Chapter 21: The Back Lot

Declan's POV

The Tin Roof was still there.

It stood on the same corner in Madison with the same crooked sign, and a faded beer ad in the window.

I parked across the street at eleven forty with Miriam in the passenger seat.

She had not said a word for the last hour of the drive.

Behind us, two unmarked cars slid to the curb, and the Madison detective got out of the first with her coat open.

"The owner knows," she said at my window. "He's going to keep the back office unlocked and stay behind the bar."

"How many inside?"

"Five regulars and a bartender. Sunday brunch crowd."

"And Tierney?"

"Not yet." She looked down the street. "We cut her off at the highway. She'd have to come in the back."

Miriam opened her door.

"Where are you going?" I said.

"The lot."

"Miriam."

"I'm not going to hide behind a car," she said. "That's where it happened. I'm going to stand there."

I wanted to say no.

I got out and came around the car and took her hand instead.

We walked down the alley beside the bar, into the back lot.

It was smaller than I had pictured.

It was a patch of cracked asphalt, a dumpster and a metal door with a bent handle, and a single light on a pole.

Miriam stopped in the middle of it and turned in a slow circle.

"This is where I swung," she said.

I held her hand and said nothing.

The bar's owner stood in the metal doorway, a gray man in an apron, with a dish towel in his hands.

"I filed a missing person report on Darren Bristow ten years ago," he said to Miriam. "Nobody ever called me back."

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