“Crime,” Colin said. “What kind of crime you have here?”

“What, growing up or now?”

“Has it changed?”

Simmons allowed a grin. “Not really. Nothing here much changes. You’ve seen the board at the station. Not a lot on it.”

“Pretty quiet town.”

“We’re in the top three safest cities in New Hampshire. Truth is, it’s just that kind of area. Was the same way when I was a kid. Never really had to worry about being out at night, things like that.”

The Pleasantville metaphor was becoming even more apt. “But you have crime,” Colin said. “Every place has crime.”

“Sure, of course we do. Had a rape a couple of years ago.”

In Madison, they had over a hundred rapes in Colin’s last year there before he’d transferred to Milwaukee. That was a much bigger city with a large university population, but still.

“Okay, what else?” Colin asked.

Simmons thought about it. “Car break-ins. The occasional DUI. Maybe three or four legit house burglaries a year. A couple of months ago, a guy torched his self-storage unit. Turned out he was going through a nasty divorce and wanted to burn all his wife’s stuff.”

Colin processed this. He supposed given Bury’s size—just about seven thousand—it wasn’t unusual to have such a low crime rate. He also knew the socioeconomic profile of the town had a lot to do with it. Affluent white folks were less inclined to commit crimes warranting a 911 call. The crimes likely being committed in Bury were the less obvious ones. Those involving offshore accounts, routing numbers, and shell corporations.

Then there were the vices of the rich.

“Does Bury have a drug problem?”

“Nah,” Simmons said. “Not like Manchester or anything like that. Some heroin issues, some opioid abuse. Nothing off the charts. Other than that, yeah, we’ve busted some kids with coke at parties. Some pot. Nothing more than recreational. No large-scale dealers or anything.”

“And murder?”

Simmons shook his head. “No, sir. At least not since I’ve been on the force the last two years. Had three suicides. One vehicular manslaughter. But no murders.”

Not that you know of, Colin thought, not really knowing why that thought popped into his head.

“When was the last murder in Bury?”

Simmons thought about it a minute, then shook his head. “Can’t say I know. Like I said, it’s just not that kind of place.”

Moments later, they arrived at the station. Colin had a couple hours before he had to leave for the airport, so he worked at an open desk and caught up with paperwork. He also spent some time chatting with Wallace Sike, the Bury chief of police. Sike had been around about a decade and mostly confirmed what Simmons had said.

“Ayuh, Bury’s pretty quiet. Lower crime rate than Hillsborough County as a whole, that’s for sure. We assist the other jurisdictions more than they assist us.” Sike appeared on the edge of fifty and had a mustache as bushy as a raccoon tail, completely hiding his upper lip. His pronounced gut affirmed the fact that he didn’t spend a lot of his day running down suspects. “But there’ve been murders over the years, no doubt about it. Can’t think of any place without a murder every now and then. But ours are extremely few and far between.”