“While your partner is poking around up there,” I say, “let’s check out the shop.”

“Sounds good,” he says as we leave the barn. Copsey is older, hard to say how much. Maybe five years. No more than ten. He’s a strawberry blond with biceps that are barely contained by his uniform. He speaks with a slight lisp that I find charming.

Merritt’s woodworking shop is in an aluminum Quonset hut. Its form reminds me of the arching ribs of a chicken carcass. My mother wasn’t much of a cook, but whenever she made her favorite—and no one else’s—she started by simmering a whole chicken in a pot with onions and carrots. And, yes, her chicken and dumplings smelled so good. Her dumplings never came out of the pot tender. Always hard, like little doughy rocks.

Like her heart.

Merritt’s shop is filled with the odor of cedar and fir. Balsam, I think. It’s like one huge potpourri bag that I wish I was able to give to Maxine. I can’t, of course. The thought that passes through my mind is only good, not snarky. I liked Maxine. I didn’t like how her place assaulted my olfactory senses.

I tell Copsey to search the north side. I note a flattened area on the floor, an imprint of something that had been there a long time.

Carpet?

“I’ll start here, on this end. We’ll meet in the middle. Seriously, Deputy, if the hammer we’re looking for is anywhere on the property, it will be here.”

“Got it, ma’am.”

“Please,” I say. “No more ma’ams.”

“Yes, sir,” he says.

I keep my mouth shut and wonder if I should grow my hair longer. Or maybe slather on the peacock shadow.

There are a bevy of galvanized storage bins on Copsey’s side.

We search by grid, first sweeping every inch in a methodical manner. We take photos too. Not of everything. Copsey also uses a metal detector. I didn’t think to bring one. I make my way around a couple of chairs and a table, works in progress, toward the wide workbench that runs the length of that side of the hut. Merritt Wheaton might have been a monster, but it was clear that he was a very neat one. An array of tools hangs neatly on hooks against a pegboard. He’d outlined with a Sharpie each tool.

In the row of hammers, I note several with the distinctive claw that the coroner indicated was the cause of death.

One in particular draws me close. As I lean over the bench, an errant nail cuts through my clothing.

“Shit!”

Startled, Copsey looks up from the hovering head of the metal detector.

“You okay, Detective?”

I grimace as I touch the tear in my shirt. Thankfully, it didn’t puncture the skin. My father’s DNA would really confuse this crime scene.

“Okay.”