“If this is about your case, you’d have to talk to Lt. Shipley. He’s trying to track down those letters—”

“Well, it’s related to that, but not exactly.” He motioned with his head toward the hall. “Can we talk in your office or something?”

“I don’t have an office, but I suppose we can use the interrogation room.” He waved to one of the clerks. “I’ll be in the exam room,” he announced.

The clerk nodded, and the two of them passed through a small security gate and into the hall. Doug followed Mike into the interrogation room, a small cubicle with barely enough room for two chairs and a table.

Now that he was here, Doug did not know where to begin. The chronology he had developed, the arguments he had worked out in his mind, withered in the just-the-facts environment of the police station. He had no proof, not really, only some strange occurrences and tentative connections. Connections that, it was obvious now, required great leaps of faith. The confidence he had felt while talking to Stockley in the newspaper office had vanished entirely. He had not been expecting to get from the police the type of reception the editor had given his ideas, but he still had not been prepared for the lack of belief he now knew would greet his story. He had been stupid to come here at all.

Still, as he looked across the bare table at Mike Trenton, he saw not cynicism and disinterest in the young officer’s eyes but an open willingness to hear him out.

This had better be good.

He started at the beginning, with Ronda’s unlikely suicide and his initial impression of the new mailman at the funeral. He had an impulse to speed his story up, to relate it in the shorthand manner in which he’d seen witnesses talk on television, but he forced himself to take his time, to carefully go over every small detail, every emotional impression, believing that it would lend verisimilitude to his theory.

Mike stopped him before he was halfway through. “I’m sorry, Mr. Albin. No offense, but this has been a pretty hectic week around here. This isn’t a big-city police department. We have twelve cops working in two shifts. There’s been a series of dog poisonings, a suicide we’re still investigating, and the usual fights in the cowboy bars. We’re seriously undermanned at the moment. I know we’ve been having a lot of trouble with the mail, but to be honest, you should be talking to Howard Crowell—”

“Look, you may think I’m crazy—”

“I don’t think you’re crazy, Mr. Albin.”

“Doug.”

“Doug.”