The Gas-N-Go was run by a Gujarati family named Desai who had owned it for fifteen years and who had, as Mr. Desai pointed out with some pride, eleven cameras. He let Wade sit in the cramped back office with its smell of burnt hot dogs and floor cleaner and scroll through the night. At 3:38 a.m., a man in a dark hoodie with the hood up came in, kept his head down, bought a prepaid card and a can of energy drink, paid cash, and left. The interior camera gave Wade nothing but a shape and the bill of a ball cap shadowing the face under the hood.
"He knew where the cameras were," Mr. Desai said, leaning over Wade's shoulder. "Professional."
"Or local," Wade said. "Can I see the pumps?"
The pump camera was mounted high under the canopy and looked down over the lot at an angle. At 3:41, the man came out with his energy drink and walked to a pickup parked at the far edge of the light, half outside the frame. Only the rear third of the truck was visible: the tailgate, a bumper, one taillight.
Wade stopped scrolling.
It was a small truck, an older Ford Ranger. In the strange flat color of the night camera it looked dark gray. But the tailgate didn't match the rest of it. The tailgate was lighter, a different shade altogether, and there was a dent in the lower right corner shaped like a crescent moon, and a sticker on the left side that Wade couldn't read but didn't need to read, because he had been standing right there, two summers ago, home on a weekend from Mobile, holding the flashlight in Aunt Patsy's driveway while Kyle bolted on a junkyard tailgate he'd found for forty dollars. Kyle had dropped it. That was the dent. Kyle had stuck the sticker on afterward to cover a rust spot. It was a Saints sticker, and it was peeling at one corner, and Kyle had said, Good as new, man, good as new, and laughed his elbow of a laugh.
"Officer?" said Mr. Desai. "You want a copy?"
"Yes," said Wade. His voice came out sounding like someone else's. "Please."
He drove back to the station with the thumb drive in his shirt pocket, where he could feel it against his chest like a second heartbeat. He did not go into the chief's office. He sat at his own desk and put the headphones on and played the forty-one seconds again.
No ma'am. I just—the old Chinese guy that puts in at the public ramp.
He had listened to it more than twenty times. He had heard the halyards, the wind, the muffled pitch. He had heard the No ma'am that every boy on this coast said the same way. What he had not let himself hear, what he had slid past every single time like a car swerving around a pothole, was the little hitch before the old Chinese guy, the quick inhale, half a laugh, the sound of somebody nervous and pleased with himself at the same time. He had heard that sound across a supper table two nights ago. He had heard it across a thousand supper tables and a hundred fishing piers and in the back seat of his mother's car on the way to vacation Bible school. He had heard it every time his little cousin did something he knew he shouldn't and wanted someone to see.
Wade took off the headphones and put his face in his hands.
He stayed like that until the phone on his desk rang. It was a sergeant from the Jackson County Sheriff's Office, across the line in Mississippi, with a voice like gravel in a bucket.