I went through all the stills, hoping for shots of the bag tags showing the latitude and longitude of the digging, but couldn’t see any. It was maddening: I was looking at the place where Sonia thought Matt Chastain was buried, but I still had no idea where it was.

The more I thought about it, the less I believed it could be a cemetery, at least not one in current use. Headstones would have stood out, paler stone against darker soil, even in the poor light. The arrival of the SUV or truck, coupled with the fact that they were working in the dark, made it pretty clear that Doris and her guests were trespassers.

I stood, stretching the kinks in my neck and hamstrings, pressing my palms together to straighten my fingers. I wandered to the patio door. It was satisfying to find evidence that August and Emerald had been here. Satisfying to find evidence that Sonia really had seen them. I toyed with sending the video of her to her parents or Randy Marx, to show she had in fact seen August and Emerald. Bad idea, I finally decided: they would only pay attention to her crude dance as an excuse to mock her further.

I pulled on the blind cord over the patio door, jamming the slats. I’d gotten so focused on Sonia, along with all the other oddly behaving people in Lawrence, that I’d lost track of the problem that had sent me to Kansas in the first place: the wanton destruction in August’s home and at the Six-Points Gym.

Was this thumb drive what the thugs had been looking for? The search at the McKinnon farm hadn’t been as destructive as the damage in Chicago—except, of course, for the murder of Doris McKinnon.

They would have searched Doris’s home first and not found what they wanted. They thought August must have it; when he and Emerald disappeared, the creeps thought they’d gone back to Chicago. They became increasingly enraged, so they’d ripped apart August’s home and then the gym. Why hadn’t they torn up Emerald Ferring’s house as well? Maybe Ferring’s watchful neighbors kept invaders at bay. If vandals had been prowling around, it would help explain the neighbors’ hypervigilance toward me.

I wondered about the SUV that had arrived in the field. Was it the Buick Enclave that had followed me yesterday? The sheriff claimed he wasn’t tailing me. I believed him, if only because I’d checked on him in my databases. His personal SUV was a Ford Explorer, and the county budget definitely didn’t run to Enclaves. Maybe I’d imagined yesterday’s tail: no one had followed me to the McKinnon place after all.