“Yes, I remember. He thinks someone’s offering them farm work. Denise, what happened?”

“A milk truck driver scared some turkey vultures off a body in the ditch on Liberty Hill Road. Deputy Luck just got there. It looks like a homicide. It looks like the victim might have been homeless.”

The jar grew warm and heavy in her hand. She heard the gunshot echoes from her dream.

“Sheriff? Are you there?”

“Let me guess,” she said. “Shot twice with a small-bore rifle, probably a .22.”

The phone went silent for moment.

“And the body’s caked in dirt.”

“What’s going on, Heidi?”

“Am I right?”

“Heidi, what the hell is going on?”

She pulled the jar away and finished into the grass. She raised her face toward the house and saw Grammy Belle staring back at her. The guest room curtain fell closed. She dumped the jar.

“I’m on my way,” she said.

CHAPTER 2

Leroy Fanta, having heard the call on his bedside scanner and beaten the sheriff to the scene, was lighting his first smoke of the day when he saw Heidi Kick’s brown-on-tan Charger crest into the already brutal morning sun on Liberty Hill Road.

At the sight of his favorite sheriff, Fanta felt pride—and then, beneath his ribs, a hot gob of loss.

Come November, it looked as if Heidi Kick would be gone.

He could visualize the headline he would write:

Challenger’s Attacks Take Down First Female Sheriff

Except the Bad Axe Broadcaster did not print news anymore. It no longer needed headlines, nor an editor to write them. After a century in service, the Broadcaster was no longer even a newspaper. It had become the Happy Valley Shopper after Babette Rickreiner had sucked it into her empire, and as of last week, after forty-three years as editor-in-chief, Fanta had become unemployed.

He should turn his scanner off, maybe. But here he was. Sheriff Kick’s new rookie, Deputy Lyndsey Luck, had blocked the road with three orange cones. Fanta hustled in his old-man shamble to move them. His favorite sheriff steered past with a nod and parked behind the milk truck. Then she stayed inside the Charger, talking on her cell phone.

Now fully into his first sweat of another tropical day in the Bad Axe, Fanta energized himself with a pull on his Winston and limped toward Deputy Luck and the milk truck driver where they stood on the bridge over Hink’s Creek. His joints hurt, every goddamn one of them. His fingertips prickled. His pig valve felt sticky as it flapped. His hip locked, and he had to tack left to go straight. He hadn’t seen a dead body in a while, he told himself, other than his own in the mirror. What Babette Rickreiner had done to the Broadcaster had crushed him. He felt like a ghost as he joined the deputy and her witness.

“Where?”