“I just don’t,” she said. “Take me to jail. Charge me. Do whatever you want to do.” She licked her lips coyly, giving Lena a once-over. “There something else you want to do?”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

When the sexual offer didn’t work, she turned back into the frightened little girl. Crocodile tears dribbled down her cheeks. “Just process me. I don’t have anything to say.”

“We’ve got some questions.”

“Go fuck yourself with your questions,” she said. “I know my rights. I don’t have to say jack shit to you and you can’t make me.” Minus the expletives, she sounded very much like Albert, the owner of the Pink Kitty, when Jeffrey had asked him to come down to the station last night. Lena hated when people knew their rights. It made her job a hell of a lot harder.

Lena leaned across the table, saying, “Patty, you’re not helping yourself.”

“Fuck you with your helping myself. I can help myself fine just shutting the fuck up.”

Spittle dotted the table, and Lena sat back, wondering what events had brought Patty O’Ryan to this kind of life. At some point, she had been someone’s daughter, someone’s friend. Now she was like a leech, looking out for no one but herself.

Lena said, “Patty, you’re not going anywhere. I can sit here all day.”

“You can sit on a big fat cock up your ass, you cocksucking bitch.”

There was a knock on the door and Jeffrey walked in, Buddy Conford behind him.

O’Ryan did an instant one-eighty, bursting into tears like a lost child, wailing at Buddy, “Daddy, please get me out of here! I swear I didn’t do anything!”

Sitting in Jeffrey’s office, Lena braced her foot against the bottom panel of his desk, leaning back in her chair. Buddy looked at her leg, and she didn’t know if it was with interest or envy. As a teenager, a car accident had taken his right leg from the knee down. Buddy’s left eye had been lost to cancer a few years later and, more recently, an angry client had shot him point-blank range over the matter of a bill. Buddy had lost a kidney from that fiasco, but he still managed to get the charge of attempted murder against his client reduced to simple assault. When he said he was a defendant’s advocate, he wasn’t lying.

Buddy asked, “That boyfriend of yours staying out of trouble?”

“Let’s not talk about it,” Lena said, regretting yet again that she had involved Buddy Conford in Ethan’s troubles. The problem was, when you were on the other side of the table and you needed a lawyer, you wanted the wiliest, most crooked one out there. It was the old proverb of lying down with dogs and waking up with fleas. Lena was still itching from it.

“You taking care of yourself?” Buddy pressed.

Lena turned around, trying to see what was keeping Jeffrey. He was talking to Frank, a sheet of paper in his hand. He patted Frank on the shoulder, then walked toward the office.

“Sorry,” Jeffrey said. He shook his head once at Lena, indicating nothing had broken. He sat behind his desk, turning the paper facedown on the blotter.

“Nice shiner,” Buddy said, indicating Jeffrey’s eye.

Jeffrey obviously wasn’t up for small talk. “Didn’t know you had a daughter, Buddy.”

“Stepdaughter,” he corrected, looking as if he regretted having to admit it. “I married her mama last year. We’d been dating off and on for pretty much the last ten years. She’s just a handful of trouble.”

“The mama or the daughter?” Jeffrey asked, and they shared one of their white-man chuckles.

Buddy sighed, gripping either side of the chair with his hands. He was wearing his prosthetic leg today, but he still had a cane. For some reason, the cane reminded Lena of Greg Mitchell. Despite her best intentions, she had found herself looking out for her old boyfriend this morning as she drove into work, hoping he was out for a walk. Not that she knew what she’d say to him.

“Patty’s got a drug problem,” Buddy told them. “We’ve had her in and out of treatment.”

“Where’s her father?”

Buddy held his hands out in a wide shrug. “Got me.”

Lena asked, “Meth?”

“What else?” he said, dropping his hands. Buddy made a fine living from methamphetamines- not directly, but through representing clients who had been charged with trafficking in it.

He said, “She’s seventeen years old. Her mama thinks she’s been doing it for a while now. This shooting up is recent. I can’t do anything to stop her.”

“It’s a hard drug to quit,” Jeffrey allowed.

“Almost impossible,” Buddy agreed. He should know. More than half of his clients were repeat offenders. “We finally had to kick her out of the house,” he continued. “This was about six months back. She wasn’t doing anything but staying out late, stumbling in high and sleeping till three in the afternoon. When she managed to wake up, it was mostly to curse her mama, curse me, curse the world- you know how it is, everybody’s an asshole but you. She’s got a mouth on her, too, some kind of voluntary Tourette’s. What a mess.” He tapped his leg with his fingers, a hollow, popping sound filling the room. “You do what you can to help people, but there’s only so far you can go.”

“Where’d she go when she moved out?”

“Mostly she crashed with friends- girlfriends, though I imagine she was entertaining some boys for pocket change. When she wore out her welcome, she started working at the Kitty.” He stopped tapping. “Believe it or not, I thought that’d finally be the thing to straighten her out.”

“How’s that?” Lena asked.

“Only time you help yourself is when you hit rock bottom.” He gave her a meaningful look that made her want to slap him. “I can’t think of anything more rock bottom than taking off your clothes for a bunch of seedy-ass rednecks at the Pink Kitty.”

Jeffrey asked, “She didn’t happen to get mixed up with the farm over in Catoogah, did she?”

“Those Jesus freaks?” Buddy laughed. “I don’t think they’d have her.”

“But do you know?”

“You can ask her, but I doubt it. She’s not exactly the religious type. If she goes anywhere, it’s looking to score, seeing how she can work the system. They may be a bunch of Bible-thumping lunatics, but they’re not stupid. They’d see right through her in a New York minute. She knows her audience. She wouldn’t waste her time.”

“You know this guy Chip Donner?”

“Yeah. I represented him a couple of times as a favor to Patty.”

“He’s not on my files,” Jeffrey said, meaning Chip had never been busted by Grant County police.

“No, this was over in Catoogah.” Buddy shifted in his seat. “He’s not a bad guy, I have to say. Local boy, never been more than fifty miles from home. He’s just stupid. Most of ’em are just stupid. Mix that with boredom and-”

“What about Abigail Bennett?” Jeffrey interrupted.

“Never heard of her. She work at the club?”

“She’s the girl we found buried in the woods.”

Buddy shuddered, like someone had walked over his grave. “Jesus, that’s a horrible way to die. My daddy used to scare us when we’d go visit his mama at the cemetery. There was this preacher buried two plots over with a wire coming out of the dirt and going up to a telephone poll. Daddy told us they had a phone inside the coffin so he could call them in case he wasn’t really dead.” He chuckled. “One time, my mama brought a bell, one’a them bicycle bells, and we were all just standing around Granny’s plot, trying to look solemn. She rang that bell and I liked to shit in my pants.”

Jeffrey allowed a smile.

Buddy sighed. “You don’t have me in here to tell old stories. What do you want from Patty?”

“We want to know what her connection is to Chip.”

“I can tell you that,” he said. “She had a crush on him. He wouldn’t give her the time of day, but she was into him something horrible.”