Rafe’s mouth opened, then shut. There was no denying the truth. His dad’s storytelling abilities were legendary, and one of the prime reasons for their legendariness was sheer length. Half an hour was not uncommon, and I’d known the hunting dog story to run twice that long. On one momentous occasion, the Las Vegas story ran three hours. Bathroom breaks had been needed.

My beloved bowed to the inevitable and pulled out his wallet.

“Thank you,” I said, taking his money and trying not to sound smug, but not trying all that hard. “And even though the story wasn’t a classic, it did give us some insight into John Pinnock’s character.”

“Yeah, now we have proof that he’s a complete jerk. Giving an underground electric easement to a neighbor is a normal thing around here. But it’s a huge jump from that to murder.”

Though I knew he was right, I also had the itchy feeling—call it a gut feeling, an instinct, whatever—that John Pinnock could be violent.

“What’s your plan for the rest of the morning?” Rafe asked.

“Oh, just a little online research.” And, after he left for the school, I headed back home and fired up the computer. After three failed attempts to get Eddie to settle on my lap and be cozy, I reconciled myself to working without the comfort of a purring cat.

A couple of hours later, I sat back, thinking.

Using the county’s website, I’d looked up the property owners up and down the lakefront from the Mattocks’ cottage. For half a mile in both directions, all of them except John Pinnock had downstate or out-of-state addresses for their tax bills. This essentially guaranteed that they were not year-round residents. Then I’d done some mild social media stalking on all of those folks. I hadn’t been able to track down one hundred percent of them, but the ninety-nine percent that I had found online had posts indicating downstate (or out-of-state) locations at the time of Pug’s death.

“Well, there you go,” I said out loud.

To me, this meant one very important thing. Odds were extremely good that John Pinnock was the only person around when Pug was killed.

Which could mean two things.

The first scenario was that Pinnock could have seen something that would help track down who killed Pug. The second scenario was that, if Pinnock had pulled the trigger, there would have been absolutely no one around to see.

Or hear.

*   *   *

All afternoon, I mulled over what I’d learned. At first it had seemed like a lot of information, but once you distilled it down to its essence, it was really only one thing; that John Pinnock was not a nice person.