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implicating Donté Drumm. He wasted little time. Two days later, he and his partner, Detective Jim Morrissey, approached Donté as he was leaving a health club. Several hours later, two other detectives approached a young man named Torrey Pickett, a close friend of Donté’s. Pickett agreed to go to the police station and answer a few questions. He knew nothing about the disappearance of Nicole and was not concerned, though he was nervous about going to the police station.
    “Keith, it’s the auditor. Line two,” Dana announced through the intercom. Keith glanced at his watch—10:50 a.m.—and shook his head. The last voice he wanted to hear at the moment was that of the church’s auditor.
    “Is the printer full of paper?” he asked.
    “I don’t know,” she fired back. “I’ll check.”
    “Please load it up.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Keith reluctantly hit line two and began a dull but not extended discussion of the church’s finances through October 31. As he listened to the numbers, he pecked away at his keyboard. He printed the ten-page factual summary, thirty pages of news articles and editorials, a summary of the death penalty as practiced in Texas, Donté’s account of life on death row, and when informed that the printer was out of paper, he clicked on Donté’s Photo Gallery and looked at the faces. Donté as a child with parents, two older brothers, one younger sister; Donté as a small boy wearing a choir robe in church; various poses of Donté the linebacker; a mug shot, front page of the
Slone Daily News;
Donté being led in handcuffs into the courthouse; more photos from the trial; and the annual file photos from prison, beginning in 1999 with a cocky glare at the camera and ending in 2007 with a thin-faced, aging man of twenty-seven.
    When the auditor was done, Keith walked to the outer room and sat down across from his wife. She was sorting through the copies he’d printed, scanning them as she went. “Did you read this?” she asked, waving a stack of papers.
    “Read what? There are hundreds of pages.”
    “Listen,” she said, and began to read: “The body of Nicole Yarber has never been found, and while this might thwart prosecutions in some jurisdictions, it did not slow things in Texas. In fact, Texas is one of several states with a well-developed case law allowing prosecutions in murder cases where there is no definitive proof that a murder has indeed taken place. A dead body is not always required.”
    “No, I did not get that far,” he said.
    “Can you believe it?”
    “I’m not sure what to believe.”
    The phone rang. Dana snatched it and abruptly informed the caller that the minister was unavailable. When she hung up, she said, “Okay, Pastor. What’s the plan?”
    “There is no plan. The next step, the only step I can think of right now, is to have another talk with Travis Boyette. If he admits he knows where the body is, or was, then I’ll press him to admit the murder.”
    “And if he does? What then?”
    “I have no idea.”

CHAPTER 4
    T he investigator trailed Joey Gamble for three days before he made contact. Gamble wasn’t hiding, nor was he hard to find. He was an assistant manager at a mammoth auto parts discount warehouse in the Houston suburb of Mission Bend, his third job in the past four years. He had one divorce under his belt and perhaps another on the way. He and his second wife were not living together and had retreated to neutral corners where the lawyers were waiting. There wasn’t much to fight over, at least not in assets. There was one child, a little boy with autism, and neither parent truly wanted custody. So they fought anyway.
    The file on Gamble was as old as the case itself, and the investigator knew it by heart. After high school, the kid played one year of football at a junior college, then dropped out. He hung around Slone for a few years working at various jobs and spending most of his spare time in the gym, where he ate steroids and built