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Dalton nodded slowly. “Yes.”
“If I showed you a picture—” Auggie scrolled through the images on his phone until he found the photo of the ring that Jem had recovered along with a collection of other stolen and illegally transported items.
Dalton made a soft noise. He reached for the phone, but the cuffs caught him, so he leaned in for a closer look.
“Is that Leon’s ring?”
“Yes. Where did you get this? What happened to Leon?”
“Are you sure?” Theo asked.
“I don’t know. I think so; I don’t know. Did something happen to him? I told him not to go with that man.”
“We don’t know,” Auggie said. “That’s what we’re trying to find out.”
They stood and moved toward the door. Theo hit the buzzer, and it sounded distantly. Dalton looked smaller inside his scrubs, as though the interview had stolen something from him.
When he spoke, it sounded like he was talking to himself. “It wouldn’t have worked even if he’d stayed. I know that. He was nice to me, but he didn’t feel the same way. There was always that other boy. He’d let Leon go for a while and then reel him back in, and every time, Leon let him.”
“What boy?” Theo said. “Keelan?”
“It was sad, really. I tried to tell him it wasn’t ever going to work out. Keelan liked fooling around, but that’s all—anybody could see that. Of course, Leon was convinced there was more. Deeper feelings and all that.” A laugh bubbled up. “And yes, I’m aware of the irony, but at least I knew how Leon felt about me. What he didn’t understand, though, was that it wasn’t just that boy. It was his mom. Even if Leon had stuck around, she would have made sure nothing ever happened between him and her son.”
“Who are you talking about?”
The deputy entered the room, keys jingling, and Dalton stood to be led away. “Baylee Vasquez. Do you know, I honestly believe if she’d ever caught them, she would have killed Leon?”
23
“That was good,” John-Henry said. “That was really, really good.”
“Excellent work,” Sheriff Engels said.
In the sheriff’s office, after their debriefing, Theo felt exhausted. The physical and emotional toll of the last few days, sure, but then this. Dalton. His terror had been hard enough to experience secondhand; this was a man Theo knew, and although they hadn’t been friends, it was still somehow worse because Dalton wasn’t a stranger, someone Theo could explain away without a second thought as a pervert and a deviant. Even worse, though, was hearing him talk about Leon, and learning—even though it seemed impossible—that the campy theater teacher who lusted after teenage boys might have been the closest thing to a parental figure in Leon’s life. Certainly, Theo thought as he ran through the cast of asshats they’d encountered in the last few days, he was the only one who had genuinely cared about Leon. Then he thought of Shaniyah and added, While he was alive. He tried to scrub that thought out as soon as it came, because maybe Leon was still alive, and maybe he was healthy and happy somewhere. But when he closed his eyes, he saw the terror in Dalton’s face, and beyond it, a shadow—the man who had taken Leon away from Wahredua.
“We’re going to get started on this right away,” John-Henry was saying, and Theo forced himself to open his eyes again. “We’ve got a connection between Leon and the Cottonmouth Club. We’ve got Dalton as an eyewitness. We’ll start working on taking that place apart, finding the weak links, the ones who will talk if we apply the right pressure. We’ve got six-packs we can show Dalton in the meantime, in case we get lucky. Some of the sex offenders, don’t you think?”
Engels nodded; it took Theo a moment to realize six-packs referred to packs of photos of previously convicted individuals.
“You did good,” John-Henry said. “This is solid. This is golden, actually. And we’re going to run with it.”
“Now,” Engels said, “you boys need to go home and get some sleep, because you look dead on your feet.”
John-Henry walked them out, chatting about something—about Lana and Evie, Theo thought, although it was hard to track the conversation. He left them at the door and hurried back, obviously excited to get started now that the investigation had legs.
When Theo caught Auggie’s expression out of the corner of his eye, he was surprised to see a frown.
“What?”
“What about Shaniyah?”
Theo’s eyes had that gluey feeling that came from too little sleep. “Shaniyah?”
“All right, some mysterious man offered Leon a chance to make porn. Let’s say Leon went with him, and that’s why he disappeared. If the guy was telling the truth, if it was a semi-legit offer and Leon’s out there in California living his best life, then why would someone kill Shaniyah? And more importantly, why would they kill her here, in Wahredua? I mean, it’s not like she showed up on the studio doorstep and announced they were using underage models. But the other version doesn’t make any sense either—if the guy’s dirty, if he was lying to Leon and still took him, why kill Shaniyah? Leon’s gone, and there’s no way Shaniyah could have made that connection to whoever this guy was. I mean, Dalton was the only one who knew the whole story, and he wouldn’t tell us until his own life was on the line; there’s no way he told Shaniyah. So, it’s the same question: why kill Shaniyah, and why kill her in Wahredua?”
It took a moment for Theo to make sense of what Auggie was saying. His brain had that same tackiness as his eyeballs, like his thoughts were gummed into place. Finally he said, “You think Keelan’s mom killed her? Why? Because she stumbled onto something else?”
“I don’t know. I think we know—kind of, partially—what happened to Leon. But we don’t know who killed Shaniyah, or why, and the answer is still here, in town.”
