She did not expect to be picked up by Interim Chief Deputy Dick Bender, driving Lyndsey Luck’s Tahoe. Bender was rumpled and perspiration-stained and appeared exhausted, a mad gleam in his eye as he told her, “Rhino sent me.”

She didn’t want to get in.

“Where have you been all night, Deputy?”

“Off-duty.”

“Not my question.”

“You’re wasting time.”

“Where is your vehicle?”

“You’ll see.”

“Goddamn it, Bender. I don’t trust you. Get out. Leave the keys.”

He didn’t budge. He gripped the wheel with his small hairy hands and stared ahead. Sweat rolled down his temple and along his unshaven jaw. Over the radio, Rhino announced another break-in, this time at Dollar Heaven.

“Bender, get out.”

His right hand released the wheel and trembled as he reached to lower the radio volume.

“No, Sheriff. I’m Oppo. I know where the white truck is going. Get in.”

As Bender rocketed the Tahoe toward Town of Leavings, she felt so agitated that her tongue stiffened and her body went numb. Beneath her crashing heartbeat, she heard her interim chief deputy begin to explain himself. Yesterday afternoon, Denise had sent him to the Bad Axe County Library to window-dress the Vigdis Torkelson improper-campaign-activity complaint, just to shut up Becky Rilke-Rickreiner. From Mrs. Torkelson, he had heard about Leroy Fanta’s interest in a Town of Leavings property still owned by the Golly brothers.

“I thought them two jokers were long gone. I had to take them food from my church one winter. As far as I knew, they sold out and left after Gibbs cleared them for the Ronald Rickreiner murder.”

She did her best to listen. While he was at the library, Mrs. Torkelson had fed Bender the tidbit about Barry Rickreiner cheating in her high school English class. Later, Deputy Schwem had reminded him that the candidate had also cheated on a urine test as an EMT, not long after Babette had bribed him out of a DUI charge.

“We’ve all been watching out for you,” Bender said, “one way or the other, once we saw who our next boss could be. I’m Oppo,” he said, “but I’ve got a team.”

He had pushed the Tahoe up to ninety. She hardly felt movement, though the vast feedlot of Vista Farms had come and gone in a flash.

“By this point,” Bender was telling her, “Prickreiner’s campaign and this Greevey-Goodgolly mess began to seem, to my mind, like different parts of the same shitstorm.”

He braked and separated from the highway with a reeling right turn. Ahead were the steep hills and sharp curves of Muchlander Road. Bender sped in the style of a local, using both sides of the center line.