“No,” Flint said, his voice drifting off. “What I was wondering was, would anyone ever want to be electrocuted?”

“Excuse me?”

“You know, shocked. Have a few volts shot through their system.”

I shook my head. “I can’t imagine anyone getting their jollies that way.”

“Well, me neither. But I was wondering whether you ever noticed, did Ms. Snelling have a stun gun?”

“What?”

“A stun gun. You know, the kind some police forces have. You shoot a guy, you put fifty thousand volts into him, tends to slow him down a bit.”

“No,” I said. “I never saw anything like that. What makes you ask?”

“Well, you see,” Flint said, “we found something interesting on Mr. Benson’s body. Looked like a couple of bee stings at first. Right on his torso, just to the left of the navel, these two spots, a few inches apart.”

“Maybe he’d been stung.”

Flint shook his head. “No, no trace of any sort of bee venom in his bloodstream. No, these looked like the marks that are left when someone gets zapped with a stun gun.”

“Really.”

“Yeah. See, what I’m thinking is, maybe Ms. Snelling, or maybe somebody else if we accept your version, that she didn’t do this, zapped Mr. Benson with a stun gun, and while he was incapacitated, strapped him to that big wooden cross, and finally cut his throat open.”

I tried to make some sense of this. “Don’t you think, if Trixie had done this, she wouldn’t have had to use a stun gun on him? She could have lured him onto the device, promised him a bit of fun, made a game out of it, but then, once she had him strapped down, killed him. That’s if she’d done it. But someone else, someone who wasn’t into the whole role-playing thing, they’d have to use a stun gun on him first to get him up there.”

“They?”

“A couple of days ago, these two guys, they did a presentation for the city police, not Oakwood, not your department, but downtown, of this new kind of stun gun. Wanted to get the cops to buy a bunch of them. I did a story on it, for the paper. When Trixie saw the story, saw a picture of these guys, she freaked out. Like they were the very ones she’d never want to see her picture in the paper. And then her picture runs, and now there’s a dead guy in her basement, and you say he was shot with a stun gun.”