“Would it surprise you to know that the Causeys and the Wrens are pretty closely related? Joree Causey herself was a Wren before she married. And I can’t begin to count the many ways those families are intertwined.”

It was my turn to sit silently and think for a bit. Did it matter at all? And was it just coincidence that Leon Wren should show up at the convenience store while I was talking to Sandy Willis? No, that was a chance encounter, the crossing of paths with a dangerous lunatic. Leon had attacked my truck in a fit of madness. If it hadn’t been mine it would have been someone else’s. It was just an unexpected and inexplicable event, like running across a rattlesnake coiled on a busy city sidewalk. You can’t account for it, but those kinds of things sometimes happen.

“No, Sheriff, that wouldn’t surprise me very much. There are people in my own family that we just call cousins and leave it at that. If you try to follow the lines of relationship it becomes too complicated and confusing. But I do wonder this, is Leon Wren crazy? I mean, is he mentally deficient or unhinged in some manner? Has he done this sort of thing before?”

Zimmer frowned and shook his head slightly. “Leon Wren is an utterly vicious and completely cruel man—he has been all his life. But crazy—no,” he said, shaking his head again. “I wouldn’t call him intelligent. In fact, in many ways he’s stupid, but he does have an animal cunning about him that is surprisingly powerful. Some people say he took over the operations of the clan after his uncle Lazlo Wren burned to death in a trailer fire last year. Some people also say that Leon might have had something to do with that fire. But nobody says it out loud, and no one’s ever said it to a grand jury.

“But if you’ll press the charges,” he continued, “I think I can see that Brother Leon goes to Reidsville for a few years. This makes him a three-time loser, and by God, this time, I was the witness.”

“Of course, Sheriff. I’ll file. But I think you need to get a shrink to run an evaluation on him. The entire time he was swinging that bat he was babbling a bunch of crazy religious talk—all about being the avenging hand of God, cleansing the Earth of Satan’s spawn, and such lunacy. And I can tell you for certain, the man I saw behind those eyes was sincerely crazy.”

“It might have been a big dose of crystal meth doing the talking,” Zimmer replied.

“Yes,” I said upon reflection, “it could have been at that. But it could also be something deeper and more permanent.”