Norm phrased his answer carefully. “When Sandra came to me about the lawsuit a couple of years later, we discussed the bribe. I had to have a complete history of what the mine had done to try to push Sandra out. I knew they’d offered her money, but not that Brink was the one who’d done it. I didn’t know that until he came back, and Sandra confirmed he was the one. I’m sorry for keeping you in the dark about it last winter, but any information I had about Brink was privileged.”

Sandra pushed up her sleeve and checked her watch. She glanced out one of the small windows toward the dirt road leading down into the bowels of the mine. “Let’s move this along, okay? I’m losing money here. You might as well get to the shit you really want to know about.”

“What do you think we want to know?” Darrell asked.

“Come on, this is about Kip and Racer, right? You think Brink talked to me around the time the two of them got chopped up in Norm’s trailer.”

“That seems pretty likely, doesn’t it? Given the similarities between the crimes.”

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you. I can’t even be sure it was the same summer. But if they got killed after I met Brink, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought back then. Kip and Racer had nothing to do with me or the mine. I had no reason to think there was any connection between them and Brink.”

“What about when you heard how Gordon Brink was killed?” Darrell asked.

Again Sandra glanced at Norm, but he nodded his approval. “Sure, it made me wonder, but I figured Brink was killed by a copycat. When the sheriff said it was Jay, I assumed that was the end of the story.”

“Except now there’s Ajax, too,” Darrell went on. “Was he in the mix on any of this?”

“If he was, I never heard about it.”

Darrell shook his head in frustration. “Sandra, we’ve got four murders, four brutal crimes committed in very similar ways. When Brink was killed, we didn’t find any evidence to link his death to the murders of Kip and Racer. There was nothing to tie the three of them together. But now we find out that Brink was in town once before, which you knew but kept from us. Our next stop is going to be at the Fair Day resort. When we check their records, I think we’re going to find out that Brink was staying at the resort right around the time Kip and Racer got killed. There’s no way that’s a coincidence. All these crimes are connected somehow, and right now, the only connection I’m seeing is you.”

“Well, I didn’t kill them, Darrell. I don’t know who did.”