'Maybe she met them there.'

'Maybe… There's another problem, too, Billy Bob. You'd better get that boy out of jail.'

'What's going on?'

'Harley Sweet.'

She widened her eyes and held them on my face.

I rode up to the third floor of the courthouse with a turnkey. The heat had risen in the building and the stone walls were speckled with condensation.

'I'd like to talk to Lucas in an interview room,' I said.

'Sorry, Billy Bob. Harley says he stays in lockdown… By the way, don't worry about that 'un on the left. He's got a lot more Christian perspective today.'

The man in the cell to the left was dressed only in a pair of paper-thin Jockey undershorts. His sparse hair was the color of Mercurochrome, pasted in oily strains across his head. His skin had the unblemished smoothness of latex stretched over stone, and his left eye was smaller than the other, like a dime-size blue marble pushed deep into clay.

'What's your name, buddy?' I said to him, while the turnkey opened Lucas's cell.

'Garland T. Moon,' he answered, his eyes brightening with challenge.

'They treating you all right?'

He got up from the bunk, his stomach cording with muscle, and stood close to the bars. His breath was sweet, like prunes that have fermented in a jar. 'I like it here. I wouldn't trade it for a half dozen Californias. It don't impress me out there.'

'Ask him what happened inside that family's house in Santa Monica. If you got the stomach to hear it,' the turnkey said.

The man who called himself Garland T. Moon smiled into my face and ran his tongue along his bottom lip. His tongue was red and thick as a biscuit.

The turnkey locked me in Lucas's cell. I sat down next to Lucas on his bunk.

'My PI says you've seen something that might get you in trouble,' I said.

Lucas pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. 'The guy in there,' he said, his voice lowered. 'Harley was telling him last night Texas won't send him back to California because California don't like to give people the death penalty. He was telling the guy what it's like to die by injection, how the guy's muscles are going to turn to cement so his lungs cain't go up and down, how he'll suffocate way down inside himself while everybody watches.