He’s been waiting for this moment, clearly, for a long time. In fact, what he’s doing in 1995 is unearthing an arsenal of guns and whiskey, left over from his four years as an undercover narcotics agent. They’re sticking to their seventeen-year-old story: Cohle took time off to see his father, who had leukemia. For the first time to our knowledge, the detectives lie to 2012 investigators Papania and Gilbough. Now we get to the part where Cohle and Hart go rogue (or "off book," as Cohle puts it). Fatherhood, and the conflicts that come with having it (or losing it), has come up in every episode so far. She’s not buying it-but now we know what sparked this mid-life crisis of his. He pleads with Maggie, saying he’s been a mess since his dad died a year ago. His carefully maintained boundary between work and home, which was already cracking, has now utterly crumbled. On his way home, Hart stops at the hospital where his wife works, and finds out that she’s met his mistress Lisa. The biggest tip-off: Charlie says that Reggie had a spiral branded on his back, the same mark drawn on Lange and "drowning" victim Rianne Olivier. He says that when Reggie was high (on substances he cooked from what was available in the prison), Reggie would talk about "a place down south where rich men go to devil worship, sacrifice women and children," "something about someplace called Carcosa and the Yellow King," and "all these like, old stones out in the woods, people go and worship." That all fits with the pagan imagery we’ve seen around the crime scenes, as well as the references to Carcosa and the Yellow King in Dora Lange’s journal. The inmate confirms the connection, says he showed sexy photos of Dora to Reggie when they were cellmates. The interrogation room resembles a padded cell in an insane asylum, and while Charlie isn’t wearing a straightjacket, it may not be a coincidence that he’s in head-to-toe white.
They now know he shared a prison cell with their prime suspect, Reggie Ladoux. But first, they need to interrogate Charlie Lange, victim Dora Lange’s convict ex-husband.