Quay squinted into the sunlight. “Could be irrelevant to your case.”

“True, but how much crime do you get here?” McAdams was annoyed. “We were searching here because Decker figured that Baer and Pauline might have been walking back to Elsie’s house. They’d been arguing before; maybe they were still arguing. Maybe it got heated. Maybe he stabbed her and then dumped the knife.”

“He takes off her clothes here but buries the body three hours away?”

“Don’t have an answer for that,” McAdams said. “We’ve got a shirt, Sergeant. It could be his shirt. It could be anyone’s shirt. We’ll just have to wait for the forensics on what we found.”

Quay said, “That’s going to take a while. We don’t have a lab here.” A pause. “Do you have a lab?”

“Not in-house. We send the information out to the next town over. It’s a referral center for all the smaller towns around it. And yes, it takes a while for us too.”

Decker came back. “We need more evidence bags. We found a ton of stuff: cigarette butts, soda cans, beer cans, food wrappers, water bottles—”

“You’re not going to turn all that in for processing,” Quay said.

Decker stared at him. “There is a potential crime scene. Everything needs to be collected.” He looked around. The sun was rising to its full height and the temperature was climbing to triple digits. “The first thing we’ll do is process the knife and shirt for DNA.”

“Whose DNA?” Quay asked. “Pauline, Elsie, or Baer?”

“We have a profile on all three of them. Well, I don’t have Baer’s profile, but he’s a felon, so he’s bound to be in CODIS. All we need is a match.”

McAdams said, “The sergeant was just saying that the labs he uses don’t process any faster than the labs we use.”

“Then we’ll wait,” Decker said. “In the meantime, there are other things I can do.”

“You know, if this is Pauline’s blood …” Quay shuffled his feet. “Then the murder happened in our jurisdiction.”

Decker stared at him. “Jake, you’re not going to get all territorial on me.”

“It’s not me, it’s my captain, Decker. I know him. He hates anyone coming into his city and telling him what to do.”

Decker cursed internally. “Is he coming out here … to look at the evidence? I’d like to meet him. Maybe explain my situation.”

“He’s on vacation for the next two weeks, but I’ll have to let him know what’s going on.”