Obedience

“No, wait,” Thurman said then, gesturing in the air as if to say, Wipe that off, clean the slate. “Before then. Before the boyfriend returns, we’d brought the dad in to question him. This guy is a bum. Tattoos all over his body, profane things, Nazi propaganda and all that. He had a tattoo of the solar system on his back. Must have cost him a year’s earnings, at least. They called him Stardust. Star. Star had been up in Swani for beating a guy nearly to death a few years before. He was in a motorcycle gang we were surveilling called the Creeps. This was about six months prior to Dea

“Star was talking about their ornaments, the girls who sit on the backs of their bikes and smoke cigarettes and let their hair blow wild while the men look tough in the front. He’d said, ‘Joh

Thurman’s eyes widened and he breathed in expansively, playing up the drama of it all. “So after the boyfriend returns we call Star back in. He comes in like he owns the place. You know how they do. These bikers and hoods and criminals. They’re above the law. They’re untouchable. So this guy comes in and we ask him again what he’d meant before, which ‘girl’ he was talking about for dead old Joh

“Tell them about how you caught Star,” Williams led the detective. “Tell them the part about Bell City.”

Thurman said, “Well, we kept Star on a short leash. Put a man outside the house to watch his every move. For two or three days after Dea

“And then?” Williams pushed. It was clear that he was tiring of all the extraneous detail in the man’s story.

“And then it happened,” Thurman said. “Star got on his bike one morning, real early, just after dawn, and he rode out to Bell City. He stopped a few times on the way, trying to detect a tail, but our guy was good. They played cat and mouse all the way up Highway 72. Finally, Star pulled over to a little dusty trailer right outside of Bell City. The detective stayed back a good distance and watched him through binoculars. Star went in, stayed maybe a half hour, then came outside and drove back to Cale.

“Of course we descended on the place. But get this: there was a girl in there, but it wasn’t Dea

“But she looked just like Dea

“Right! It was the damndest thing. It struck us all: how similar she looked to Dea

“Excuse me,” someone in the back said. Mary turned and saw Brian House; he was standing up, his hand raised. “Excuse me,” he said again.

“Mr. House?” Williams said.

“I have to…” Brian sat down, put his face in his hands.

“Are you feeling well?” Williams asked.

“No,” Brian said. “I’m not. I’m sorry but I have to go.” He stood up again, gathered his things and, with his head down as if he were going to get sick, walked out of Seminary East.

“Go on, Detective,” Williams instructed the man when the door was closed.

“We never found that missing girl. Of course the father chopped her up, we all knew that, but we never could prove it. One common theory was that some of the Creeps’ rivals took her out to the desert and left her there as a sort of blood capital. But uh-uh. No. You can’t convince me that it wasn’t Daddy.

“I still think about Dea

Detective Thurman stopped talking. His eyes were still moist, glinting in Seminary East’s steady light. He took another slug of the Dasani. “Questions?” he asked, his voice choked and raw.

The students spent a few minutes asking questions. Thurman answered them clumsily, his language leaning heavily into cliché. When asked why he had gone into the force, he told them that police work was “noble,” and that he was just carrying on the legacy of his brother and father, who were also cops. He told them that the key to detective work was “keeping your eye on the ball” and not getting “trapped in a corner.” When asked if he had ever fired his gun, he said yes, but only as a last resort. De

When the detective had shuffled out of the room, Williams shut the door behind him. Mary braced for an important bit of information.

“There is, you’ll be happy to know, some edutainment scheduled for this weekend. There is going to be a-how shall I put this and not offend the Square Guard up at Carnegie?-a party at my house on Sunday night.”

“A soiree?” asked De

“A bash. Montgomery and Pride. Eight o’clock. You can bring a friend.”

As usual, a few people convened in the hallway after class. “Are you going?” De

“Of course not,” she said. But she was lying. She had already made up her mind about what to wear.