Sheriff Dennis Young, the better part of sixty, a good head taller than Gaines, looked directly at Gaines as Gaines entered the room. Young’s expression was almost a threat, but his eyes seemed to carry a weight of sadness. Looked like a man who not only remembered the past, but longed to live there. He reminded Gaines of the hardfaced, bitter police veteran with whom he’d first been partnered. That man, the first day they met, had shook Gaines’s hand roughly, slapped him on the shoulder, and said, “Well, hell, son, let’s get you out there and see if we can’t get you shot at or blown to kingdom come, eh?”

“Do for you?” Young asked.

“I’m Sheriff John Gaines, Breed County, Mississippi—”

“I know who you is, son. ’Parently, one of your people called here and said you was on the way. Who you is ain’t what I asked.”

“I’m here about Matthias Wade.”

Young slowed down then. Had Gaines not been as intent, had he not been so aware of Young’s every move, he perhaps would not have noticed it. There was a definite and tangible shift in atmosphere in that room.

“He’s been around and about again, has he?”

“Yes, sir, he has.”

Young smiled knowingly. He seemed to relax a mite, barely noticeable, but relax he did.

“He was always one for getting on and about into other folks’ business.”

“He’s getting involved over in Breed County,” Gaines said.

“Tell me what he’s been saying.”

“Not what he says, but what he’s done. I had a guy called Michael Webster on a possible first-degree. World War Two veteran, crazy as a shithouse rat. Looks like he strangled a teenage girl down there a while back, and there was a fuck-up with a warrant and he was given bail. Wade came down and paid up the bail and took him away just three or four hours ago. Paid all of five thousand dollars.”

“Did he, now?”

“Yes, Sheriff, he did.”

Young nodded, and then he smiled. “The name’s Dennis, son, just Dennis. After all, we is family, is we not?”

Gaines nodded respectfully. Maybe Young wasn’t so impregnable after all.

“And you have a question for me, right?” Young prompted. “And I’m wonderin’ if it has something to do with what happened back here in sixty-eight.”

“That’s right,” Gaines said.

“What did you hear?”

“Nothing much. Word has it that some girls were killed.”

Young smiled resignedly. “Oh, there is more than a word, my friend. We think he killed two little girls. Personally, I would stake my life on it. But it don’t seem my life has a great deal of weight against the lack of evidence. What actually happened back then, and what we think happened, well, that’s where the disagreements start, and to this day they have not ended. All we got right now is Matthias Wade walking the streets a free man, two little girls dead, and not an ounce of justice to share between them.”

“Can you tell me about it?”

“I can tell you what I know,” Young said. “Two girls, one ten, the other twelve, found strangled . . . left in a shack someplace out in the middle of no place special. Only thing that linked them to the Wades was that both girls were daughters of Wade-family employees. That was the thing, you see? It was such a fragile link, and there was nothing substantive we could use to bring Matthias Wade in. He was—what?—maybe thirty-five years old at the time. He wasn’t some clueless punk. He was a smart man, Sheriff Gaines, and more than likely still is.”

“So what made you think he was responsible for the killings?”

“Some people you think are bad,” Young said. “But there’s some people you know are bad. He’s one of them. Can smell his kind from a mile and a half away. Pompous asshole, telling us what we can and can’t say to him. Son of a bitch. I know he killed those girls. I had him in here for two hours, and he talked himself around the countryside, saying how he didn’t know squat about nothin’, but I could read it in his eyes and the dark sack of shadows he has in place of a soul.”

Young shook his head and sighed. “God didn’t make many of them like that, but the ones he did make are awful bad.” He paused to light a cigarette. “So tell me what you got over there in Breed.” He leaned forward, his eyes all fired up bright with interest.

“Girl of sixteen years old, found buried in a riverbank. She’d been there for twenty years. Was a disappearance back in fifty-four, only come to light now, so to speak. Had her heart cut out, in her chest a wicker basket with a snake inside. She’d been strangled and then butchered postmortem.”

“Jesus Christ almighty,” Young said, and he whistled through his teeth. “What the hell kind of madness is that?”

“What happened to the two girls here?” Gaines asked.

“I can show you the files, my friend. You can look at the pictures, too. However, sounds like we had ourselves a church picnic compared to what you’re dealing with.”

“There are others who think that Wade was responsible for the deaths of these two girls?”

“I am not alone in my conviction, Sheriff. Whole heap of people don’t see it could have been any other way. Wade is the baddest kind of son of a bitch I’ve ever had the misfortune of dealing with.” Young shook his head. “Most folks is simple. Even the crooks and the crazies. You know what they’re gonna say before they even set themselves down to the table. That’s the thing that makes most of this job pretty straightforward. Someone gets killed around here, well, there’s pretty much gonna be only two or three that coulda done it. Even with the housebreaking an’ all that, you get some folks’ place robbed, and a day later you got some dumbass son of a bitch tryin’ to sell their shit in a bar three blocks from home. It ain’t complicated because most people ain’t complicated. But then there’s others. Others who is intricate. Others who are a different kind of animal altogether. You just can’t predict what they’re thinking, nor what will pass their lips. And even when they do say it, well, it’s just as likely gonna mean something different than how it sounds. Wade is a devious creature. He don’t pretty much say nothin’ ’cept if it’s a lie. Easiest way to know if he’s lying is to look see if his lips are moving. If his lips are moving, he’s delivering up some kind of bullshit, and that’s a fact. Those girls of ours, Anna-Louise Mayhew and Dorothy McCormick, went missing within three days of each other back in January of sixty-eight. They were both found together less than a week after Dorothy disappeared . . . Well, you can read the files and look at the pictures, and then you can tell me what kind of human being it is that can strangle little kids like that.”

“And Wade was your only suspect?”

“Only suspect then, only suspect now. He was local, you see. Ran a whole heap of companies down around these parts, and after it happened, he got real busy quieting everyone down about it, newspapers suddenly deciding they weren’t going to run the story and this sort of thing. And here we are six years down the line, and the likelihood of proving anything against him grows more impossible with every passing day. He has connections, you see? He has family down here, and the Wades are a family that will do whatever it takes not to have their name sullied by the taint of such things.”

“I didn’t get it at first, but these are the Wades, aren’t they?”

“Only ones I know. More money than is decent. Sugar and cotton and crawfish and rice and soybeans and whatever the hell else they fancy. You look under the porch of a Wade house and you find everyone from the bank owners and the real estate folks to the governor hiding there. That family’s been backhanding support to pretty much every political official that suits their business for five generations.”

“And there was a picture album in Webster’s room. Photographs of Webster with Wade and our victim, a girl called Nancy Denton. There are pictures of the other Wade kids, as well. And there was another girl that Webster mentioned, a girl called Maryanne?”