She quickly stepped in and closed the door behind her. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she began to make out details: black plastic over the windows to keep out the light; a battered desk with a large Buck knife jammed into its top; an Ibanez flying-V guitar lying in a pile of stomp boxes next to a Fender amp. Posters on the wall displayed thrash bands like Slayer and Metallica, along with cult films such as Audition and The Relic. A smell of weed and unwashed socks lingered in the air.

A twin bed sat to the right of the door, its covers twisted up in a ball at the foot. A figure sat on the bed: a man, or rather a boy, wearing torn black jeans, black low-top sneakers, and a jean jacket with metal studs in it. His hair was long and spiky, and it flopped over his face, concealing the features. His knees were drawn up and he was hugging them to his chest with two tattooed arms. His eyes flickered up toward her a moment before drifting back down to stare again at nothing.

The volume of the music had been too high for her to process it before, but now she recognized it: “The Wanton Song,” by Led Zeppelin. Judging by the bass riff that had been shaking the apartment since her arrival, the kid had been playing it over and over. And now she noticed, on the scuffed table, a decent-looking sound system, with an amp and speakers and—to her surprise—a turntable with a stack of vinyl records next to it.

She turned to the youth on the bed. “Hey!” she shouted. “Would you mind if we turn it down for just a minute—”

In response, Parkin picked up a set of headphones and slid them over his ears.

Swanson took a seat beside the desk and began rotating it slowly back and forth, looking around. She knew that to Parkin, she must look like just another government drone, with her slacks and blue blazer, making negative assumptions about him. What the kid didn’t know was that she could easily have been him six years ago, right down to the ripped jeans and the little network of red lines on the inside of his arm where he’d practiced cutting himself. He couldn’t guess that his costume had been her costume, too, and that the blazer she was now wearing happened to be one of only two she could afford, a blue and a black, and that she was carefully rotating them until the next good sale. And he couldn’t guess that, as a result of all this, she might have a clue to what he was feeling—and how he was reacting—right now.

Parkin wasn’t in a gang—the tattoos weren’t right, and they were too professionally done. The record player, in place of some streaming Bluetooth device, indicated he cared enough to search out and curate a collection of music. Despite the smell of weed, he didn’t look like a big-time user, and according to Porter’s rap sheet the crimes this “shitbag of a brother” was suspected of were two accusations of shoplifting from big-box stores, the charges dropped in both cases. He’d been a decent student, too—until three years ago, when the plane with his parents disappeared into the ocean.

She reached over to the old Marantz receiver and slowly turned down the volume knob until the music was background noise.

The kid pushed the headphones down around his neck and glowered at her. “Hey, what the fuck? Turn that back on. I already told the others I don’t know anything. So leave me alone.”

Instead of answering, she reached over to the turntable, removed the record, and returned it carefully to its torn white sleeve. “I like your rig,” she said, putting the sleeve back in the record jacket. “Interesting taste in music, too. I mean, the way you’re rocking it old school. You know what? I’ve tried to get into hip-hop—I really have. But I’ve more or less given up. To me it sounds like a bunch of bragging and ranting and bitch-slapping, chanted over the beat of a dime-store drum machine. And then when they do condescend to sing a little—like, during the hook, maybe—the voices all sound so clinical and similar, Auto-Tuned up the ass.” She shrugged and nodded toward the door. “Of course, those characters out there don’t even know Merle Haggard’s dead. Don’t tell them—you’ll ruin their day.”

Parkin didn’t say anything during this monologue. But he didn’t curse at her again, either; just looked at her with curiosity. Now she took a moment to replace the album atop the stack. “I was more into dark ambient, but I always did like Zep,” she said. “They took even older material and respected it, made it relevant. Made it their own. That’s how the best music endures. By the way, my name’s Corinne—Corrie to my friends.” She paused and then, because she had to go by the book, added, “FBI.” She touched the lanyard on which her ID was strung.

But this didn’t seem to faze the kid.

“I know you’re Ernest. Do you mind if I—?”

The kid watched as she began to look through his records. Swanson had already gotten what she’d come to Scottsdale for—it wasn’t much, but it was all she could hope for—and now she was just confirming her instincts. “In ninth grade,” she said, “I used to carry around a Les Paul—a knockoff, anyway—totally broken, no pickups or anything, but I didn’t care. I wore it low slung, practically down to my knees, like Page.”

Her fingers stopped on another album, with a cover showing nude figures creeping up a slope—presumably toward a sacrificial altar. “This is it!” she said. “Houses of the Holy. There’s a song on here—‘The Ocean’—that totally changed my musical perspective. That opening guitar riff…I mean, it comes out of nowhere, breaks all the rules of rhythm, seems to start over again even before the end of the second bar. Here, I’ll play it.” She took off her jacket and let it drop on the dirty chair—pretending to be unaware her shoulder holster was in plain view—pulled out the record, flipped it to side B, set it on the platter, moved the needle to the last track, and cranked the volume back to where it had been before.

They listened for all four and a half minutes of the song. Then a second time, and then a third. And then Swanson put the tonearm back on its stand. There was a moment of silence, broken only by a faint hum from the speakers.

“What do you want?” Parkin finally asked.

Swanson didn’t answer immediately. She was winging it and had been ever since she stepped into the kid’s bedroom. There was nothing like this in the book, and Morwood would probably shit a brick if he saw her. This wasn’t her case—but she understood this frightened and lonely youth better than any of the cops outside did.

“I want you to know I’m not here because of you,” she said. “Your sister’s only been gone for—”

“Don’t bullshit me, you know she’s dead!” Parkin said, suddenly sitting up straight on the bed, face flushing, tendons showing in his neck. “Dead! And those motherfuckers out there, hanging around, doing nothing to find her…they might as well be jacking off. They obviously think it was me—hope it was me. That would make their lives easier, wouldn’t it? Fuckers.”

“Is that why you won’t talk to them?” she asked.

Parkin’s answer was to lean back again and turn his face to the wall.

Exactly what she would have done in the same situation. Not if her mother vanished—that would be cause for a Kansas state holiday—but if her father had. He had left, truth be told…but not suddenly, like this. Not with apparent violence. She could just imagine it: cops crawling all over their double-wide, Sheriff Hazen concluding right away that it was her—hell yes, she’d have reacted just like Parkin. Except he had it worse. It was obvious that things had fallen apart for him after the death of their parents. His sister, several years older, had weathered it a lot better than he had. She’d gone on with her life, found a job, found someone to date—even if he was married. Meanwhile Ernest had just drifted.