Everyone was silent for a moment.

  “What does that mean?” Theo asked.

  Tean shrugged. “Whatever it is, it seems like something has changed.”

  Emery opened his mouth, but John-Henry spoke first. “I understand your point, Ree. We’ve discussed this before; I agree that the drugs and the wildlife trafficking, they’re all tied together with what’s going on. But I’m trying to say there are a lot of possibilities, and we shouldn’t jump to conclusions.”

  “And I’m saying that it’s ineffectual to pretend we don’t know the most likely possible explanation for what happened last night.”

  “What’s the most likely explanation?” Auggie asked.

  “Jace Vermilya either did something stupid,” Theo said, “or was no longer useful.”

  North made a noise of disgust.

  Emery gestured and said, “Exactly.”

  “They didn’t need him anymore?” Tean asked. “But the case won’t go to trial for months.”

  “He’s a witness,” Jem said. “His name is all over legal paperwork now. He’s in the system because he’s tied up in this shit with John-Henry. He was a liability, and more importantly, they didn’t need him anymore—they would have known, beforehand, they’d have to cut him loose at some point.”

  “Or he asked for more money,” Shaw said. “Or he thought he could score for free. Or he threatened to recant if he didn’t get whatever he wanted.”

  “I don’t know,” John-Henry said. “It looked like he got the jump on those guys before that woman, Ingra, took him down.”

  Emery shook his head. “That doesn’t mean anything one way or another. He might have suspected they were about to turn on him. They might have been arguing. We have no idea what happened.”

  “He did something stupid,” North said, “like Theo said.”

  “Shouldn’t we have heard something about him being shot?” Jem asked. “Maybe the police don’t know who he is.”

  “Silence doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” John-Henry said. “The police could be withholding information while they try to figure out what happened. They could be watching us right now, waiting for us to make a mistake. Even if Vermilya’s prints aren’t in the system, they could have identified him based on his ID, credit cards in his wallet, that kind of thing.”

  North and Shaw traded a long look.

  “About that…” North said.

  Emery was the first to respond. “You’re shitting me.”

  “It’s not as bad as it seems—” Shaw tried.

  But Emery cut him off. “Really? Because it seems like you took the personal property of a shooting victim and brought it into my home, creating a direct link between last night’s shooting and my husband, which was the very fucking thing we were trying to avoid!”

  The sentence ended in a shout.

  “You’re thinking about it the wrong way,” Jem said. “You’re thinking about keeping him safe.”

  Emery opened his mouth, but Tean spoke first, “What he means is, you’re worried about John-Henry, and you’re thinking about how you can protect him. But I think Jem’s right. I think that might not be the best way to think about this, not right now. Right now, we need to think about the next step. How do we prove this man, Vermilya, was lying? More importantly, how do we prove it if he dies?”

  “It’s more than that,” North said, “If last night was an accident, then whoever’s behind this, they’re going to have to change their plans. They’re going to have to act. We’re sitting ducks if we don’t do anything.”

  When John-Henry looked over, Emery’s usual reserve flickered, and for a moment, his face was full of fear. Then it was gone, and he gave a reluctant nod.

  John-Henry wanted to dig in his heels. He wanted to fight about it. What about other people, he wanted to ask. What about people who don’t know what we know, people who don’t have friends with these skills, people who get railroaded or framed? How is this fair to them? His father taking the high school coaching staff to lunch. His mother meeting with the principal. A quiet conversation with a judge about a speeding ticket. His face was hot. He wiped his hands on his pants and then didn’t know what to do with them. It wasn’t the same. He knew that. He thought he did, anyway.

  “All right,” he said. “What are we supposed to do?”

  Emery was the one who answered. “Let’s start by figuring out who Jace Vermilya really is.”

  8

  They gathered around the table, and North produced a plastic bag. He shook the contents out across the table: a wallet, a set of keys, a watch, a phone, and a cascade of loose paper—to Emery, they looked mostly like receipts, but several larger pieces were mixed in.

  Emery handed around disposable gloves. “He had all this on him?”

  Shaw shook his head. “We took some of it from the Jeep.”

  Auggie was already separating the receipts, and he glanced up and said, “Tean, want to take a look at this with me?”

  Tean moved over to join him while Jem picked up the watch. “Thirty bucks,” he said. “Walmart.”

  “You know that just from looking at it?” Theo asked.

  “Sure. You used to be able to boost them—” Jem cut off.

  North muttered, “Nice save.”

  Emery took the wallet and began laying out its contents: a driver’s license, two Visas issued by Wells Fargo, a hundred and sixty-seven dollars in cash, a loyalty card for Super Subs with four of the ten sub-sandwich silhouettes punched out, and an expired condom. Jem picked up the cash and began riffling through it.

  “I counted that,” Emery said.

  Tean shifted in his seat like he might say something, but Jem just laughed.

  The driver’s license was the obvious place to start. Emery examined it, checked the security features, and grunted. Then he handed it to John. After a moment, John shrugged.

  “It wouldn’t be hard to acquire an ID,” Emery said. “Jem said he saw Social Security cards and driver’s licenses in that van. Vermilya could have gotten the necessary documents without much difficulty.”

