Through the nine more long days that she had to wait before going home, the heat wave persisted while her department’s investigation proceeded and the gears of justice turned slowly and squeakily. She mixed work-related visits with family time, and between naps she spent hours on the phone. The remains of three bodies were recovered, then five, then six. Father Paul McCartney was helping with the effort to identify those he could. Denise and Bender gave her updates. District Attorney Baird Sipple had called her. Pending results of the ongoing investigation into Barry Rickreiner’s alleged crimes, he was working on charges of murder (Kim Maybee), statutory rape (Patience), destruction of police property (Bender’s Avenger), and he was considering a charge of attempted murder (Lyndsey Luck, via poison meant for Patience). But he had mostly called to bark at the sheriff, to say that he was countermanding her promise of immunity for Jon Golly, that every scrap of information Golly had provided would be disallowed in court, and to scold her for thinking on her feet in the heat of battle.

She didn’t care. Lives were saved. Anyway, Jon Golly had heard his Miranda rights, and in an effort to secure himself a deal for what he knew about Rickreiner and his brother, he was telling his story all over again. The sheriff read transcripts and listened to recordings that Bender played for her.

“What I don’t understand,” she told him, “is why the Golly brothers still owned that land at all. This whole time, Randall Rickreiner’s heirs, Babette and Barry, still had a legal lien on it? Right? But they never collected on the lien?”

“Legal is debatable,” Bender said. “I talked to Kevin Smallwood, Babette’s attorney. The debt was all in one brother’s name, Jon’s, and the lien was on joint property. Smallwood told Babette years ago that it probably wouldn’t hold up in court.”

“But the Golly brothers never knew that.”

“Of course not,” Bender said. “But eventually that girl got old enough and Barry figured out how to use the threat of it.”

“Do we know whose daughter she is?”