The Long and Faraway Gone by Lou Berney

saying.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œState system flagged him, so they let me know. Because the investigation’s still ongoing, officially. He applied for a job down near Chickasha, so they ran a background check. The Indian casino down there.”
    Julianna was so surprised she felt as if she were in a dream, the kind where you tried to run but couldn’t move, where you tried to cry out but couldn’t speak.
    Crowley. Christopher Wayne Crowley. She hadn’t thought about him in years. He was the carny who worked at the booth where Julianna won her stuffed Pink Panther. Early on, in the first few days after Genevieve disappeared, he’d been the primary suspect in the case—­the only suspect, really, the only solid lead. Julianna told the detectives how he’d flirted with Genevieve and invited her to meet him later. Genevieve, at the time, probably thought Julianna had missed all that, too enraptured by her new Pink Panther to notice. Julianna, of course, missed nothing. It was Genevieve she had been enraptured by, and she monitored her big sister’s every breath with fascination.
    Crowley had been arrested twice before, once for possession and once for assault and battery. The police picked him up and questioned him for hours. He denied at first that he remembered Julianna, then denied that he’d ever invited her to come by his trailer. Finally he admitted that he’d invited her but swore she never showed up. He’d been disappointed when she hadn’t.
    The police couldn’t find any physical evidence in the trailer or his car, but they were certain he was lying. Julianna had seen the official transcripts of the interview. She remembered a handwritten note about Crowley that some cop had jotted in the margin of the transcript: “Lies like he breathes.”
    Crowley stuck by his story. It was Abigail Goad, the rancher’s wife from Okeene, who cleared him. She saw Genevieve alive and well at 9:00 P.M. in Food Alley. Ten minutes earlier, at a 7-­Eleven store a block from the fairgrounds, Crowley had been arrested for trying to shoplift a six-­pack of beer. He spent the night in Oklahoma County Jail.
    So much for the one suspect, the one solid lead.
    A year later Crowley was convicted on another drug charge, in Tennessee. Julianna, fourteen years old, a freshman in high school, found the address for the prison and wrote him a letter. Even though Crowley could not have murdered Genevieve, Julianna was convinced he knew more about what happened that night than he’d told police. Lies like he breathes.
    He didn’t reply to that first letter, or to any of the others she sent him. The last few, in the winter of 1991, were returned with a stamp on the envelope that said the addressee was no longer in custody. Fitch, the detective who had the case at the time, checked for Julianna. He found out that Crowley had served his full sentence and been released without condition: no parole officer, no forwarding address, no trace.
    DeMars tried again to track Crowley down when he inherited the case—­when . . . well, Julianna begged and bitched and bullied. But he came up empty, too, and so did Julianna every time she used the Internet to find Crowley on her own. DeMars told her that Crowley was probably dead. He told her to forget about him, and eventually she had.
    But now.
    â€œHe’s here?” she said. “In Oklahoma?”
    â€œHe doesn’t have any answers, Juli. He never did.”
    â€œLet’s make sure.”
    â€œWe did. Long time ago.”
    We. Meaning the police, the original detectives in the case, all the ­people like DeMars for whom the case was just a job.
    â€œWhen?” she said. “When did Crowley pop up?”
    â€œFew months ago.”
    â€œA few months ago.” She pressed her palms flat against the table. “And you just now . . .”
    Julianna realized he hadn’t been planning to tell