Chapter 8

Deputy Royce Vance was laughing when she came through the door.

He had his back half to the counter and his coffee up near his mouth, and he was saying something to Charlene Boggs about a man who'd backed a tractor into a fence post, and Charlene was laughing too, and the fluorescent light over the counter made everything look like a photograph taken with the flash on.

Sadie walked up and put her phone on the laminate and turned the screen toward him.

"I want you to watch something."

He looked at her the way a man looks at a dog that has wandered into a store. "Sadie Quinn."

"Watch his left hand," she said, and pressed play.

The screen flared, grainy and gray-blue. Her grandfather's windshield. Fog in the fields. The blue lights in the mirror.

Vance's laugh stopped in the middle of itself.

On the screen, a man in a tan shirt walked away from the truck and stood with his back to the camera for four seconds. Then he turned. Then his left hand was closed. Then he leaned through the open door and his right hand came up holding a small clear bag pinched between two fingers, and the time stamp in the corner read 5:52 a.m.

Nobody in the lobby said anything.

Then Vance lunged across the counter for the phone.

He was fast for forty-seven. His right arm came over the laminate with his hand open, and Sadie saw it coming and didn't move, and she never had to, because Sheriff Dale Kettering's hand came down on his wrist and pinned it flat against the counter.

The coffee cup tipped and rolled.

"Royce," Kettering said. "Stand still."

He kept his hand on the wrist and pulled the phone across the counter with the other one, and he watched it again from the beginning. He watched it twice. The second time he turned the volume up, and everybody in the lobby heard a man's voice say, "Well, well. What do we have here?"

Kettering straightened. He looked at Vance. Then he looked at the glass front door, and at Tommy, and at Deb.

"Go home," he said. "All of you. I'll handle this internally."

Vance wrenched his arm free, stepped back, and straightened his shirt cuff. "Her brother made that on a laptop," he said. "That's a kid with a computer. That's not evidence."

Sadie didn't answer him.

She reached inside her canvas jacket, into the pocket that didn't zip right, and took out a folded piece of white paper, and opened it on the counter and turned it around.

It was the property photo from her own arrest entry on the county's public log. Three pages for a dollar from the clerk's window. The bag on a white paper towel under the evidence room light. Fourteen pale tablets.

And on the corner of the bag, folded over the seam, a strip of white tape with writing on it.

"Then explain this," Sadie said. "That's in your own record. Anybody in this county can buy it for a dollar."

Kettering leaned over and looked at it for a long time. Then he said, "Nadine. Bring me the property from Tuesday."

Nadine Cross was the evidence tech. She was sixty and had worked that room for nineteen years, and she looked at the sheriff, and then at Vance, and then she went through the door behind the counter without saying anything.

She came back in four minutes with a manila envelope and set it on the laminate and pulled on gloves before she opened it.

The bag came out on a paper towel. Fourteen pale tablets. A white tape strip folded over the corner seam.

Kettering read it out loud, slowly, like a man reading a prescription.

"E-eleven forty-seven. March fourteenth."

"That's not my case number," Sadie said. "My number's on the front of that envelope. This one's on the tape." She tapped the paper. "And look at the date."

The date on the tape was three years old.