Chapter 3

The Bramlett County Sheriff's Department sat on the square in Marlow, in a red-brick building with a flagpole and a glass front door that stuck in the frame.

Sadie pushed through it at 2:15 Friday afternoon.

The woman behind the counter was Charlene Boggs, who had gone to church with Sadie's grandmother and who looked up like she'd smelled something.

"Sadie."

"I need my incident report, and I need to know about my truck."

Charlene typed. The printer coughed. She slid two pages across the laminate with two fingers, like the paper was wet.

The report was a page and a half. Sadie read it standing there.

It said the stop was made at 5:44 a.m. - eight minutes before the clock on her dash had read 5:52 when the deputy put his light through her window. It said the subject consented to a search of the vehicle. It said the contraband was observed in plain view on the floorboard at the base of the driver's seat.

She had not consented. She had stepped out when told. And the bag had come up out of his hand, not off any floorboard she had ever seen.

"Where's my truck?"

"Ledbetter's. Forty-five a day, starting Tuesday." Charlene's eyes went past her, to the wall behind. "You'll want to get it out of there before it climbs."

"Who's got my property? My badge, my watch -"

"That comes through the property room. Deputy Vance handles his own bookings."

"Then I want to see Deputy Vance."

Charlene's mouth did something small. "He's off today. Back Monday."

Sadie folded the report and put it in her jacket pocket, in the pocket that didn't zip right.

On the wall behind the counter there was a glass case with framed citations in it. Deputy of the Year, Bramlett County, three years running. There was a photograph of Royce Vance shaking hands with Sheriff Dale Kettering at some banquet, both of them in dress uniforms, both of them laughing at something outside the frame.

She had read the numbers in the Ledger's year-end piece last spring, the way everybody in the county had. Sixty-three arrests on that stretch of Fannin Road in four years. Every one of them had stuck.

Outside, the rain had stopped and the square smelled like wet brick. Sadie sat in Deb's car with the report open on her lap and did the arithmetic she had been avoiding for three days: forty-five dollars a day, and the truck was the last thing of her grandfather's she owned, and if she lost it she would have to explain that to Tommy too.

She closed her eyes and went back to 5:52 in the morning, the way she had a hundred times since Tuesday, hunting for the one detail that would make a judge believe her.

Fog. Her coffee cup. His flashlight. The sound of his boots on the wet road, going away from her truck, and then coming back.

And behind her, in the mirror, that maroon rig with its hazards on, sitting there the whole time, close enough that its driver had heard every word the deputy said.

Somebody had heard it. Somebody had watched it happen.

Sadie put the car in gear.