He chewed a Slim Jim, not eating it really, just sort of rolling it from side to side in his mouth and taking it out occasionally to admire his tooth marks and slick spittle residue. At least I think it was a Slim Jim. I couldn’t be sure, because I hadn’t seen one in a while—since around the same time I last heard the word “fella.”

“We don’t want to keep you from…the old lady,” I said, “but we’re sort of pressed for time.”

He rolled the Slim Jim across his lower lip, somehow managed to suck on it as he spoke. “Devin said you’re the two who settled Gerry Glynn’s hash.”

“Yes,” I said. “His hash was settled by us.”

Angie kicked my ankle.

“Well.” Captain Groning stared over his desktop at us. “Don’t have that kind of thing round here.”

“What kind of thing?”

“Your sicko killers, twisted deviants, your cross-dressers and baby rapers. No, sir. We leave that for all you in the Big City.”

The Big City was approximately eight miles from Stoneham. This guy seemed to think there was an ocean or two in between.

“Well,” Angie said, “that’s why I’ve always wanted to retire here.”

It was my turn to kick her.

Groning raised an eyebrow and leaned forward as if to see what we were doing on the other side of his desk. “Yeah, well, like I always say, miss, you could do whole lots worse than this here town, but not whole lots better.”

Call the Stoneham Chamber of Commerce, I thought, you got yourselves a town slogan.

“Oh, absolutely,” Angie said.

He leaned back in his chair and I waited for it to tip, send him back through the wall into the next office. He pulled the Slim Jim out of his mouth, looked at it, and sucked it back in again. Then he looked at his computer screen.

“Anthony Lisardo of Lynn,” he said. “Lynn, Lynn, City of Sin. You ever hear it called that?”

“First time.” Angie smiled brightly.

“Oh, sure,” Groning said. “That’s a hell of a place, ol’ Lynn. Wouldn’t raise a dog there.”

Bet you’d eat one, though.

I chewed my tongue, reminded myself I’d resolved to work on my maturity this year.

“Wouldn’t raise a dog,” he repeated. “Well. Anthony Lisardo, yeah, had himself a heart attack.”

“I thought he drowned.”

“He did, fella. He surely did. First, though, he had a heart attack. Our doc didn’t think it was so big it would have killed him on its own, him being a young kid and all, but he was in five feet of water when it happened, so that was pretty much all she wrote. All she wrote,” he repeated with the same musical lilt he’d used on “wouldn’t raise a dog.”

“Anybody know what caused the heart attack?”