“What do you have for me?”

I hold up the bag with Angel’s things. “Case No. 1. This contains a water bottle and a sequined gold scarf. The scarf is filthy and was out in a field. Dust and particles from God knows where, maybe the beginning of time. Only one girl drank out of the water bottle so it should be pretty clean. I know this because I gave it to her. I’m looking for her DNA on the bottle and whatever you can find on the scarf.”

“This girl—she’s alive?”

“I need an ID. Please don’t ask me anything else.”

I set the bag on the bench and hold up the other one. “Case No. 2. A pair of boots. Again, I’m looking for DNA. Maybe more than one person’s. And again, anything else. Dirt analysis, cow dung, bug bits, anything that would indicate where these boots have been.”

She clears her throat. “The crime lab I work for now is private so I have a little leeway but not as much as you may think. I know other forensic scientists who help their friends off the books all the time. But they’re helping with little things. Affairs of the heart. Wayward seeds. Not major cases.” She pauses, training her eyes on my leg. “The short of it is, if any of this evidence has to do with Trumanell Branson, I don’t want to know. I want to remain anonymous. I’ve seen what the media does to anyone in my profession who brushes up against that case.”

Her eyes, softening, travel back up to my face. “I know it has to obsess you. My daughter and I watched the documentary together. We thought it was unfair—that FBI agent’s implication that you saw what happened to that poor girl and are covering up for someone. And whoever leaked those pictures of you at the accident scene … there’s a place in hell for them.”

A picture flashes in my head of a girl I don’t recognize. Blood painting her face. Eyes on their way to dead.

I can’t go there. I can’t be pulled under by this woman’s sympathy, by Wyatt, by a mute girl, by my father’s fucking boots.

“I understand,” I say quickly. “Strictly between you and me. No one else.”

“What’s the priority?” she asks abruptly.

“All of it.”

She rolls her eyes.

“How long will it take?” I persist.

“Don’t die waiting for me.”

“Seriously?”

“Give me a week, and I’ll have something preliminary.”

Her finger reaches out and drifts across the black mark on my shirt.

“I think I have wipes. Do you want me to try to get that out?”

While she digs in her purse, bugs are beginning to crawl, frenzied, all over my thigh, where leg attaches to metal. That’s how it feels, but I know that if I tore off my pants, I would see my pale skin, untouched. I fight an extraordinary urge to jump in the lake and shoot down to the cold at the bottom that never feels the sun.

The water is rippling, a slight breeze making it nervous. Memories are rippling, too. About four hundred yards to the west, in those trees, is where Trumanell found a boy raping a girl.

A mile past it, Wyatt was found wandering, out of his mind, the night his sister and father disappeared. My father was baptized here, born again and again. I threw a handful of his ashes into this water and they floated like goldfish food.

This park has always been a meeting ground for good and evil, for firsts and lasts.

23

I’m a mile from town when I swerve off for a rest stop bathroom. I rip off my jeans and shirt in the bathroom stall. I strip off the protective sleeve on my leg and bare it to the metal. With every body contortion, I’m trying to avoid touching anything. I feel like I’m getting naked in one of those bug traps where every side of the box is sticky.

It is pitiful, manic, but I scratch at the invisible bugs on my thigh and my prosthesis until a fingernail breaks.

I take a shaky breath. And another.

While a woman gets high in the bathroom stall to my left and a little girl throws up in the one on my right, I sit on the lid of a toilet in my underwear and massage my stump.

I shut my eyes and listen to the soothing noises of the mother comforting the child, who sounds like she is hacking up a lung.

I wonder if Angel ever felt this kind of love when she was sick, when she was sad, when she lost an eye. I pretend the woman is talking to me, too. Everything will be all right. I’ve got you. When my leg is quiet, I use toilet paper to wipe the sweat off my face, and change into the slim-tight black workout gear from the duffel I brought from the truck.

The little girl and I emerge at the same time. In the mirror, our faces are the same pale ghost. She points at my shoe. A couple of shreds of toilet paper are stuck to the bottom. I smile a thank you.

I pick off one piece, filthy. Then another. Not toilet paper. I’m staring at the two halves of the phone number from my father’s drawer. It fell out of my jeans pocket when I was changing in the stall.

I stuff it in the trash.

I wash my hands in cold water until they are numb.

I wait until I’m inside the truck before I dial it.

I curve the truck onto a lonesome, rugged piece of property with a shimmering ribbon of the Brazos cutting through it.

The first time she answered, it was such an electric jolt that I hung up. Dr. Andrea Greco always had a particularly distinctive voice, high and unexpected for all that intellectual stamina. It took just her single musical hello to hurtle me back to the blue chair where I sat ten years ago with a hollow stomach and a skyscraping view.

I haven’t talked to my childhood therapist since I was sixteen, when my fingernails, chewed and bloody, felt as raw as my leg. Based on our final encounter, it shocks me that my father would ever even think about calling her—that her private phone number would be hoarded in his drawer of precious things.

Fifteen minutes later, after a little online research, I dialed again.

It was a short conversation. I said I needed to see her. She recited an address in the middle of rocky nowhere, a two-hour drive away, as if we had seen each other last week.

Now her house looms in front of me as ominously as her therapy used to: steely railings, long falls, opaque windows, lookouts that cannot be defended. An end I cannot see.

She’s standing up on one of the decks, peering toward my truck as it crunches to a stop. Hair, loose and messy. Now she’s making a careful descent on a staircase that juts its way to the ground in a series of tight right angles.

No more Prada pumps. No more tailored suits so she would fit in with the big boy psychologists, or soft blowouts to impress juries more charmed by a “fixy” Texas woman.

The power pantsuits, the friendly Tina Fey glasses, a degree from Brown—she said they were all part of her armor. “Everybody needs armor,” she’d assured me. “We’ll figure out yours.”

Kind of ironic since, two years ago, she fled her corner tower office in Dallas that made ants of people below and made an ant of herself on an empty landscape.

She’d paid a high price for taking on infamous child cases.

I knew from my brief search that she was addicted to restraining orders.

Abusive parents she testified against. A psychotic teenager who tried to run her down with a motorcycle. Another who left love letters with hearts colored with his blood. Her ex-husband, who apparently liked to sneak into her Turtle Creek home after their divorce and move the furniture around while she was gone.

She told a reporter that she retired to write a book.

I wonder what I look like to her, out of the truck, metal leg bared, a black spider against all that rock and sky. Maybe like an apocalyptic assassin.

A thin cotton shirt is billowing over faded jeans as she reaches the bottom step. I wonder if she still carries a gun.

Her small Ruger flashed at me just once. It was strapped to her waist. She was reaching on her office bookshelf for the translation of the ancient Indian poem about Vishpala, a warrior queen who lost a limb in a battle and returned to fight again, fitted with an iron leg.

“The whole thing is total myth,” I’d spit at her. “Nobody could lift an iron leg to walk, much less run. Nobody back then would think a woman could fight. They don’t even think that now.”

“This poem about Vishpala was the first written mention of a prosthetic in the history of the world,” she’d replied. “Thousands of years ago.” She sat beside me on the couch and laid a hand on sacred territory, the thigh of my amputated leg. Nobody did that, which is why I remember.