What to make of the animatronic shotgun? Security? Guarding something? For sure it was not the weapon that had put two clean .22 holes in the man found in the ditch. Deciding to leave it for now, she moved around the apparatus into the workshop behind. The gimlet came from here. Several similar hung with other traditional hand tools on the barn wall above a workbench. Arrayed on the bench were the partly assembled bare bones of a solar panel. The barn floor was dirt. One of three livestock stalls contained a semi-fresh horse turd and dark smears on the door and sidewalls that could have been dried blood. But as a former farm girl, she knew there could be many explanations for blood in a barn. Outside, the entire south-facing roof flashed with homemade collection panels.

When she cornered behind the barn, a bony Holstein lumbered toward her from behind barbed wire, the cow’s swollen udder showing that she needed to be milked. Beyond the animal, a disused tractor road trailed away into tall late summer weeds. A few hundred yards off, the meander of box elders meant a creek flowed there. A steep bluff towered beyond. Nothing else to see.

The sheriff climbed between loose strands of barbed wire and let the desperate cow butt her ungently in the chest. It was a hard thing, the way life just went on indifferently in the aftermath of horrible crimes. She knelt and milked the cow onto the sun-scalded clover beneath her udder. As happened lately at odd moments, Taylor came to mind—her troubled little boy, what he needed she just couldn’t figure out. Around a month ago he had begun dressing differently, compulsively overdressing for a little boy, if she had to put a negative label on it. He would no longer expose his bare legs in a pair of shorts. He always wore his brown hat with Cabela’s in gold script. He kept on his little Levi’s jean jacket in the heat, and his little work boots, and he coasted about silently, enigmatically, wincing at the world like some minidesperado.

Squeezing teats by old muscle memory, she asked herself again when this all had begun. And why? She and Harley had mostly found it cute until one July morning Amos Glick had picked up Taylor hitchhiking for real out on Pederson Road. “I was pretending,” he had claimed.

She sighed and gave the cow her done-slap. Life went on.

And on.

She did not need more of it.

She bumped her Charger back out Goodgolly’s driveway. When she reached Liberty Hill Road, she called Denise.

“Be on the lookout for an older model white pickup.”

“Is that all we have on it?”

“I didn’t see it well.”

“Ten-four,” Denise said. “BOLO on an old white pickup. Meanwhile, hon, four other items for your attention.”

“Is that all?”

“Well… for now.”

“Go ahead.”