“Pretty cool, huh?” she asked.

I nodded. She performed the trick a couple more times, sending shocks of fear down my body whenever the aim of the guns came up to me, her greasy hair waving at the sides of her plump face as her body worked the weapons. She pointed the guns at the television sets, pretending to pop off rounds at her reflection in the gray glass. “Pow, pow, pow.”

In time, I inched over and asked her as softly and calmly as I could to hand the guns to me. She did, and I clicked their barrels open.

They were fully loaded.

I stood in the sun outside Mona Wallgreen’s house for a couple of hours giving the story of what had happened inside to hostile, uncomfortable officers of every level while her property was searched. Sweeney arrived and heard my tale, taking furious notes to back up her recording. Mona had given permission for her property to be searched, so a warrant wasn’t needed. But I got more and more uncomfortable with the situation as officers began bringing clear evidence bags out of the house and loading them into the back of a truck. There were dozens and dozens of guns. Inside the house I could hear Mona mumbling and shuffling about as she directed the quietly shocked officers to another cache of weapons, and then another, and then another. She had long, antiquated rifles and sawn-off shotguns and small, ornate derringers with ivory handles. The officers coming in and out of the house kept exchanging flabbergasted looks with one another, wondering, it seemed, when the collection would end. The guns were coming out from beneath couches and down from on top of shelves and from behind lumps of meat in the freezer that appeared to have been there for decades.

“Two of my officers came and visited her the other day,” Sweeney said. “And she gave them nothing. Wouldn’t let them in. And Amanda said she had the door slammed in her face. But you”—she squinted at me—“she let you right in? Why?”

“I think she might have liked the look of me,” I said uncomfortably. “There were hints about the position of boyfriend being available.”

Sweeney wiped her mouth, and I couldn’t tell if she was stifling a laugh or not.

“What do we know about her?”

“She’s Mona Wallgreen.” Sweeney flipped a page of her notebook. “Forty-seven. She was being cared for by her father until he passed away a couple of years ago. That’s all anyone really knows. I assume the guns were his. We’ll have to run them all, see where they came from.”

“Right.”

“What do you think?” Sweeney glanced toward the trees through which the Barking Frog stood. “She goes over there wanting to perform her gun show and pops them both?”

“Would explain the money on the roof,” I said. “Doesn’t look like Mona needs or wants cash.”