“I want to hear about the knife, Junie,” Rich said, steering the interview to our only piece of evidence.

“The knife?” Junie asked.

“We found a knife under your sofa. Looks like bloodstains on the blade. It’ll take a few days to get the DNA results, but if you help us, Ms. Castellano will take that as another sign of your cooperation.”

“Don’t answer,” said Melody Chado. “We’re done.”

Junie was looking at Rich, and she was talking over her attorney. “I thought the knife went into one of the garbage bags,” she said to my partner. “So I don’t know what knife you found. But listen, I remember the name of the town.”

“Junie, that’s enough. That’s all!”

“I think it was Johnson,” Junie said to Rich. “I saw a sign when we got off the highway.”

“ Jackson?” I asked. “Was it Jackson?”

“Yes. That’s right.”

“You’re sure about that? I thought you said you drove up the coast.”

“I’m pretty sure. It was late, I got confused. I wasn’t trying to remember,” she told me, her eyes downcast. “I was trying to forget.”

Chapter 14

THE TOWN OF JACKSON was known for its cowboy cookouts and craft fairs. It also had a sizable dump. It was just after noon, and the smell of rot was rising as the sun cooked the refuse. Gulls and buzzards circled the trash dunes that filled our view out to the foothills.

Sheriff Oren Braun pointed out the square acre of landfill he’d had cordoned off – the approximate section where waste had been unloaded at the end of January.

“Soon as I got the call from the governor I had my boys on it,” Braun told me and Conklin. “ ‘Pull out the stops,’ that’s what he said.”

We were looking for eight black plastic garbage bags in a sea of black plastic garbage bags. A hundred yards uphill, a dozen members of the sheriff’s department were picking very slowly through the three thousand tons of refuse piled twenty feet high, and the dump foreman was assisting the dog handler, who followed behind his two cadaver dogs as they trotted over the site.