“Well, it was bad enough when he made laughingstocks of us six years ago. I was in that documentary, do you remember? The sheriff with the monster in his backyard. I’m not going through that again! Got it? I want to know who killed Gordon Brink, and I want an arrest.”

“I want that, too.”

“Next time People magazine calls me, we better have a human being behind bars, and if you can’t do that, then you can start sleeping in the woods until you find me a seven-foot-tall ape.”

Darrell didn’t smile. None of this was funny to him.

“The thing is, Jerry, I wish I could tell you we’re close to figuring this out, but right now, the investigation is dead in its tracks.”

The sheriff got up from behind his desk and paced. Physically, he was an older, grayer version of Ajax, tall, lean, and handsome, but his personality was like a lit fuse, always one spark away from a blowup. Jerry was in his midfifties, which made him several years younger than Darrell. Back when the previous sheriff had retired, a lot of people around the county assumed that Darrell would run for the job. But Darrell had no patience for politics. He let Jerry do the county fair and the Chamber of Commerce dinner and the 4-H picnic. Jerry had charisma, just like his nephew, and he ran unopposed. He’d been sheriff for more than a decade, and he would probably stay in the job until he was buried in the ground.

“There’s no such thing as a dead investigation,” Jerry snapped. “Just cops who need to get off their butts and get the job done.”

“I can’t make up evidence out of thin air, Jerry.”

“No, but you can shake things up.” The sheriff sat down at his desk again. I couldn’t help but notice that he hadn’t looked at me once since Darrell and I had come into his office. I might as well have been invisible.

“What do you suggest?” Darrell asked.

“You’ve got one legitimate suspect in this murder, and you’ve been treating him with kid gloves. Go in there and rattle his cage.”

Darrell sighed. “Jay.”

“Exactly. Come on, Darrell, a crime like this is personal. You don’t carve up somebody like that unless you’ve got a hell of a motive. More often than not, that means we’re looking at a family member. If you ask me, a wife is always the likeliest person to carve up her husband, but you confirmed that Gordon’s wife didn’t come back from Minnesota until after Gordon was killed. Right? So who does that leave us with? The son. Jay.”

“Except there’s no evidence the boy was involved.”