“Nine.”

“What did you do with the file?” Joe asked, hoping it might still be available.

Reassuringly, Rowe smiled. “I put it back in a new wrong place, where nobody but me can find it, unless they tear the whole cabinet apart.”

“Outstanding,” Joe commented.

Willy merely nodded as he asked, “And nothing happened afterward? Life went on?”

“Far as I know. I never brought it up again, and he didn’t either.”

“Does your boss know about our BOLO?” Willy asked.

“I doubt it,” Rowe replied. “He carries a flip phone and relies on me and my partner to man the computer.”

“What about that partner?” Joe asked. “Did he see it? And what’re his relations to Herrick?”

“The chief likes him less than me. Plus, I’ve never seen him look at a BOL. He’s not that into the whole law enforcement thing, not like me. He mostly likes walking around with a gun.”

Willy lightened up enough to comment, “You’re clearly hanging with the wrong crowd, Dillon.”

The young man looked at him unhappily. “Tell me about it.”

“The BOLO also mentioned Seamus Kyle,” Joe said. “You remember that?”

“I do, but it didn’t sound familiar, and there was no DOB or anything, so I didn’t have anything to work with.”

“Yeah,” Joe conceded. “We don’t have one. We also doubt that’s his real name.”

“We passed a town hall on the way in,” Willy said. “Would they have land or tax records where we could find if Shaw’s on file as a property owner?”

Rowe looked momentarily nonplussed. “Sure. I guess. I mean, yeah.”

Joe saw where Willy was heading. “We could pose as attorneys doing a title search. That shouldn’t raise any alarms. Is the clerk a friend of your chief’s?”

“Not that I know of,” Rowe answered. “She’s really old and reminds me of Yoda, and I’ve never seen them together. Nice lady. Very outgoing. You thinking Herrick and Shaw are connected?”

“Tell us about Herrick,” Joe requested, neither answering nor airing his suspicions.

Dillon shrugged. “I don’t know about anything criminal, but I wouldn’t put it past him. Look, he’s been in that position longer than God. At least it seems that way. But he’s got nice stuff, gets a new truck every two years. I know what he makes. It’s not enough to do that. And the way he handles the cases we bring in? Gary—the other patrol cop—he doesn’t give a shit. But I see the boss playing favorites all the time. If you check with the county prosecutor, there’s no way the numbers we bring the chief match what he’s passing up the ladder. He cuts people slack all the time.”

“And you think he gets paid for that?” Willy asked.

Dillon blew out a puff of air, his pent-up frustration having gotten the better of him. “I can’t say that. It’s just how it feels. But I got nothin’ to prove it.”

One hundred and fifty miles to the south, Lester and Sam were back in the car, running down the last few miles of Don Kalfus’s recorded trip in Shaw’s borrowed Mercedes.