“Faith’s,” he said. “By one brother or the other.” He seemed embarrassed. “I asked a bunch of times. Jon Golly truly doesn’t know.” He moved on. “He said Faith hated both of them and wanted her girl back. From that I gather that she was out looking for Daniel Greevey, who got away from her and Jim, when she came upon the buggy crash, where you were, and then the scene at the farm. It must have been obvious to her that Patience had beered her courage up and stabbed Jon. So Faith staged that crime scene and took the girl to Derp Hubbard’s empty house for safekeeping. She hoped to blame the gimlet to Jon Golly on Greevey, and blame Greevey’s gunshot wounds on Jon Golly, like they got into something together. I guess that’s why she dumped a shovel and that rifle down the outhouse. When we get the ballistics, we’ll find out if that’s the rifle they used on Greevey. Then all she had to do was let Jim die of whatever the hell his problem was, and she’d have her little girl back at the end of it.”

Let Jim die…

Faith had not survived to tell her story, and Jim Golly was ashes. There would be no postmortem. But was it possible that his sickness wasn’t from bacterial tick bites and infected deer prions, which was what he complained of in his letters? Was it possible, part of the pattern, that Faith had been poisoning a man who abused her?

“Dick,” she said, on a hunch, “has Jon Golly said why he booby-trapped his house and his barn? Maybe Faith was trying to get at him?”

Bender appeared exhausted as he sorted through his pages of notes. “No,” he concluded, still scanning. “I thought of that, but no.”

After a minute, he summarized, his voice wooden with disgust.

“Patience had started resisting Rickreiner, refusing to go with him ‘for a hamburger,’ sassing off and acting like she might tell someone. So Rickreiner started coming around and threatening her and Jon Golly.” He flipped pages. “That was what the booby traps were about. But once Rickreiner started running for sheriff, Jon Golly was afraid the guy would kill them both to keep his fairy tale alive. Golly finally told us yesterday that he hid some motion-activated cameras. We’ll look through the footage.”

“When you do, you’ll see Barry Rickreiner putting pesticide in the buttermilk,” she predicted. “To shut up Patience, same as he did Kim Maybee. That’s the piece the DA needs.”

“We’ll look,” Bender promised.

The sheriff closed her eyes in anger.

“Sex crimes, exploitation of underage girls. We’ve been down this road in the Bad Axe before.”

“That’s what makes it a road,” Bender said.

There was a fine Benderism, indeed.

But he wasn’t done. She waited.