The turn is that this is not the climax. It's the cause.

Four days of preparation the reader doesn't understand is preparation. Then a night at the tow yard that is over faster than it should be, handled at close range by a man with a bad knee, with a total economy that reads as wrong before it reads as skilled. It should be hard to watch and hard to look away from, and it should be over on the page in about the time it would take in life.

Casey is out. Sarris is alive and will not be pressing the matter. Nothing about this is triumphant.

The hinge of the whole book is the last beat of the sequence: Ray goes back and cleans up. Not to escape — out of habit, the way you wipe a counter. He wipes, he repositions, he takes two things away with him. It costs him twenty minutes he doesn't have and it is the single most incriminating thing he has done in eighteen years, and he knows it while he's doing it and can't stop.

Then he sits in the van with his hands on his knees and waits for his breathing to come down, and Casey watches him from the passenger seat and has the thought she can't take back.