Just after he'd arrived home from the war, Sales had been arrested in separate incidents on charges of disorderly conduct and assault. Both had been pled down to lesser charges. The red flag was that Sales had undergone treatment at the VA hospital for post-traumatic stress disorder. It wasn't an uncommon thing for veterans, but Bolinger knew it wasn't an uncommon thing for psychopathic killers, either.

Bolinger lit a Winston of his own and looked candidly at Sales through the smoke.

"You want to sit down?" the sergeant asked.

Sales jangled his chains and snorted disdainfully but sat down anyway on the cell's concrete floor. Bolinger sat on the bench against the wall. Beside him, he put down a tape recorder whose rectangular red light glared accusingly at Sales.

"What brought you to your daughter's apartment?" he asked quietly.

"Ha!" Sales barked. His face crumpled in pain, and tears began to stream freely down his face. He shook his head from side to side as if trying to make everything go away. "Ha! My daughter! Oh God! Oh my God!"

Bolinger waited. In ten minutes, the big man's crying subsided enough for him to take a deep breath and say, "We were supposed to have dinner together. I was taking her to dinner…

"We did that," he explained sadly, looking directly into Bolinger's eyes. "I promised her that if she went to law school at UT I wouldn't be around all the time. I only live an hour up the road. But I told her I wouldn't always be checking up on her. When she was at San Angelo State, I used to drop in on her a lot…"

Here Sales looked at Bolinger to see if he understood. Bolinger didn't have kids, but his brother did, so he nodded with commiseration.

"Yeah, so I stopped doing it, but we'd still see each other pretty regular. We were going to dinner- Oh God!"