  “Your turn or mine?” North asked.

  “Yours,” Shaw said.

  “Bullshit.”

  Shaw gave him a lopsided grin and jogged toward the front of the house.

  “Let me see that,” North said, plucking the license from John’s hand.

  “You said you heard someone identify him in a bar,” Emery said. “You left out some rather pertinent details, such as how you found him and how you ended up following him out to that meth lab.”

  “Yeah, well, I got kind of busy when someone started shooting at me.”

  “Nobody was shooting at you—”

  “Boys,” John said.

  “Have you ever thought about letting them kiss?” Auggie asked without looking up from the papers. “Just once. So they can get it out of their system.”

  Theo started laughing so hard he had to walk out of the room.

  “Funny you should ask,” John murmured.

  “Bunch of fucking comedians,” Emery said.

  That was when Shaw came back carrying a laptop. He set it up on the counter, and he and North bent over it together, quibbling for a few seconds until Shaw said, “I know how to do it, North!”

  Grumbling, North drifted a few feet away.

  Tean whispered something in Auggie’s ear, and Auggie broke down giggling. Jem had a huge smile on his face.

  “What is so fucking funny?” Emery asked.

  “You know what?” Jem said. “You wouldn’t get it.”

  “You all are a real fucking cluster of ass-nuts, you know that?” North said. “He’s got a little house on the east side of town. All the utilities in his name. It took me one search. We got there, sat around for a while, and then he walked out of the house and got in that fucking Jeep. We decided to see where he was going.”

  Emery frowned. “He didn’t notice you tailing him?”

  North snorted.

  “North, Jem take some of these,” Auggie said, pushing two piles of receipts across the table. “Jem, start a shared map and drop pins. North, make a spreadsheet and log them chronologically.”

  “Easy there, Captain Crunch.”

  “Fine. Emery—”

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it,” North said as he swept up the receipts.

  “What do you want me to do?” Theo asked.

  “Supervise North.”

  “Hardy-har, chuckle-fuck,” North said. “Theo, get your ass over here and help me.”

  Emery was examining Vermilya’s phone when he glanced up and caught an unfamiliar expression on John’s face.

  When he noticed Emery’s attention, John’s face smoothed out, and he gave a short laugh. “This is so frustrating. Normally—I mean, you know what it’s like, Ree. If I want to know who somebody is, I get his fingerprints, I get aliases, I run search after search until NCIC is about to explode, I get a warrant for his phone.” He raked fingers through his hair. “And now I don’t have any of that, and I’m useless.”

  “You’re certainly not useless.” Emery cocked his head. “What else would you do?”

  John gave him a crooked smile. “That’s very sweet.”

  “I’m serious. Fingerprints are out unless we can get somebody inside the department to help us.”

  “I don’t want to do that. That’s asking them to compromise their professional ethics, and even if they’re doing it to help me, what am I supposed to do when this is over? I don’t want anyone who would do that working in my department.”

  “For those of us not on the soapbox,” North asked, “what’s it like up there?”

  “Does the altitude keep you from getting a boner?” Jem asked. “It seems like it would.”

  They shared a smirk, which vanished when Emery directed a glower at them.

  Turning his attention back to John, Emery nodded, which was—in his opinion—less of an outright lie. After all, a nod could simply mean acknowledgment. And there was no point in mentioning his run-in with Dulac, not yet. “What else?”

  “Traffic cameras—”

  “Not the things you can’t do. What else?”

  John reached for his mug of coffee, but he didn’t drink; he just held it, hands wrapped around the ceramic, the hint of mint rising on the air. In a different voice, he said, “If I had a photo, I’d show it around locations that were significant—the crime scene for starters.”

  “We’ve got pictures,” Auggie said. “He’s on the internet.”

  “I’d check his social media.”

  “Go ahead,” Tean said. “I can finish.”

  “On it,” Auggie said, whipping out his phone.

  “What else?” Emery asked.

  “If he had any identifying physical characteristics, those get entered into—”

  “John.”

  A smile, a real one, bloomed.

  “What?” Emery asked flatly.

  “Good God,” John said to himself. Then, smile growing, he said, “Thank you.”

  “Thank me later. What else?”

  “Even without database access, identifying physical characteristics could be helpful. I didn’t see any, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

  “We didn’t strip him to his skivvies,” North said, “if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I didn’t see anything,” Emery said. “What else?”

  John shook his head. “Dental records, DNA—”

  Emery made an annoyed grumble.

  “Well, I don’t know, Ree. If it’s a murder victim, you examine their personal possessions, try to reconstruct whatever you can—a geographic area, a timeline—”

  Emery let a tiny smile slip out, and John stopped.

  “And if we have some photos and a starting place,” John said slowly, “we work backward, and we try to build out every angle of this guy’s life.”

  “That sounds like surprisingly good police work for someone who doesn’t have access to a single database.”

  “How long does it take before you stop hearing the snark and just recognize how adorable he is?” Jem asked.

  “About a week,” Tean said.

  “A week,” John said in a tone that might have meant anything, his eyebrows crooked, the lines around his eyes deepening.

