But he didn’t call. He didn’t pick uphercalls. All the way to school, as the Bisonette’s group chat sizzled and snapped, Kimbra’s astute mind studied and prodded and resigned itself to a simple fact: her boyfriend might be hiding even more from her than she suspected.
KT Staler, bless his heart, really was not as clever as he thought he was, but Kimbra had always loved that about him. Unlike Bethany Tanner, Kimbra Lott knew her boyfriend lied to her on a daily basis. KT’s deception, in some odd way, was almost part of his charm. It was charming because Kimbra had a pretty clear idea of the sort of work he did on those weekend trips he took to the coast with Dylan Whitley. KT always thought he was fooling her. It had been adorable until today.
She skimmed through all the messages from the Bitchettes, began to type, and then there was her man, slipping through the door of the geography room with a heavy bag on his shoulder and black circles around his eyes. KT walked with a slouch to the back of the room, refusing to look up when she called his name.
the cops are here, wrote Alisha.
the fuck?!
omg omg omg
Kimbra went very cold. Before she could stand up and drag her boyfriend outside and twist his arm until he cameverydamn clean about what thefuckhe had actually been up to this weekend, the bell rang. Mrs. Sparrows rose from her seat and even the wildest of students came to attention. None of them wanted to risk the wrath of Mrs. Sparrows on a Monday morning.
Which made Lady Cop all the more impressive. Stepping through the class’s door without a knock a few minutes later, taking in all of their frightened faces, Lady Cop said, “I need to speak with Kyler Thomas, please.”
Kimbra heard Bethany suck in a little gasp three rows away, felt her captain (Oh captain, my stupid captain) turn to stare at the side of Kimbra’s face.
“Class just began,” Mrs. Sparrows said, but KT had already pushed back his chair.
“It’s KT,” he said, and trudged to the door.
“Officer,” said Jasmine Lopez. “Is Dylan alright?”
Lady Cop didn’t blink. She didn’t say a word. She led KT out into the hall and left Kimbra staring at the door, her heart in her throat, her clever mind briefly gone truant.
CLARK
KT followed Clark down the hall without a word. She led him to the vacant classroom where Mayfield was waiting. He thanked the boy for coming, said, “I hear your sister’s doing well.”
KT folded his bony frame into his seat. A patchy stretch of stubble climbed his neck. His small eyes were sunk in their sockets. He looked tired, irritated, but relatively calm. He did not look, as far as Clark could tell, like a young man hoping to conceal a murder.
“If this is about Dylan I ain’t got no idea where he is,” KT said. “He told me he never wanted to come back to this shitty town again and he was going to drive till he found a new place he wanted to be. I was like whatever. Jamal and me drove back from G-town last night and I ain’t heard from D since.”
Mayfield tilted his head. His considerable gut was creased over the edge of the table. “You’re answering a question I don’t recall asking.”
“That’s what this about, right?” KT said. “The wonder boy don’t show up to practice and now the school’s bugging?”
Clark hoped her nerves didn’t show. Her experience with interviews had, until now, been limited to drunks, meth heads driving cars with hot plates, battered spouses and their battering spouses. She had never worked a murder, and the wounds on Dylan’s body left little doubt that they were dealing with a homicide, making his the first violent death reported in Pettis County in years.
Clark felt far out of her depth. She knew that these initial interviews were precious to the investigation, that Dylan’s friends and schoolmates would likely never be more honest than they were now—or more apt to fumble some unpracticed lie—and she was terrified of squandering the moment.
“Just treat this like talk,”Mayfield had told her when they’d arrived at the school.“If they’ve got something to hide they’ll do all the work for you.”
“Maybe we could back up a little,” Clark said to KT now. “What exactly did the three of you do in Galveston over the weekend?”
KT rolled his eyes. “We fished.”
Mayfield cocked his head. “You fished for two days straight?”
No, KT explained,of coursethey hadn’t. The three of them—Dylan, KT and Jamal—had left town straight after the game Friday night, getting into Galveston around 1:00 a.m. Dylan seemed weird from the minute they arrived, KT said, distant and moody, and had gone straight to sleep. They got up around ten the next morning, ate some breakfast with KT’s half brother, Floyd, and then took a little putter boat out into the Gulf to fish all day.
Clark jotted all of this down. “And was Dylan still acting moody when you got out on the water?”
“He’s was a fucking pain is what he was,” KT said. All day long Dylan talked about how shitty a place Bentley was for a guy who wanted any kind of future, how the only thing anybody cared about was a game that gave you brain damage, blah blah blah. By Sunday afternoon, KT had had enough. “We was out on the water again, nothing biting, and still he’s just going on and on about how he haddreams, how he wants to have afuture. So finally—it must have been like around six I guess—I say, ‘Bro, if you hate that place so much, how come you don’t just leave?’ So he got real quiet, didn’t say much till we docked that night, and then he just got out of the boat, grabbed his keys and was like ‘Peace.’ He got in his truck, headed out and that was the last I heard from him.”
“That’s it?” Clark asked. “He just up and left?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
