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I said marker in front of him yesterday, and his face didn't move. He keeps his eyes on the tabletop now and says nothing.

I think this marker is the same secret he wouldn't tell me about my father. I don't ask him, not in front of Torres and not today. He's refused me every time I've asked, and another question gets me another no. When I ask again, I'm going to have proof he can't argue with.

"How did you get out?" Torres asks.

"I killed a man."

Torres lays her pen on the notebook. "Before you say the next sentence, you need to know you can have a lawyer with you. Nobody's charged you with anything. If you want to stop here and find one, you stop here."

"Do you want to know or not?"

"I want you to understand what I just told you."

"I understand it. I'm telling you anyway." My voice comes out steadier than my hands. "The night they ordered me onto the truck, the man they sent to load me came into my cell. I was holding a piece of rebar I'd worked loose from the wall. I drove it in under his ear. His name was Royce. He was Dutch's little brother. I left him on the floor of my cell and hid in the empty cell next door. Dutch came down after him and went into mine. I slipped up the stairs behind him and slammed the bolt on the cellar door."

Torres picks her pen back up and writes it all down in small, square letters.

"Everybody who carried Sandy's lines goes in my report, along with what happened to each of you," she says. "Yours too. You'll tell it again someday with a lawyer beside you, and you'll tell it the same way."

"I won't need to change a word."

"Somebody had to get rid of that body," Torres says. "Royce what?"

"I never heard a last name. Only that he was Dutch's little brother."

"If a grown man named Royce quit showing up at his job and his mother's table a few weeks ago, somebody noticed. I'll find who." She underlines his name. "Did you take anything off him?"

"His boots and his knife. They're in the dresser in the guest house. His blood's still on the boots."

"Leave them where they are. Don't clean them, and don't let anybody else handle them. I'll have an evidence technician from the San Antonio office out here to bag them, and I want the guest house locked until then. I'll take the keys."

I dig both brass keys out of my jeans and put them in her palm. She locks them in a zippered pocket of her bag.

She finishes writing. "Who else knows where you were held?"

"Knox, his brothers, and Raven." There's one more name I don't want to say. "My father. Yesterday at dawn, I told him Coleman kept me in a cell under his winery."

Torres sets down her pen. "I'd assume Whitlock knew by last night."

I told my father on the church walk knowing he might carry it to Coleman. I've been telling myself ever since that he wouldn't. Torres has never met him, and she's sure he did.

"Tell me what they did to you in that cellar," she says.

I look at Knox. His hand is still pressed to the wood.

He has never asked me what happened in the cigar room. He's seen the bruises and watched me go blank in his bed, and he's held me down because I asked him to, but he has never once made me say it. The first time he hears it isn't going to be me reciting it to Torres across his own kitchen table.

"Go out on the porch," I tell him.

He doesn't argue. He turns to Torres instead.

"When she says stop, you stop," he says.

"That's how I work," Torres says.

He takes his hand off the table and goes. He crosses the kitchen in heavy strides and hits the release button beside the door frame, and the magnetic lock lets go. Through the glass, I watch him stop at the porch rail with his back to the house.

Raven starts to push her chair back, and I put my hand on her arm. "You stay."