  “He’s got some utilities in his name,” Shaw said, “all of them for the address on the license. But there’s not much else—an account at Wahredua Savings and Trust. No loans.”

  “Because it’s a cover,” North said. “It’s not his real name. You’re not going to be able to dig up anything useful on there. Meanwhile, I made this kickass spreadsheet—”

  Theo scratched his beard and, in that annoying way teachers had, found a way to make his silence pointed.

  “—that shows half a dozen stops our boy made yesterday afternoon. And we’re just getting started.”

  “We should start with his house,” John said, “before the police—”

  Emery shook his head. “You were right about one thing: last night exposed you in a way that’s not acceptable. We have to be smarter, particularly because things are only going to get more dangerous from this point. North?”

  “On it. Come on, spunk musket.”

  Something must have happened on the way to the front door because Shaw started giggling uncontrollably. When the door shut off the sound, Theo let out a long slow breath and gave Auggie a look.

  “One year, they made Theo teach freshmen,” Auggie said.

  “Thank you, Auggie.”

  “And every day he came home looking like that.”

  Theo scratched his beard again.

  “We went through a lot of beer.”

  “You two are good with working the social media angle?”

  Auggie nodded, and the relief on Theo’s face was transparent.

  “We can keep an eye on Evie and Colt,” Tean said. “We can’t forget about that other guy, the one who’s come after us before.”

  “And I want to dig into this anti-trafficking organization Vermilya supposedly runs.” Jem frowned. “It stinks, and I want to know what’s really going on.”

  Emery nodded and glanced at John. “Here we go.”

  9

  They spent the morning crossing off each place Vermilya had visited the day before, working their way backwards through the list Theo and North had compiled.

  They went to Reasonable Grounds, a coffee shop not far from the police station, where a barista recognized Vermilya, even remembered that he’d tipped, but couldn’t tell them anything about him. He came in sometimes. He seemed nice. They tried the Kum & Go. They got lucky at first—the clerk on duty had worked the afternoon shift the day before—but their luck ran out. If Vermilya had come into the convenience store, the clerk didn’t recognize him. They hit a dry spell after that: a stub for an unmanned parking lot on Jefferson Street; a Super Lube, where a dead-eyed technician stared at them until John-Henry had to drag Emery away to prevent a murder; the Piggly-Wiggly, where they finally found a red-headed woman cleaning her nose with her apron, who remembered Vermilya.

  “He tips the bag boys,” she said. “Don’t you think he should tip the checkers too?”

  The day was clear and cold, so crisp that John-Henry thought he could hear it crackle when he got out of the Mustang, and an enameled blue like the inside of a bowl. The snow was dirty. When he wasn’t getting the cutting edge of the wind, the air smelled like car exhaust. By noon, his feet were wet, and two hard nights meant his head was starting to pound. He was surprised, as they got into the car after the Piggly-Wiggly, when Emery’s hand came to rest on the back of his neck, and he began to massage the stiffness there.

  John-Henry groaned. “Give me two Tylenol, and I’ll do anything you want.”

  Emery laughed quietly. “Why don’t you go home, get some sleep?”

  “Because five minutes after I lie down, I’ll be ready to bang my head against a wall again.”

  They sat like that for a while. John-Henry arched his back. Emery’s thumb scraped over the short hairs on his nape. He was painfully aware that they were in public, the pale winter light filling the car, and that what he wanted, right then, was to be touched and held. It felt like it had been years instead of days. The last person who had touched him had been the deputy who processed him into the jail, and the violation lingered in his body at a level below words.

  John-Henry spread his legs until his knee bumped the shifter. Then he said, “Maybe a quick nap.”

  Another of those quiet laughs. Emery’s fingers tightened, and he gave John-Henry a tiny shake.

  “Is that a yes?”

  “I’ll drop you off.”

  “That’s not what I had in mind.”

  “John—”

  “I know, I know.” He started the car. Warm air began to pump out of the vents, carrying the smell of the car’s heater. “I’m just being needy.”

  Emery’s thumb traced his nape again, came to rest on the vertebra there. The whisper of the vents had swallowed up the sound of his breathing.

  John-Henry checked the spreadsheet, marked the address for their next stop, and pulled out of the parking lot. They drove in silence, the only sounds the tires hissing over ice, the occasional crunch of refrozen snow collapsing. The town was busier than it would have been on a Tuesday. Winter break, he reminded himself. No school. A gaggle of boys was horsing around in the Olive Garden parking lot—grabbing chunks of ice and chucking them at each other as hard as they could. The dummies were in shorts and t-shirts, of course. One kid kept having to haul his shorts back up, and they were all red-cheeked and laughing. Two women stood outside Morgan’s Music, waving their arms wildly—apparently giving directions to the men who were wheeling an upright piano out of the store. At the next red light, John-Henry glanced over at the minivan next to them. The man driving had unbuckled his seat belt and crawled halfway into the passenger seat. When he sat back, John-Henry saw the portable DVD player balanced on a cooler in the passenger seat. You know, so he could watch it while he drove. Something began to play, and as the light turned green, John-Henry saw just enough to hope desperately that he had misunderstood.