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Fontaine blinks harder, then wipes his hand over his face.

“Come on, James,” Cavallo says. “You know her, don’t you?”

“You mean Hannah?”

“That’s right. Tell me about Hannah.”

He shrugs. “Tell you what?”

“For one thing, how do you know her?”

“From school.”

“Are you two friends?”

“No, we ain’t friends.” He expels a puff of air. “Not hardly, not no more.”

“Why is that?” I ask.

“On account of what she done to my car, her and that other girl.”

Not the answer I was expecting. “And what was that?” I ask.

“Busted the windows out,” he says, swinging an imaginary bat through the air. “Keyed up the side.”

“When did this happen?”

He hears the skepticism in my voice and rolls his eyes. “You the police, man. Look it up.”

Cavallo jumps in. “You reported it?”

“Of course we reported it,” he snaps. “You gotta report it for the insurance. And we told them who done it, too, but that didn’t matter obviously. They didn’t do nothing about it, did they?”

Cavallo scribbles a note, then tears the sheet off her notepad, walking it out the door. While she’s gone, I give Fontaine a stern but paternal look.

“Hannah seems like a nice girl,” I say. “Why would she do something like that to your ride?”

The question makes him thoughtful. Sometimes a pause is strategic, buying time to invent an answer, but the way he starts rubbing his neck and studying the suspended ceiling tiles, I’m guessing he’s never stopped to wonder about this.

“She is a nice girl,” he admits with a nod. “In her own way. I liked her at first. I mean, she’s pretty fine looking, right? And underneath all that Jesus talk, she could be pretty cool sometimes.”

“You liked her.”

He shrugs. “She was all right. But all that religion and stuff – it’s fine for some people, don’t get me wrong, I’m not judgin’ or nothing – but it gets old, you know what I mean? Feeling like you the pet project, always needin’ to be dragged into church. And then she got all, like, clingy, you know?”

Cavallo reenters, pausing on the threshold. She has a new stack of papers in her hand. When she sits, she starts shuffling through them. “James, I have a question about your phone. The one we found you with, that’s with Cingular, right?”

“Yeah.”

“But you have another phone, don’t you?”

“I got my home phone.”

“Another mobile phone, I mean. What’s the number to that?”

He glances at me, confused. “What she talking about?”

“Your other phone,” I say.

“You already got my phone. I don’t got another one.”

Cavallo shakes her head. “You don’t conduct business on that phone, do you? The one your parents pay the bill for?”

“I’m seventeen,” he says. “I don’t conduct no business.”

She reaches down to the floor and starts unfolding the pile of notes he gave her a few minutes ago. “This looks like a business to me. What were you doing last Thursday?”

“I don’t remember. Why?”

She sits back. “You’re not being very cooperative, James.”

“What you want me to say? I don’t remember what I was doing. Probably nothing, since they suspended me from school.”

“Let’s talk about the car,” I say, breaking up the rhythm. “You never did tell me why she’d do something like that.”

He turns his chair so he’s facing me, ignoring Cavallo across the table. “Prob’ly ’cause of the weed they found in her locker.”

“So that was yours?”

“I didn’t put it there, if that’s what you mean.”

Cavallo taps her pen on the table. “Why’d she think you did?”

He turns toward her. “Like I said, she was interfering with my game. I was, like, ‘you need to back off,’ and she was all uppity about it, you know, so we ended up having some words. That’s it, just words. And she was all crying and everything, and saying how she cared about me.” When he says cared, his shoulders tighten. “She was living some kind of fantasy in her head, I guess, thinking there was something more between us than there was.”

“Did you ever go out on a date?”

He laughs. “Man, she wears one of them rings – what’s it called? A promise ring?” He shakes his head. “Shawty’s saving herself, you know? Why would I take a girl like that out? Nothing in it for me.”

“You’re a class act,” Cavallo says.

He smiles her way. I liked him better when he was crying.

“So you told her to back off,” I say, “and suddenly some dope turns up in her locker. She assumes you put it there to get her in trouble, so she trashes your car?”

“Her and that other one. The Katrina girl.”

“Katrina who?” Cavallo asks, making a note.

He scrunches his face up in contempt. “No, not Katrina who. That New Orleans girl that was Hannah’s friend.” He edges toward me, man to man. “Talk about messed up. It’s that girl you need to be talking to, if you wanna know what happened. She was the instigator.”

Cavallo’s pen is still poised. “This girl have a name?”

He shrugs. “She got one. Don’t mean I remember it.”

“Evey?” I ask.

His eyes light up. “That’s the one. Talk to her. She’s one of those people seems normal, then all the sudden they just freak out on you. I told Hannah she needed to get clear of that one, but the girl don’t listen to me.”

Cavallo stands. “Let’s take a break.”

When it came to ratting out his friends, Fontaine seemed only too helpful, but on the subject of Hannah Mayhew, his answers strike me as evasive and confused. Not that I think he strangled her and buried her in his backyard, or has her locked up in his bedroom closet. Now more than ever, I’m convinced she ended up in that West Bellfort house, bleeding out on the dirty bed. Only I don’t know how she got there. If Fontaine had picked up his brick from some Crips, we’d have a direct link, but he went to the wrong neighborhood, Latin King territory if it was anyone’s at all.

And what was really between them? He speaks so cavalierly about her, denying any attraction on his part, but then he turns around and warns her about the people she hangs with? I can’t help thinking there was more to their relationship than he wants to let on. Out of pride, maybe, assuming it’s not plain fear. Not wanting to get mixed up any deeper than he already is.

In the monitoring room, Wanda Mosser sits watching him on the screen. She looks up at us, clearly disappointed. Villanueva’s corner now stands empty.

“We need to call the question,” she says. “Ask him point-blank where Hannah Mayhew is.”

I shake my head. “It’s not him. He wouldn’t be talking if it was.”

“Do it anyway.”

Cavallo gives her the nod, then turns to me. “Who’s the Katrina girl he’s talking about?”

“Someone Robb mentioned. Evey something, short for Evangeline, like in the poem.” She looks at me blankly, but I decide now’s not the time to astonish her with my knowledge of Longfellow. “We’ll need to follow that up.”

She hands me some printouts on the vandalism. Sure enough, the incident was reported. Fontaine’s father, a Hewlett-Packard employee, even retained a lawyer and managed to get a restraining order against Hannah Mayhew, preventing her from approaching either the family home or James personally.

“So not only have we failed to recover our victim,” Cavallo says, “or seize her kidnapper for that matter, but we’ve turned up a little dirt to tarnish her name.”

“You think this might be why Donna’s reluctant to go on television? The drug suspension, the restraining order, that’s a lot of dirty laundry to put out there.”

Wanda interrupts with a long sigh. “Mama’s tired, boys and girls. And if that kid walks out of here without giving us our missing girl, that means our only real lead isn’t a lead anymore. Then I’ll be real tired, and when I’m tired I get irritable.”

“Should we beat him with a hose until he talks?”

“Don’t put ideas in my head, March. Just go in there and ride him until he either coughs something up or has a nervous breakdown.”