Patty rolled over in bed to face him, and Brad sighed, shaking his head. He couldn’t sleep. He’d been in bed since nine, trying to catch up on all the shuteye he’d missed over the past week, and for the first hour or so he’d actually dozed, but some random household noise had roused him from slumber after that, and he’d been wide awake ever since. The only reason he hadn’t gotten out of bed to watch TV in the living room was because he hadn’t wanted to wake his wife.

Now that Patty was up, though, he kicked off the covers and swung his legs out of bed. He sat there for a moment staring down at his bare feet, fatigued but not sleepy, frustrated by the unwillingness of his brain and body to rest when they were supposed to.

But how could he shut down and relax with everything that was going on?

He saw in his mind the B of A manager slaughtered in the ditch by the control road; all those dead bodies laid out in the field; the Clarks butchered in their own garage; Carl Yates shooting himself in the head, brains and bone and blood bursting out the other side.

More than anything else, though, it was the new bank that was keeping him awake.

He could not forget the odd feeling he’d experienced inside the bank, a space that to him seemed far too large for the building it was in. And he could not shake the sense that something was wrong with the employees he and his men had questioned, many of whom had seemed vaguely familiar, like people he had once arrested.

More pertinently, the bank seemed to be at the swirling center of everything bad that was happening in Montgomery. It was the bank’s rivals from B of A who had been found dead in the forest. The bank had hired that Victor kid who had killed his parents (although everyone at the bank denied it. Denials he flat-out disbelieved). Even Carl had killed himself because a bank was foreclosing on his place, although, granted, it had been a different bank.

It was all probably just a bizarre coincidence, but, as a sheriff, he found coincidences automatically suspect, and Brad could not help thinking that there was a picture here he wasn’t seeing simply because he could not connect the dots.

Yet.

Patty had scooted over to his side of the bed, and she sat next to him on the edge. She smiled. “Should we turn on the radio? Listen to Chet’s show?”

“While he tells all his dimwitted insomniacs that they should kill me? I don’t think so.”

Patty frowned. “Has he really been saying that?”

Brad nodded tiredly.

“Throw his ass in jail,” she said fiercely. “Threatening a police officer.”

“I would if I could,” Brad confessed.