“Absolutely no idea,” Sandra replied, snickering through her cigarette smoke. “But I’m just sick about it.”

“I can see that.”

I started for my cruiser again, my boots crunching in the snow, but Sandra wasn’t done.

“Rebecca?” she said, with sharpness in her voice. “Don’t feel sorry for Brink or his wife or any of those bastards. They killed my dog. I didn’t report it, but that’s what they did.”

“Are you sure?”

“I let Pogo out two weeks ago when I got home from work. He never came back. We never saw him again. You try explaining that to a sobbing eight-year-old boy. The mine people and their lawyers are sons of bitches. I hope every one of them rots in hell.”

Sandra wiped a tear from her face. She liked to pretend that she was hard as nails, because as soon as the men at the mine smelled weakness, they’d be all over her. But I knew that, deep down, much of her toughness was an act. I knew, because I often had to wear the same disguise in the sheriff’s department.

“I’m sorry about Pogo,” I told her gently, “but you know, we lose a lot of animals around here. This is wild country. It doesn’t necessarily mean it was Gordon Brink or the people at the mine.”

“The next day at work, I found a bag of doggy treats in my locker,” Sandra went on.

I shut my mouth.

She was right. Of course, she was right. The games were mean.

“I’m telling you, Rebecca, these people are evil. They care about money, they care about winning, and they don’t care about anything else. I don’t give a shit what happens to them. I really don’t. They deserve whatever they get.”

*

Christmas Eve continued on its strange path from there.

I spent the next several hours following up on other holiday problems around the county. Emily and Kevin Pipewell called in a panic to report that their twin girls were missing. When I got there, I spotted the girls eating graham crackers up on the roof near the chimney, where they were waiting for Santa. We got them down and back in bed.

Four-year-old Denny Bublitz called because his parents were sleeping. He’d flushed his goldfish to see what would happen, but after it disappeared, he wanted me to look for it. I told him that Mr. Jenkins at the pet store was in charge of rescuing flushed fishies, and that Denny’s parents would be able to get his goldfish back from Mr. Jenkins after Christmas.

Louisa Shepherd, who was eighty-one and still spry enough to chop her own firewood with an ax, called to let me know that she’d baked Christmas spritz cookies and did I want some? Yes, I did.