“Do you want me in the room,” he asked, “or outside it?”

Nobody answered that.

He buttoned his collar and left with the cloth bag under his arm.

I slid his statement into the yellow envelope and put the envelope in Arthur’s freezer, behind the ice trays, where he said nobody in Oakwood would think to look.

Sarah Jenkins was in the lot at eight the next morning with her clipboard on the hood of her car and her metal pen going.

“My supervisor signed the warrant at four forty,” she said.