She let the moment linger, savoring the power more than anything else. "Yeah," she finally said, though with little conviction.

He continued to stare, and she could see the doubt in his eyes. For a moment, she thought he might even tear up.

"It was a clean shot," she told him. He kept staring straight at her, as if he could see into her. Lena knew that her tone wasn't confident, and that he had picked up on this. She knew, also, that she had not made it clear that she trusted his judgment. Her response had been purposefully ambiguous. Lena had no idea why she had done this, but she felt the thrill of it for a long while, even as Jeffrey put the car back into gear and drove down the road.

Grant County was made up of three cities: Heartsdale, Madison, and Avondale. Like Avondale, Madison was poorer than Heartsdale, and there were plenty of trailer parks around because it was cheap housing. This did not necessarily mean that the people occupying the trailers were cheap. There were some better parks with community centers and swimming pools and neighborhood watches, just as there were some that festered with domestic violence and drunken brawls. The Kudzu Arms fell into this second category. It was about as far from a neighborhood as a place could get without falling off the map. Trailers in various states of dilapidation fanned out from a single dirt road. Some of the residents had tried to plant gardens to no avail. Even without the drought, which had put all of Georgia on water restrictions, the heat would have killed the flowers. The heat was enough to kill people. The plants did not have a chance.

"Depressing," Jeffrey noted, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. It was a nervous habit she had never seen in him, and Lena felt the guilt come back like a strong undertow, pulling her the wrong way. She should have been more adamant about the shooting. She should have looked him right in the eye and told him the truth, that killing the teenager was the only thing he could have done. Lena could not think how to make it better. A thousand adamant yeses would never erase her initial reticence and the impact it had made. What had she been thinking?

Jeffrey asked, "What's the address?"

Lena flipped the file open, tracing her finger to the address. "Three-ten," she said, looking up at the trailers. "These are all twos."

"Yeah," Jeffrey agreed. He looked over his shoulder across the road from the park. "There it is."

Lena turned as he backed out of the park. A large mobile home, she guessed a doublewide, was on the other side of the road. Unlike the ones in the park across from it, this trailer looked more like a house. There was something like landscaping in the front yard, and a cinder block foundation covered the bottom portion. Someone had painted the concrete blocks black to offset the white trailer, and a large covered deck served as a front porch. To the side was a carport, and beside this was a large diesel semi.

"He's a truck driver?" Jeffrey asked.

Lena thumbed down to the proper space on the form. "Long hauler," she told him. "Probably owns his own rig."

"Looks like he makes some money from it."

"I think you can if you own your own truck," Lena told him, still skimming Mark Patterson's file. "Oh, wait," she said. "Patterson owns the Kudzu, too. He put it up as collateral when he bailed out Mark."

Jeffrey parked in front of the Patterson trailer. "Sure doesn't take good care of it. The park, I mean."

"No," Lena answered, looking back across the road. The Patterson house was a stark contrast to the desolate-looking Kudzu Arms across the street. She wondered what this said about the father, that he would take such pride in his own home, yet let the people living less than thirty yards away live in such squalor. Not that it was Patterson's responsibility to help people out, but Lena would have thought the man would try to pick himself some nicer neighbors, especially with two kids in the house.

"Teddy," Lena told Jeffrey. "That's the father's name."

"Maria pulled his sheet back at the station," Jeffrey told her. "He's got a couple of assaults on him, but they go back about ten years. He did some time on one of them."

"Apple doesn't fall far from the tree."

A large man stepped from the trailer as Jeffrey and Lena got out of the car. Lena guessed this was Teddy Patterson, and she felt a momentary flash of panic because he was such a physically large man. Taller than Jeffrey by a couple of inches and at least thirty pounds heavier, Patterson looked as if he could pick up both of them in one hand and toss them across the road.

Lena felt angry that she even took note of his size. Before, Lena had felt like she could take on anybody. She was a strong woman, muscular from working out in the gym, and she had always been able to push herself to do whatever she wanted to do. Now, she had lost that feeling, and the sight of Patterson gave her a slight chill, even though he wasn't doing anything more threatening than wiping his hands on a dirty dish towel.

"You lost?" Patterson asked. He had that look about him that all cops learned to recognize: Teddy Patterson was a con, right down to the jailhouse tattoos clawing up his arms like chicken scratches. Lena and Jeffrey exchanged glances, which did not seem to be lost on Patterson.

"Mr. Patterson?" Jeffrey asked, taking out his badge. "Jeffrey Tolliver, Grant Police."

"I know who you are," Patterson shot back, tucking the dish towel into his pocket. Lena could see it was soiled with what looked like grease. She also took note of the fact that Patterson had not bothered to acknowledge her.

Lena opened her mouth to speak, to let him know that she was there, but nothing came out. The thought of him training his animosity on her brought a cold sweat.

"This is detective Lena Adams," Jeffrey said. If he noticed her fear, he did not seem to register it. "We're here to talk to Mark about what happened last night."

"Alright," Patterson said, running the words together like most people in Madison did, so that it came out more as "Ahte."

Patterson turned his back to them and walked toward the house. He stood in the doorway as Jeffrey passed, crowding him on purpose, and Lena could see that the man was a lot taller than she had thought from the car. Lena was not sure, but Patterson seemed to narrow the space between his stomach and the door jamb as Lena passed through. She turned slightly so that she would not be forced to touch him, but even then Lena could tell from the smile on his face that he knew she was feeling intimidated. She hated that she was so transparent.

"Have a seat," Patterson offered, indicating the couch. Neither Jeffrey nor Lena took him up on this. Patterson's arms were crossed over his barrel chest, and Lena noticed that his head was about three inches from the low ceiling. The room was large, but Patterson filled the space with his presence.

Lena looked around the trailer, trying to behave like a cop instead of a scared little girl. The place was orderly and clean, certainly not what she would have guessed if she had met Teddy Patterson in a bar somewhere. The room they stood in was long, a kitchen at one end, with a hallway to what she assumed was the rest of the trailer, then the room they stood in, which had a medium-sized fireplace and a big-screen television. A floral scent was in the air, probably from one of those plug-in air fresheners. The living room seemed feminine, too, the walls painted a light pink, the couch and two chairs covered in a light blue with a matching pink stripe. A quilt was over the couch, the pattern complementing the decor. On the coffee table, a bowl of fresh cut flowers was surrounded by women's magazines. There were some nice framed prints on the walls, and the furniture looked new. The carpet, too, was freshly vacuumed. Lena could see Patterson's footprints indenting the pile where he had walked.