'Try five cans and a couple of wine bottles. The cans all have Lucas's or the dead girl's prints on them. The bottles are probably twenty years old.'
'What have you got on the girl?'
'Raised by an aunt… Long welfare history… In high school she was known as a real piece of work… Went to a community college for a while and dropped out… Worked at a church store, got fired from Wal-Mart for stealing… Get this, though. Three people at Shorty's say she came there by herself, not with a bunch of college kids. Not good news for Lucas.'
'Maybe she met them there.'
'Maybe… There's another problem, too, Billy Bob. You'd better get that boy out of jail.'
'What's going on?'
'Harley Sweet.'
She widened her eyes and held them on my face.
I rode up to the third floor of the courthouse with a turnkey. The heat had risen in the building and the stone walls were speckled with condensation.
'I'd like to talk to Lucas in an interview room,' I said.
'Sorry, Billy Bob. Harley says he stays in lockdown… By the way, don't worry about that 'un on the left. He's got a lot more Christian perspective today.'
The man in the cell to the left was dressed only in a pair of paper-thin Jockey undershorts. His sparse hair was the color of Mercurochrome, pasted in oily strains across his head. His skin had the unblemished smoothness of latex stretched over stone, and his left eye was smaller than the other, like a dime-size blue marble pushed deep into clay.
'What's your name, buddy?' I said to him, while the turnkey opened Lucas's cell.
'Garland T. Moon,' he answered, his eyes brightening with challenge.
'They treating you all right?'
He got up from the bunk, his stomach cording with muscle, and stood close to the bars. His breath was sweet, like prunes that have fermented in a jar. 'I like it here. I wouldn't trade it for a half dozen Californias. It don't impress me out there.'
'Ask him what happened inside that family's house in Santa Monica. If you got the stomach to hear it,' the turnkey said.
The man who called himself Garland T. Moon smiled into my face and ran his tongue along his bottom lip. His tongue was red and thick as a biscuit.
The turnkey locked me in Lucas's cell. I sat down next to Lucas on his bunk.
'My PI says you've seen something that might get you in trouble,' I said.
Lucas pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. 'The guy in there,' he said, his voice lowered. 'Harley was telling him last night Texas won't send him back to California because California don't like to give people the death penalty. He was telling the guy what it's like to die by injection, how the guy's muscles are going to turn to cement so his lungs cain't go up and down, how he'll suffocate way down inside himself while everybody watches.
'Harley was almost back to the elevator and the guy says, "One… one… one Fannin Street." It made Harley go crazy. He got three other guys up here and they went in the guy's cell and chained him up and drug him down to the shower, then Harley went back to a locker and got a cattle prod. Mr Holland, the guy's eyes was rolled in his head and his britches was around his knees when they drug him back…'
'Listen to me, Lucas. As long as you're in here, you didn't see any of this,' I said.
'I cain't take it. The guy in the other cell, Jimmy Cole, he told me this morning what he done to a little boy in Georgia.'
He started to cry, unashamedly, his arms stiff on his knees, his eyes squinted shut, the tears streaming down his cheeks.
The sheriff kept his office behind the courthouse in the squat, one-story yellow sandstone building that had been the original county jail in the 1870s. He was six and a half feet tall and weighed over three hundred pounds, ate five meals a day, chainsmoked cigars, kept a spittoon by his desk, and hung framed pictures on the ancient log walls of every man his department had helped the state of Texas execute.
With no more than a fourth grade education, he had managed to remain sheriff for twenty-seven years.
He spun a poker chip on his desk blotter while I talked. The brow of his granite head was furrowed, his massive upper arms red with sunburn.
'Evidence disappearing? No, sir, not in this department. Where'd you hear this?' His eyes, which were flat and gray, lifted into mine.
'It happens, sheriff. Things get misplaced sometimes.'