“I’m not stirring the shit,” Caddy said, “but I would like to know just a little bit more about our father. What did he look like? What did he say? Is he as crazy as folks say?”

“I’d back away from this situation like a burning car,” Quinn said. “My dealings with Jason were not pleasant.”

“You calling him Jason?”

“I’m not calling him Dad.”

“He had to have a good reason,” Caddy said. “If he didn’t have a good one, he would have made one up.”

“He tried,” Quinn said. “None good.”

“And you charged him with murder.”

“I charged him as an accessory,” Quinn said. “He wouldn’t talk. He just sat there not answering any questions. He got some shitbird lawyer out of Jackson to bust him loose. But he’s not done with any of this. He has to come back, answer to things. We’re putting together a case on the lynching. Lillie and me.”

Caddy took in a long breath. Little Jason was inside watching television, a show on PBS about a couple brothers who fight crime against wild animals called Wild Kratts. Jason liked animals and thought of himself as an animal protector and rescuer.

“I want to talk to him,” Caddy said.

“No you don’t.”

“Not your decision,” Caddy said. “Sorry.”

“That’s like sticking your head in an oven,” Quinn said. “Don’t do that to yourself. Keep away from him. Let me put things together, but don’t offer yourself up. You were young, but you know he doesn’t have feelings. What kind of man walks away from his wife and two kids? Not just walk away but has no contact with us at all? Like we never even happened?”

“I want to know his reasons.”

“Who gives a shit?”

“I give a shit, Quinn,” Caddy said. “I want to know. When I was young, it about turned me inside out.”

“We had bigger issues.”

Caddy was silent, not wanting to address that time in the woods, that man following them both, and what had happened in that old and rotten barn. Maybe Jason had loved them once, but he was a man who loved himself so much that he did everything he could to destroy himself. Quinn had come to the realization that the stunts weren’t bravery but cowardice, wanting to break himself into bits so he wouldn’t have to feel a thing. Why should he be admired for that kind of bullshit? He and Caddy would have never gone out into the Big Woods if it wasn’t for him skipping town . . . again.

“Did he try to talk to you?” Caddy asked.

“Yep.”

“Did he try and explain things?” Caddy said. “With him and Momma? And him not coming back ever?”

“Yep.”

“Did it make sense?”

“He finally quit talking to me,” Quinn said. “Lillie and I tried to break him down, Lillie being really, really good at it. But he just shut up, wouldn’t talk about himself and that gang and the hanging of that fella. Disgraceful. People wonder why Mississippi is the armpit of this country.”

They rocked some more. A nice warm breeze passed over them, the bright, fun sounds of the television show coming through the open door, Jason giggling inside.

“This is your house.”

“You,” Caddy said, “get married. Bring her here. Have a family. Don’t be frozen. Move on. You’re not that type of man. Move on to the next thing, the next story. Grow. Life does not stop.”

“Preacher?”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“I have no problem with a woman being a preacher,” Quinn said. “Just don’t like to hear it from my sister.”

Quinn’s cell rang. He looked at it, seeing it was dispatch, picked it up and answered. Mary Alice said there was some kind of trouble out at the Rebel Truck Stop, not sure what was going on, but Lillie was headed that way. “Shit.”

“What?” Caddy said.

“Somebody must’ve drove off from the pump without paying,” Quinn said. “And Johnny Stagg got his dick in a twist.”

“Is he as bad as you think?”

“Worse.”

“Stay here,” Caddy said. “Don’t mess up supper. Let Lillie handle things.”

“It’s my job,” Quinn said. “And I would never make Lillie deal with that son of a bitch alone.”

“She’s pretty tough,” Caddy said. “Toughest woman I ever met.”

“I have no doubt,” Quinn said, “that Lillie Virgil could handle this whole county without my help.”

All of the Tibbehah County Sheriff’s Department came out to see the homicide. All seven of them.

Lillie borrowed a stepladder from the Rebel Truck Stop to shoot photos of Stillwell’s body, not that she had a hard time getting near the corpse. She and Kenny planned to spend the rest of the morning sifting through the garbage for any evidence. She brought a box of trash bags to take anything that wasn’t bagged up already back to the county barn. No telling, Lillie said, how long it would take to look through all this crap.

Quinn asked Johnny Stagg for the surveillance tapes.

“Oh, yes, sir,” Stagg said. “Only one issue with that.”

Quinn waited.

“That’s one place we don’t keep a camera,” Stagg said. “Don’t have a lot of folks stealing garbage. Mainly, people just tossing their shit in there without permission. Hardly worth the cost.”

Quinn shook his head, asked for everything he had anyway, telling Stagg that a car would’ve had to pull in view of one of his cameras at some point. Stagg didn’t say anything for a long while, hands in his khaki pants pockets, wind fluttering a few hairs of his greased pompadour.

“Or a motorcycle,” Stagg said.

“Even if it’s who you think it is,” Quinn said, “they’d take a truck. Kind of hard to ride around with a body perched in plain sight on the back of your Harley.”

“You’d be amazed at the brazenness of some folks,” Stagg said, both men standing next to Quinn’s truck, watching Lillie take a few more photos. Kenny had backed up his truck to start piling the garbage in. It was cool, but Stagg’s face glistened with a fine sheen of sweat. “But you ain’t gonna find nothing in that stuff besides steak bones and last week’s leftovers. Lord willing, I hope Deputy Virgil has a strong nose and stomach.”

“She does.”

“You sure admire that woman,” Stagg said, wiping his brow with a paper napkin, “don’t you? Shame she don’t go for your type.”

“We been over this ground before,” Quinn said, crime scene tape fluttering around the four dumpsters situated at the back of the Rebel. The hiss and pull of 18-wheelers coming from all around them. “Why Stillwell?”

“You don’t know?” Stagg said. “Thought y’all had been real chatty.”

“That the reason LeDoux would have him killed?”

Stagg opened his mouth, then shut it in a false, toothy grin and didn’t say a word.

Quinn shook his head, not wanting Stagg to know about any private conversations he’d had with the man. He never doubted Stagg might’ve killed the son of a bitch himself and dumped him out back not just to throw folks off but because he was that goddamn arrogant. Stagg’s face turned to feign a little sadness as he watched Lillie crawl down the ladder and Ophelia and two men from the funeral home, one being her uncle, lift Stillwell out of the trash and put him in a body bag and on a gurney.

“Two tough gals,” Stagg said.

“Pretty clear what killed him.”

“Two in the head,” Stagg said. “I seen it. LeDoux making a goddamn statement.”

“Since you seem to know,” Quinn said, “go ahead and tell me.”

“On why LeDoux killed him and deposited his dead ass on my property?”

“That’d be the question.”

“Shit,” Stagg said. “Stillwell told me himself that he was the boy who put LeDoux in prison. He was the goddamn informant for the Feds and somehow LeDoux knew about it.”