I was leaning against the car door when Hollis Boxleitner struggled up the slope, wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand. To mark the spot, he tied an orange strip of plastic to the tree nearest the road and the car. He gestured toward the car door, indicating I should get in, and he drove back to the town in grim silence. “Teenie Hopkins was my sister-in-law,” he said as we parked.

There wasn’t anything for me to say.

I let him precede me into the police station. We had only been gone forty-five minutes or so, and the crew was still assembled. The tightness in Tolliver’s jaw told me that they’d been grilling him about me—maybe about my success rate—and he’d had to do some explaining. He hated that.

All the faces turned toward us, questioning: the mayor’s looked only curious, the lawyer’s cautious, the sheriff’s angry. Tolliver was relieved. Sybil Teague was tense and miserable.

“Body’s there,” Hollis said briefly.

“You’re sure it’s Teenie?” Mrs. Teague sounded . . . somewhere between stunned and grief-stricken.

“No, ma’am,” Boxleitner said. “No, ma’am, I’m not sure at all. The dentist will be able to tell us. I’ll give Dr. Kerry a call. That’ll be good enough for an unofficial identification. We’ll have to send the remains to Little Rock.”

I was sure the body was Teenie Hopkins, of course, but Sybil Teague wouldn’t thank me for saying so again. In fact, she was looking at me with some distaste. It was an attitude I’d run across many times before. She’d hired me, and she would pay me a very tidy sum of money, but she didn’t want to believe me. She’d actually be happy if I was wrong. And I certainly wasn’t her favorite person, though I’d brought her the information for which she’d asked . . . the information she’d gone to so much trouble to bring me to Sarne to deliver.

Maybe, when I’d first started out in my business, I was able to sympathize with this perverse attitude: but I couldn’t any longer. It just made me feel tired.

two

NO one wanted to talk to us, or needed to talk to us, any longer. In fact, the very sight of me was giving Mayor Terry Vale a serious case of the cold creepies. He was the least connected to the case, and in fact I couldn’t figure out his continued presence, but the others appeared to be worried about his peace of mind, so Tolliver and I took our leave.