As she started barefoot across the dew-drenched yard, the nightmare clung to her. She tasted dirt. Her body felt sore all over. Her gut retained a sickish tickle of dread. And the dream’s special effects seemed to have warped her waking world. The normally clean breath of dawn smelled like kerosene and fish. Birdsong jangled and the sunrise hissed, dissolving shadows with a crackle. She recalled how seven years ago when she carried her twin boys, vanilla ice cream had tasted like socks.

I can’t be. Please just let me be sick.

Overnight, two familiar signs—KICK HER OUT and BARRY HER—had appeared on her yard. The election was still three months away, but Barry Rickreiner had been trolling her and spreading rumors since around the Fourth of July. She wondered now, who was Oppo? What did Oppo mean: Kim Maybee’s suicide was a homicide? Should she fight back with counter-rumors? Maybe. But as much as she loathed Rickreiner, this didn’t feel right. Her strategy had been to start campaigning on the first of September, at which time she meant to take the high road. Meanwhile, the heat wave had claimed all her attention.

Hurry, Heidi, before you piss down your leg.

She hastened around the corner of the old farmhouse. So as not to cast a shadow, she sneaked beneath the curtained window of the guest room, where the kids’ Grammy Belle Kick slept whenever Harley was gone overnight. Belle had seemed hostile lately, suspicious, as if believing some new gossip.

The sheriff ducked under her clothesline, gave wide berth to the soggy septic drain field, and arrived upon the shady ground beneath the honeysuckle thicket.

Cut several fresh dandelion leaves…

Several meant how many? She preferred exact numbers.

She packed nine bright-green leaves, serrated, oozing latex, into the jar. She was ready to cut her bladder loose when she felt the buzz of her phone.

“Sorry, Denise,” she blurted into it. “Family stuff. I gotta call you right back.”

Her dispatcher and friend Denise Halverson said, “I think we need you now, Heidi.”

“I can’t—”

She couldn’t even finish the sentence. She dropped to a squat, tossed her phone upon the wet lawn, reached beneath her robe, and aimed the jar against herself. Wow. Better.

“OK, go ahead.”

Denise spoke distantly from the grass.

“Do you remember that priest from La Crosse who told us homeless men are being picked off the street and never coming back? He was calling the counties a few weeks ago to put us on alert?”

She remembered appreciating the passionate good intentions of the call, but it had left her with questions. The priest had said that five men had disappeared—under suspicious circumstances, he was certain—from the streets of the nearest “big” city. But wasn’t the simplest explanation that transients tended to be transient? And why was he so convinced that there was foul play involved?