“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 Deanna’s disappearance. One of the Creeps had been shot to death during a ride out to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and we were calling them in one by one, you know, interrogating them. We brought Star in and he said something strange, something we didn’t really put together until the boyfriend came back and it was clear that something terrible had happened to Deanna.

“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, ‘Johnny Tracer’-which was the guy who’d been shot-‘was looking for a girl to ride with, and I said, “I got one for ya. I’m trying to get her off my hands anyways.” ’”

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 Johnny Tracer. And of course he lied. He said it was some girl he’d met at a truck stop, some hook-” Thurman wasn’t sure if he should say the word. He looked at Williams anxiously, awaiting clearance. He finally decided on “some trash.”

“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 Deanna went missing-nothing. Not a peep. He was Honest Abe. I suppose that he knew we had our eye on him, so he was just play-pretending like he was Mr. Common Joe. The guy even went to church, if you can believe it, dressed in all black.”

“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 Deanna. It looked like her. In fact, we thought it was her. We arrested Star and returned the girl to her mother, but the mother told us, ‘This isn’t my daughter.’ And it was true. One of detectives had whispered to me as we drove her from the Bell City trailer that there was something funny about her. She was…hiding her face somehow. She was disguising herself. The mother was more distraught than before. What a thing! To think that your daughter was going to be returned to you, but you get this…counterfeit. So we took the girl in, questioned her. She would only say that she ‘knew’ Star Ward. She never told us what her relationship was with him. When we asked her about the missing girl, Deanna, she denied knowing a thing about her.”

“But she looked just like Deanna, right?” Williams said.

“Right! It was the damndest thing. It struck us all: how similar she looked to Deanna. She was almost an identical copy, except she was…different somehow. She would do this thing with her face-I’ll always remember it-like tilt it to one side and blink at us innocently. It was all very bizarre and crooked, and it still gives me nightmares even now, almost twenty years later.”

“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 Deanna. When I retired I would drive the streets down in Cale, looking for that girl. After Star Ward took his family and left for California, they didn’t get too many leads about Deanna down at the station. One day I followed the boyfriend-you have to understand, now, that I was off duty by this time and could have gotten in some severe trouble if I’d been found out. He went out to eat. Got gas at the Swifty. Went home and watched TV, and I watched him through the window of his apartment. Nothing. It still haunts me to this day. That one grand failure.”

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. Dennis Flaherty tried to bait him into a question about Polly, but Professor Williams jumped from his seat and announced that time was up.

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 Dennis jokingly.

“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?” Dennis asked the girl who sat beside him. “No way,” said the girl sharply. It was agreed upon by the group that no one would go to the party, that it was entirely too bizarre a proposition. “He’ll get us in there and murder us all,” a boy said, laughing, but it was a strangled laugh, nervous and pitchy. “You going?” Dennis asked Mary.

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