful, bud. Don't talk to strangers, don't let some no-count fellow tell you he's a friend of your mom,' I said.

'Temple done told me all that.'

'Then you won't mind hearing it again.'

'That ain't all she told me.'

'Oh?'

'She said for a river-baptized person you been doing something you ain't supposed to. What'd she mean by that?'

'Search me.'

'It's got to do with that lady from the sheriff's department. That's my take on it, anyway.' He bit off a bread stick and crunched it in his jaw.

'Really?'

'Temple talks about you all the time. She said she feels like going upside your head with a two-by-four.'

'How about clicking it off, bud?'

'You gonna come to my ball game this weekend?'

'What do you think?'

He chewed the bread stick and grinned at the same time.

In a candid moment most longtime cops and prison personnel will tell you there are some criminals whom they secretly respect. Charles Arthur Floyd was known for his scrupulousness in paying for the food he was given by Oklahoma farmers when he hid out on the Canadian River. Clyde Barrow finished a jolt on a Texas prison farm, then went back and broke his friends out. Men who have invested their entire lives in dishonesty do max time rather than lie about or snitch-off another con. Murderers go to their deaths without complaint, their shoulders erect, their fears sealed behind their eyes. The appellation 'stand-up' in a prison population is never used lightly.

But the above instances are the exceptions. The average sociopath is driven by one engine, namely, the self. He has no bottom, and his crimes, large or small, are as morally interchangeable to him as watching TV with his family or walking back to a witness at a convenience store robbery and popping a.22 round through the center of her forehead.

Darl Vanzandt pulled his '32 Ford into my drive the next evening, then saw me currying Beau in the lot and drove his car to the edge of the barn and got out and stood in the wind, his face twitching from the dust that swirled out of the fields or the chemicals that swam in his brain.

He approached the fence and lay his forearm on the top rail, studying me, his unbuttoned shirt flapping on his chest. I hadn't noticed before how truncated his body was. The legs were too short for his torso, the shoulders too wide for the hips, the hands as round and thick as clubs.

'Say it and leave,' I said.

'Bunny Vogel quit his job at the skeet club. My mother got him that job. He walks in yesterday and tells the manager he's finished bagging trash and cleaning toilets. Big fucking superstar. He's gonna dime me, that's what he's doing.'

'Who cares?'

'It's Bunny who started it all. I'm talking about Roseanne. You listening? Bunny pretends he's a victim or something. Believe me, 'cause he's got a messed-up face doesn't mean he's a victim.'

'Not interested.'

He made an unintelligible sound and his face seemed to wrinkle with disbelief.

'I can give you Bunny, man,' he said.

'I'm not interested, because you're a liar, Darl. Your information is worthless,' I said.