You see what I mean about respect and sci-fi writers? I didn’t take the bait, and said instead, “Will you fax it to me, or not?”

“Give me your number. Five minutes.” And he hung up.

I sat in my study, staring at the fax machine for a good half hour before it rang, started doing its little hum.

And then the sketch started sliding, scalp first, out of the machine. Then it beeped, disconnected. I took the single sheet out of the tray, turned it around, and looked at it.

Howdy, neighbor.

i kept coming back to the shovel.

Walking over to Mindy’s Market—it was only about a twenty-minute stroll—to pick up some ground beef and buns and some fixings for salad, I tried to work things out in my head.

Let’s say Roger Carpington had killed Stefanie Knight. Waited for her inside her house. That would explain the broken glass at the back door. Maybe he already knew he was being blackmailed. Or Stefanie had threatened to expose him. To tell his wife. To ruin his political career. She had the ledger by this point. Maybe she was going to rip the lid off the whole Valley Forest Estates thing. He takes her into the garage, grabs the shovel from its hanging place on the wall, strikes her in the head with it. Runs.

Okay, possible.

I show up, find Stefanie. See the bloody shovel. And then I hightail it out of there.

Carpington thinks, Hey. My fingerprints are on that shovel. I have to go back and get it before the police arrive.

It would make sense. Except by this time, Carpington’s at the town council meeting. And according to at least one witness, never left the meeting.

So someone else grabbed that shovel. It was either (a) someone helping cover Carpington’s tracks, or (b) a different killer, coming back to grab the shovel for the same reason Carpington would have: fingerprints.

If it was someone helping Carpington cover his tracks, to keep him from being connected to the crime, then why did the shovel show up in the trunk of his car?

But if the killer was someone else, and had that shovel, placing it in Carpington’s trunk was a stroke of genius. Its presence there was guaranteed to incriminate.

But this killer would have to know that Carpington was a logical suspect already. This killer would have to know that a bloody shovel in the trunk would be just one more part of the puzzle.

“That’s $14.56.”

“Huh?”

It was the cashier at Mindy’s. She’d rung through my groceries and informed me of my total. I handed her a twenty and held my hand out for the change.

I was in another world.