She tried again to inject urgency. “All those ADT alarms ring at the Rickreiner houses too. You can be sure they’re on the way. They might conclude that you’re involved.”

He ignored the problem. “You find out anything?”

“The medical examiner has the body. We’ll get fingerprints and send around a photo. I’ve got deputies searching the area. The Vernon County K-9 team is there too. But it’s hot already, and any minute now I’ll have to back my deputies off and start them on welfare visits.”

Fanta slumped. He pulled both ends of his tobacco-stained mustache. “I heard we lost Joe Himmelsbach.”

She nodded. Yesterday afternoon, Interim Chief Deputy Dick Bender had found the poor old man fighting for breath on the floor in front of his TV. It had been a hundred and ten degrees inside his house. If they had checked on him earlier, he might have made it.

“Shit on rye,” Fanta said, his eyes red-rimmed. “And Bender’s gotta feel like the Grim Reaper by now. That’s three, right? He’s got the touch. Maybe that means he should retire and give you another chance to hire somebody new.”

She declined to comment. Her Police and Fire Commission had grown increasingly antagonistic since she had busted a whole convoy of them for drunk-driving ORVs, off-road vehicles, on Memorial Day. When Chief Deputy David Morales had left, they had appointed Bender, a hostile party, as her interim chief deputy. The PFC was using Bender to harass her—and to stall, she felt, until Barry Rickreiner got himself elected in November.

She swallowed her frustration and took a few steps to see better behind Fanta’s desk. One drawer was open exactly as far as the neck of a tall whiskey bottle. Against that drawer leaned a battered briefcase. Inside she could see a silver laptop, no doubt the “missing” one.

“So is this caller threatening you?”

Fanta shrugged. “He’s got a right to be upset.”

“Does he have a name?”

“If it’s the fella I think it is, he always signed his letters ‘FROM HELL HOLLOW.’ ”

She searched her mental map and frowned.

“I can’t think of any place around here called Hell Hollow.”

Fanta coughed for a few moments. Then he leaned forward and said stickily, “Given his interest in poetry, I gather he’s making a metaphor.”

He restarted the message.

“… big sale on strawberries, fresh off their three-thousand-mile jet trip from Argentina, cheap ground beef at only eighteen hundred gallons of water per pound, vanilla ice cream with listeria. We sleep beneath a prion moon, Fanta, a billion misfit molecules hunting each and every one of us. Awake, we can’t see even the biggest broken things. Meanwhile, noon is our new midnight. But hear me…”

The voice choked and seemed about to fail.

“… those who face the darkness are meant to shine the light. You will be saved by fire.”