For the first hour, all I could think about was what Lincoln Turner told me in the juke near Anna’s Bottom, and the deductions I made afterward. Then Sheriff Dennis called my cell. When I stepped out of the meeting, Dennis told me that, not long before, someone identifying himself only as “Mr. Brown” had called his office and insisted on speaking to the sheriff. When Walker got on the line, “Mr. Brown” told him that on the previous night, he’d witnessed a pickup truck bearing the Royal Oil Company logo smash the front door of the Concordia Beacon with its right front fender. Then he’d seen two men get out, one of whom appeared to be carrying a large backpack. They entered the newspaper, and moments later, an intense glow became visible through the smashed door. About a minute later, the arsonists had emerged and fled the scene in the truck.

“Did you ask this ‘Mr. Brown’ if he recognized them?” I asked.

“He said he did,” Walker answered in the tone of a man telling a good joke. “He said one was Randall Regan, and the other was Brody Royal himself. Those were his exact words. Himself.”

This news actually lifted me out of my trance. “He told you Brody Royal torched the Concordia Beacon?”

“Yep. What do you think I ought to do about that tip?”

“Have you told anybody else about it?”

“Not yet.”

“Not even your deputies?”

“No.”

“Then don’t. Don’t say anything about it to anybody. I’ll get back to you about this later. Okay?”

“If you say so.”

I remembered then that Walker had no idea about the existence of Henry’s “Huggy Bear.” “I do, Walker. This could be important.”

After hanging up with Sheriff Dennis, I returned to my Kafkaesque civic meeting. At this moment, a white Republican is trying to reassure his colleagues that a rebuilt slave market is really “just a king-size diorama, like the ones they have at Civil War battlefield parks,” while a black Democrat makes sweeping statements about forcing white elites to acknowledge the greatest crime in American history. My fantasy about the old hangman’s trapdoor upstairs gives way to a compulsion to offer dueling pistols to each side and let them shoot it out. Or better yet … the silver-handled straight razor Pithy Nolan gave me yesterday is still in my inside coat pocket. I never took it out last night, and the thing is so slim that I forgot it was there until now. What would these blowhards do if I pulled out the “Lady’s Best Friend” and sliced off their ties just below their half-Windsors?