”Cool. I’m off to the Pig.”

Landers walked down the steps and past the patrol guys and got into his car. He recognized a reporter from the Johnson City paper loitering outside the entrance. Her name was Sylvia something. She wasn’t gorgeous, but she wasn’t hideous, so Landers got back out of the car and went over to shoot the shit with her for a couple of minutes. He leaked her a little tidbit about the missing dick, thinking it might be worth a blow job somewhere down the line.

As he made his way south down Roan Street, Landers kept glancing at the photo of the dead preacher. He had reddish hair, semi-decent features, and wide sideburns that ran to the bottom of his ear lobes, a la Elvis Presley. Not a bad-looking dude, but damn sure not in the same league as Landers.

”What’d you do to get yourself killed, Rev?” Landers said to the photo as he turned into the parking lot at the Purple Pig. ”Dip the old wick in a vat of bad wax?”

April 12

10:20 a.m.

Caroline Dillard, wearing a sharp, dark blue Calvin Klein knockoff suit, took a deep breath, straightened her back, and strode up to the reception area. Behind the bulletproof window sat a dour, pudgy, middle-aged man with a dark widow’s peak crew cut and a jaw full of tobacco. He was seated, wearing a black pullover shirt with a stitched badge on the chest.

Beneath the badge, also stitched, were the words

”Washington County Corrections.” As Caroline approached, he spit brown tobacco juice into a paper cup.

Caroline picked up the sign-in sheet and smiled.

”I need to see inmate number 7740,” she said. No one at the Washington County Detention Center seemed to have a name. Everything was tracked by number.

The officer leered. ”Got an ID, pretty lady?”

”My name is Caroline Dillard,” she said. It was only Caroline’s third visit to the detention center, and she hadn’t encountered this particular officer on either of the other two occasions. She reached into her purse, pulled out a driver’s license, and slid it into the metal tray at the bottom of the window.