I slid back through the opening in the silo fence and started into the fields, looking either for some sign of tire tracks or Doris McKinnon’s digging or even, vain idea, some remnant of the thirty-three-year-old hippie camp.

It was hopeless. The rain of the past week had turned the fields into mud baths. Maybe one of those Indian or Bedouin trackers beloved of crime writers could sense where Doris had been digging, but I couldn’t.

Mud was encasing my running shoes, making them so heavy that I felt as though I were walking through congealed molasses. My socks were soaked through, turning my toes into frozen lumps. I trudged back to my car, stopping again outside the perimeter gates. This is where Emerald Ferring had been photographed in 1983: “Aunt Doris, I owe you much.”

I was just getting into my car when I saw a dust cloud rolling toward me, the telltale strobes of the law flashing through it. I shut the door quickly, locked it, turned on the engine, and got ready to move. A squad car pulled up alongside me.

Sheriff Gisborne rolled down his window and signaled me to open mine. “I might have guessed that if there was trouble in Douglas County today, you’d be behind it.”

25
Trouble in Douglas County

“What’s troubling you today in Douglas County, Sheriff?” I kept my voice neutral.

“You, Warshawski. Douglas County was a pretty calm place until you arrived.”

“You mean until I arrived, no one would have found Ms. McKinnon’s dead body or tried to rescue Sonia Kiel and the young student, who were overdosing outside that bar?”

He shifted his gaze. “I mean none of that happened until you showed up.”

I laughed. “Come on, Sheriff. Horrible as Ms. McKinnon’s death was, it happened long before I came to town.”

“And now here you are, trespassing on private property.”

“This road?” I said. “This road is private property? It looked to me like it was posted as a county road, but you’re right: I’m a stranger.”

His upper lip curled in a snarl. “We got a call that someone was trespassing on Sea-2-Sea land, and I decided to look for myself, because I had this hunch, this intuition, the kind of thing a lady or a private eye might have, that I’d find you were the perp.”

“Good thing you’re a guy and a law-enforcement pro who doesn’t have to depend on his hunches, because they’d have misled you: I haven’t been on Sea-2-Sea land.”

He grinned in an ugly way. “Someone triggered an alarm at this location, and I don’t see anyone else around here, do you?”