We arranged for me to get dropped at the urgent care clinic, and after my wounds were cleaned up and dressed, I walked over to the sheriff’s office and spent far more time than I would have liked in the interview room with Hal, Keith, and eventually Ash, going over everything that had happened. When they’d wrung every last drop of information out of us, Hal told Keith to go home, and Ash led me straight into the sheriff’s private office itself, a room that until now I’d never been invited to enter.

Sheriff Richardson was already there, seated at a small conference table. The rest of the room was occupied by the largest wooden desk I’d ever seen. Most of the desk was covered with two huge computer screens and numerous precisely stacked piles of paper. The walls were hung with framed maps of the county, the city, and the various villages in the county, and painted a soft yellow, a color that almost precisely matched the flowers on the conference table.

It occurred to me that, though early one morning I’d once seen the sheriff on her front porch wearing a ratty bathrobe, I knew very little about her. I didn’t know where she grew up, didn’t know if she was married, didn’t know if she had children, didn’t know if she liked pineapple on her pizza. And on the heels of that realization, I decided I didn’t need to know.

“Have a seat, Minnie.” The sheriff nodded at the chair opposite her. “Did the urgent care folks take care of you?”

I held up my hands, which were bandaged and taped to the point of uselessness.

The sheriff laughed. “Well, better safe than sorry with wounds like that. I expect—ah, there he is. Hal, what can you tell us?”

Detective Inwood, with a thick file of papers in hand, sat down. “Mr. Tanaka’s insistence that Mr. Parnell didn’t appropriately choose his victims has, apparently, rankled Mr. Parnell. So much so that Mr. Parnell has been speaking of his accomplishments nonstop, before, during, and after his Miranda rights were read to him.”

“Has he, now? How convenient.” Sheriff Richardson’s smile was pleasant. A sharklike version of pleasant, but still. She leaned back and put her feet on the table. “What has he said that’s pertinent?”

The detective took a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket and slid them on one-handed. “Following a chronological timeline, Mr. Parnell first came up with the idea of killing retirees after he attended a meeting with the manager of the road commission.” Hal looked up from his papers. “Not long ago, two former road commission employees passed away of natural causes. The road commission manager made a tasteless joke about the deaths helping the road commission’s budget and that was how it started.”