“I will,” he promised.

He stood there, still waving, as they drove onto the highway and headed north.

The day was spent mostly in meetings. With the FBI overseeing the school shooting investigation, Agent Yamato was in charge, and he and Brad videoconferenced with a higher-up at the Bureau, met with the coroner for an autopsy report, met with the other FBI agents for an update and met with Brad’s deputies to go over what they’d learned.

If this was what being a big time FBI agent was like, Brad was glad he was just a small town sheriff.

He had managed to convince Yamato that Worthington needed to be interviewed, and was gratified to learn that two agents had been dispatched to the downtown branch of the bank. He was less thrilled to find out later that no evidence of wrongdoing was found. Not sure what Worthington had told the agents, Brad described his encounter on the school grounds, but Yamato dismissed his concerns with an indifferent “it’s not illegal to brag.”

“To brag that they were financing school shootings?” he prodded, but Yamato would not bite.

It was a load off his back that Sue and Jillian were with his parents. Several times, he checked on Patty in her room at the hospital, asking her if she had anything she’d like him to tell the girls, hoping to tap into a maternal vein and somehow break through the wall she’d erected, but she steadfastly refused to engage with him. They were waiting for a full psych evaluation, but someone from the county had to come up and do it, and the soonest the doctor could get here was tomorrow. In the meantime, she was restrained and probably doped up.

In a way he was happy for all the work. It kept him from having to focus on how quickly and completely his life had gone to shit.

He took off early to clean up the house, leaving Hank in charge and telling him to call if Yamato or any of the feds started causing problems. Vern had taken photos of the dummies last night on the off chance that there were any charges to be filed, and though there was no way Brad would allow that to happen, he used his phone to take some photos of his own before stripping the mannequins of their clothes and breaking down the figures until the pieces were small enough to shove into the oversized construction-strength Hefty bags that he kept in the garage for major yard work. Tomorrow, he’d toss everything in the dumpster behind the station, but for tonight, he just threw the trash bags on the cement of the driveway.