“Wasn’t it awful about what happened at the carnival Friday night?” she whispered to me while we waited for the DA to confer with one of the defendants and her lawyer. “He seemed like such a nice young man. For a carnival worker, I mean.”

“Nice” wasn’t the description I’d heard used by anyone except perhaps his mother.

“You met him?”

“Well, not really. But Bradley started talking to him when he got change and then while I was playing, they talked back and forth about what it was like to travel with a carnival and what he did during the winter months. From what he told Bradley, I think he was planning to leave the carnival soon and go into the antique business. I won back three of my quarters and a real cute little bracelet, see?”

She held out her wrist. It was encircled by a tennis bracelet set with pink glass stones. Probably retailed for a dollar ninety-eight at one of those teenybopper stores at the mall. I didn’t ask her how many quarters it’d cost her. Besides, it did match her pink blouse and pink headband.

“Pretty,” I said, and turned my attention to the grandmother who took the stand to explain to me woman-to-woman why it was cruel to keep a tired child belted in a car seat when all that precious little thing wanted to do was stretch out across the backseat and go to sleep in comfort.

I asked her if she’d ever seen what a precious little thing looked like after being thrown from a car when it flipped off the road doing sixty miles an hour, then gave her the stiffest fine I could and told the DA to call his next case.

At the afternoon break, I went down to the sheriff’s department in the courthouse basement. When I tapped on the open door of Dwight’s office, he was half sitting, half leaning on the front of his desk talking to three of his deputies. His face lit up. “Well, speak of the devil! McLamb here was just about to go find a judge to get a signature on this search warrant.”

“What do you want to search?” I asked, skimming through the form McLamb handed me.

“Lamarr Wrenn’s grandfather’s house,” McLamb said. “Based on our investigations today, we think it probably contains property belonging to the Hartley guy that was killed Friday night, property that was stolen from a locked storage shed Mrs. Ames owns.”

“Really? What sort of property?”

“Some boards that his grandfather painted pictures on.”

“Pictures?”

“Halloween things. Skeletons and ghosts and—”

I looked up at Dwight suspiciously. “You serious? Didn’t you say they only paid about twenty-five or thirty dollars for those boards? And that they were only going to use them to decorate the exterior of their haunted house?”

“Theft is theft,” he said virtuously. “Breaking and entering.”

I finished looking over the document. Everything seemed in order so I signed and dated it, even though it looked like a lot of trouble for a bunch of worthless wood.