Five past eight on a Saturday morning, the eighteenth of March, 1944, in Weleetka, Oklahoma. The man delivering the milk sets his bottles down inside a corner grocery and looks over at the chair by the front door — the chair where the owner sits every morning of his life, with the radio going.

The chair is empty.

Arley Keck was sixty years old, though his own town would have told you sixty-five. He'd run that store for ten years and slept in the back of it, so the filling station out front could stay open all night for the truckers. He had a wife, nine children, and two boys in the war — one of them in a Japanese prison camp since the very beginning of it.

By that afternoon there were bloodhounds in the street, brought up from the state penitentiary at McAlester. Red pepper had been thrown over everything the killer had touched — which is an old idea, and not a stupid one. Red pepper is supposed to ruin a dog.

It was two years before anybody was arrested.

This is the story of what a small Oklahoma county did with those two years — three suspects, fingerprint men brought in from the city, a reward nobody ever collected — and of what it finally took to close the case: a room in Tulsa, five hours, and a photograph that officers made on purpose to fool a man.

And it's the story of the one detail I can't put down. When they finally took a man for this, they had already had him. In a cell. Two years earlier.

They let him go.