She hesitated. “Me not knowing about Nell Albritten is typical of what I was trying to say yesterday at church. There’s a divide in this town between black and white and between the people north of the river, North Lawrence, and the rest of the town. Only a handful of people at Riverside know Ms. Albritten, and unless they’re connected to the hospital, they won’t have heard a peep about her. If it had been Gertrude Perec or Joy Helmsley, we’d all have our casseroles baked by now.”

“On the subject of casseroles, or at least food,” I said, “Ms. Albritten told me this afternoon that Doris McKinnon talked to you at the farmers’ market about a month ago. She was upset that someone was planting on her land?”

“No-o-o.” Rutledge drew the word out, trying to remember. “She was upset, but she was talking about the land she’d had to sell to the air force. She said it looked as though they’d sold it to another farmer instead of giving her the chance to buy it back. ‘They’re growing something there, and I need to know why’—something like that.”

“If she was digging up the ground in the middle of the night, trying to prove something, then it would be on that land?” That would be a wonderful break. I could ID the fifteen acres she’d had to cede and inspect them for signs of digging, instead of going all over the county.

“She was digging in the middle of the night?” Rutledge was startled. “She was always . . . I don’t want to say eccentric—we’re too fast to slap that label on any woman who marches to her own beat—but she was always more out there than most other people. She let the anti-nuke kids camp on her land, back in ’83. That caused a lot of antagonism out in the county, hippies or Communists spoiling the landscape.”

We’d hung up, and I was looking at the maps I’d used this morning, trying to work out where McKinnon’s old fifteen acres overlapped with the Sea-2-Sea experimental farm, when Sergeant Everard came in.

He and the barista chatted for a minute—banter, it looked like—while she pulled a beer for him. He brought it over to my table.

“Just got off duty.” He waved the beer stein. “So she’s an emotional-support animal, huh?” He leaned over to scratch Peppy’s ears. “I thought she was your analyst.”

“She’s an exceptional multitasker.”

“They told me you usually come here in the mornings for coffee.”

“Best in Lawrence, at least for my taste,” I agreed.

“That doesn’t look a lot like coffee,” he said, “but I took a chance that you’d come in at night. It’s how we LEOs catch perps: people like their routines.”

“We perps do,” I agreed, “but maybe you saw my GPS come back on stream.”