“Oh.” She sighed with relief. “The little goofball is looking forward to a nice big scar. He thinks it’s going to look awesome.”

Dr. Kleekamp said, “Hmmm.” He stripped the yellow custody tape and began to unzip the body bag. “I referred you folks to our in-system child psychologist. Any progress there?”

Now he meant Taylor, Dylan’s assailant.

“Well, no, not yet, because my husband…”

Kleekamp stopped the zipper on its first curve and waited for what she had to say about her husband. She and Harley agreed that compared to Taylor, Dylan was somehow developing more quickly, was bigger and stronger, was reading and writing at a higher level. The other threat to Taylor’s psyche, they agreed, was that meanwhile, Ophelia, Opie, Taylor’s natal big sister, was at a summer camp for gender-nonconforming kids, possibly becoming an even bigger and smarter brother than the one Taylor already failed to keep up with.

The sheriff caught herself touching her stomach and visualizing her uterus beneath her duty belt, scanning it. Three days to zygote… Eight days to embryo…

But Harley resisted seeing a child psychologist. By end of summer, he had been arguing, maybe Taylor has a growth spurt, maybe Opie becomes a sister again, maybe Barry Rickreiner gets exposed, quits the race, stops picking on the Kick family. All this crazy weather and stress would break eventually, her husband believed, and they would coast into a cooler, calmer fall.

She told Dr. Kleekamp, “It’s just that Harley knows all about small-town stigma and he’s protective of Taylor.”

“Ah, yes. Well.”

“I am too,” she said.

Kleekamp resumed unzipping. “We’re all protective of Taylor,” he reminded her, working around the victim’s booted right foot. “It’s just a question of the best way to take care of him. Your whole family needs to get together on this. No mixed signals.”

And now he meant Belle Kick, Grammy Belle, who believed that all Taylor needed was a mommy who paid attention to him and showed how much she loved him by whupping him good whenever he acted out.

“Right.” The sheriff gritted her teeth. What was Belle’s problem lately? “Same page. Yes, I know.”

Now the corpse was fully exposed. Kleekamp leaned in. He was new at this. He mostly looked at living people. As for violent death, she knew that lately he had been collecting road-killed deer, conducting autopsies and finding evidence of some new disease—not the well-documented prion infection, chronic wasting disease, but something bacterial and gnat-borne that made the deer stagger onto the roads and get killed in collisions. On the table was Dr. Kleekamp’s first murder victim, and Sheriff Kick felt his apprehension.

“Well, shot twice in the back,” he said, beginning with the obvious. “Dirty exit wounds. Looks like mud and blood mixed.”

He peered more closely at a pattern of small red welts across the dead man’s chest, neck, and cheek.