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“Look at his bruises,” I say, pointing to the screen. “Those aren’t fresh. They’re two days old, at least. Which would mean they happened right around the time Randall Boggs was getting the shit beaten out of him. But he didn’t go down easy. Remember in the police report? It said the knuckles were busted on both of his hands, and there was skin under Boggs’s fingernails.”

I reach for the copy of the police report, but Bristal doesn’t say anything, only turns the laptop toward her, zooming in on the screen. “The blood on that bandage isn’t fresh, either,” she says, reluctantly. “Damn it, Lydia. How—”

“Wait,” I say sternly. “I’m going to ask you something else, and just give me the answer you think is right. How did your uncle say his dog died?”

Bristal closes her eyes, thinking. “He didn’t.”

“Right,” I agree. “So you remember him saying Dodger didn’t die at the pound?”

“Yes,” Bristal says. “For sure.”

“That’s how I remembered it, too,” I say, then push play on the audio file I have paused and ready on my phone. Bristal’s voice from earlier in the day soars out, loud and confident.

“Might be weird, but . . . do you know if my uncle Dover’s dog was out here? Bailey Foxglove wrote in her notes that he called asking after Dodger.”

“Twice, actually,” I say.

“Yeah, Dodger was one of them,” Linda says. “He didn’t have tags on him or anything like that, but I knew Dodger by sight. I’d picked him up four or five times wandering out on Far Cry. He was a smart dog—”

Bristal’s hand snaps out, stopping the audio. “But why would he lie about that? Why would he lie about how his dog died?”

“Because Dodger was carrying around the only proof that Dover killed Randall Boggs,” I say.

“Jesus Christ.” Bristal pinches the bridge of her nose, closing her eyes in disbelief. “He fed it to his dog. He fed that fucking 1864 copper nickel to his dog, didn’t he?”

“Great place to hide the proof of your crime.” I shrug.

“Or polish up a trade-in,” she says, her face lighting up as the first excited feelings of discovery take hold, no matter what it points to. “Remember what he said, about Grandpa Sandy feeding a World War Two bullet to Dodger to clean it up?”

“‘Stomach acid put a nice polish on something, once you get the shit off it,’” I say, quoting Dover directly.

“I mean, he might suck, but that was a good line,” Bristal says, her hands now going to the papers that are strewn on the floor around us, searching for her own clues. “But if Dover killed Boggs—and I’m willing to admit it does not look good for him on that point—what does this fake Denise Chivington person have to do with anything? And—” Her hands freeze, her eyes coming to mine. “Who the hell is friending everyone on Facebook?”

“I looked harder at that profile once I got suspicious,” I tell her, going back to my laptop. “It falls apart pretty quickly. Denise Chivington doesn’t have a lot of friends outside of Henley people who responded to her requests, and a few bots. I’m sorry I have to ask this, but does your uncle have access to the internet in prison?”

“Yeah,” she says, not fighting the pile-on. “He does. Let me guess. That profile was created the day we visited him.”

“The day after, actually,” I admit.

“Fuck,” she says quietly. “Fucking dead dogs and—” She breaks off suddenly, her hand coming down hard on my wrist, squeezing tight. “Far Cry,” she says.

“Ouch!” I say, twisting out of her grip. “What?”

“Far Cry,” she says again, with no explanation other than to push play on Linda Chance’s interview from earlier. It picks up where it had left off.

“—sweet boy. I’d call him and he’d jump right up in my cab. I’d drive him home, didn’t bother taking him in. I knew your . . . Sorry, but I knew your family wouldn’t be able to pay the release fee, and the pound couldn’t afford to feed any dogs we didn’t have to. Looking back on it, I wish I would’ve just taken him home that day, but I had a full truck and he was way out at the edge of Far Cry, right where it hits the county road, and Dover lived out the other side, where a bunch of trees were down. I didn’t even recognize Dodger, poor bastard. He was covered head to toe in mud—”

I tap off the audio, looking at Bristal. “I still don’t—”

“My notes,” Bristal says, crawling over me and sifting through loose pages. “From interviewing people out on Far Cry?”

“Here,” I say, grabbing her journal pages and handing them over, still mystified.

Bristal snatches them and scans them, reading aloud, her thoughts melting into a stream that overflows as much as the creek had in 1994. “Dale Childress . . . so that would’ve been heading west, around ten a.m. . . . Sammy Aldridge, same direction, his dogs started barking about ten fifteen. . . . Then it’s ten thirty by the time Lucy Hemming—fuck!”

She yanks my laptop toward her and pulls up a map, her finger stabbing at different points along Far Cry Road, the houses and yards standing out starkly from the fields in the aerial view.

“Here’s where Boggs’s place used to be, you head out to the west and you hit the Childress place, then Aldridge’s, and that abandoned farmstead—that was a Hemming place. I talked to the old lady, Lucy. She’s in the old folks’ home now, but they all said the same thing, about their dogs going nuts before the tornado came through—but none of them at the same time.”