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“First, you roll over so I can hear you properly,” I say, and she does so, taking a pillow and putting it over her face.

“Next?”

I grab my laptop and flop onto the bed next to her, pulling the pillow away and tossing it onto the floor.

“Next, you tell me everything you’ve learned so far about the Boggs murder.”

At the mention of murder, Bristal’s face lights up, and she pulls a square of paper out of her back pocket, which I recognize as her copies of the Hometown Henley Headlines I’d printed out for her.

“These articles had the bare facts, things you and I—and probably our listeners—would already know, just from living in Henley. Boggs was a sixty-five-year-old man who lived alone out on Far Cry Road. No family, no friends, no reliable means of income. Some neighbors kayaked over to his trailer after the flood to see how the old bastard was doing, and the way he was doing was pretty bad, because they found him dead-ass dead.”

“I’m pretty sure David Swinton would have never described it that way in the local paper,” I say, uncapping a pen and making some notes in my journal.

“No,” Bristal says, running her finger down the page. “Swinton says they ‘found the unfortunate Mr. Boggs to be deceased.’ I got the dead-ass dead quote from Cousin Larry.”

“So you already did some interviews?” I ask, impressed.

“You bet your bideted ass I did,” Bristal says, then shoots me a look. “Seriously, do you have a bidet? Because if you do, I’m in. Or, it’s in me. Whatever would be the right way to say that.”

“The right way is to not mention it all,” I tell her. “And no, we don’t have a bidet. Who found the dead body? Was it your cousin?”

“Yep,” Bristal says, flopping back onto the mattress again, this time choosing a round pillow, tossing it toward the ceiling, catching it, and tossing it again. “Together with a guy by the name of Dale Childress.”

“Brandon’s dad,” I say, clicking my pen closed. “Glad you did that interview and not me.”

“Yeah, I heard he told you to fuck off and that his little sister was on that bus that Lytle ran off the road,” Bristal says, batting the pillow to the ground. “Then he ate a bunch of your doughnuts. If I’d had some advance warning, I could have injected them with Ex-Lax.”

“Anyway,” I declare, “back on topic—Dale Childress and your cousin discovered Randall Boggs’s body?”

“Yes.” Bristal nods, sitting up again. “And Larry said he knew something was ‘dead-ass dead’ before he even paddled up to the front door.”

“The smell?” I ask, my own nose wrinkling.

“‘Like a skunk that got eaten by a bigger skunk, then vomited it up, then ate the vomit, then shit the vomit out the other end,’ is how it was described to me,” Bristal says helpfully. “Dale said he pulled open the screen door, but that was about all he could take. Boggs was facedown in the water, and even though he was swollen ‘like a dead cow pregnant with six calves,’ he could see that he was missing the back of his head.”

“‘A dead cow pregnant with six calves,’” I muse, then notice Bristal’s bright smile. “You can’t say that on the podcast.”

“Why not?” she protests. “It’s a direct quote.”

“Did you record the conversation?” I ask. “Or take notes?”

“Yeah, I took notes,” she says, tapping her temple.

I groan and do a face-plant in the remaining pillows that Bristal hasn’t thrown around the room already. “Go on,” I mutter, my own voice now lost in cotton and goose down.

“Childress called the cops, and Foxglove and the coroner came out. After an autopsy they were pretty sure that Boggs was shot on the twelfth, but his body had been floating in rainwater, fast-food trash, and a decent amount of raccoon shit, so they couldn’t really say for sure. What they could definitively say, though, was that somebody beat the absolute hell out of old Randall before they shot him.”

“Really?” I ask, whipping open my notebook as I sit up, ears perked. “How did you get this information?”

“From this,” Bristal says, tearing open her backpack and tossing a police file onto my bed. The manila folder falls open, and a wave of gruesome crime scene photos and original, handwritten police reports waterfall across my pink and white quilt.

“BRISTAL!” I exclaim, running over and slamming my bedroom door shut. “How the hell did you get that?”

“I traded it for some good info about where to find the local fentanyl stash,” she says with a shrug. “Well, I wouldn’t say it was good info, but the conversation ended with the cops knowing more than they did before, and I got this out of the deal.”

“This is an open criminal investigation,” I say, part panicked, part elated, as I’m torn between diving through the material and packing it out of sight. “They never figured out who killed Randall Boggs.”

“And never will, either, because nobody gives a shit,” Bristal says. “From everything Childress said, Boggs was a racist, sexist asshole. ‘Nastier than an infected cut’ were his actual words. Cousin Larry told me that he wouldn’t have even gone over there to check on the old man if it hadn’t been for the rumor about him having some sort of family treasure stashed away.”