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a calmer, gentler era: a city hall built of stone, a life-size verdigris statue of Saint Stephen, the town’s namesake. And, yes, there was a muzzle-loading Civil War cannon. The pyramid of cannon balls beside the cannon recalled one of Bernhardt’s earliest frustrations. His grandfather had once rented a house in Bucks County for the summer. On their first trip to the village for groceries, his mother had taken him to the town square. Transfixed, he’d stared at the cannon, which had symbolized, perhaps, his first realization that, yes, might made right, like it or not. He’d turned to the cannon balls stacked beside the cannon, and tried to dislodge the topmost ball, unsuccessfully. He’d never known why the moment of sharp disillusionment had remained in his memory, but he suspected it had to do with an early loss of innocence. His mother had—
    He heard an intercom buzzer. Expectantly, he turned, watching the sour-mouthed lady officer lift her phone, listen, nod, say something cryptic and replace the phone in its cradle. As she frowned at him, Bernhardt realized that, without the generous application of black eyebrow pencil, her eyebrows would not exist. Or, if they did indeed exist in their natural state, they would have softened the face, doubtless an undesirable option.
    She gestured to the frosted glass door marked SHERIFF FOWLER, and nodded. Bernhardt’s patience had been rewarded. Plainly, his pleasure caused the lady officer mild consternation.
    Dressed in a tan uniform, Sheriff Fowler sat behind a large steel desk that was strewn with piles of papers, each pile secured by a paperweight. Grossly overweight, Fowler’s body bulged on either side of his swivel chair’s armrests. As Bernhardt introduced himself he stepped forward, signifying that he sought to shake hands. Ignoring the gesture, Fowler grunted once, wetly, and gestured to a chair placed beside his desk. As Bernhardt took his seat he played the secret game he always played when he met a fat man: mentally stripping away the fat from the face and neck to divine the true nature of the face beneath. The younger Fowler, he decided—the much younger Fowler—must have had a choirboy’s face. His lips were pursed in a cupid’s bow, his china-blue eyes were round and guileless, his nose was cherubic. Even in this overweight incarnation, the flesh that covered the fat was smooth and clear and pink. Even Fowler’s bald pate was a glowing pink, fringed with finely spun brown hair.
    Bernhardt opened his wallet to show his license, then took Janice Hale’s letter from an inside pocket. He unfolded the letter, leaned forward, placed it on the desk. Before he turned his attention to the letter, Fowler let a long moment of silence pass as he stared at Bernhardt, playing the eye contact game. Finally, inscrutably, Fowler grunted again, then took a pair of heavy black-rimmed reading glasses from his center drawer. As he read the letter, his lips moved. Finally finished, he pushed the letter across the desk to Bernhardt. After another round of hard eye contact, another draw, Fowler shrugged his large, pudgy shoulders. “I guess,” he said, “that we can start by you asking me questions. I’ll tell you what I can. What I can’t answer, I won’t.” His voice was thick, clogged with phlegm. Sunk deep in the porcine face, his eyes were small and shrewd. Plainly, Fowler was nobody’s fool.
    A disarming aw-shucks approach, Bernhardt decided, was the only tactic that could possibly succeed. Playing the big-city private detective role would never work, not with the taciturn, Buddha-size despot across the desk, bulging in his chair. Although sparsely populated, Benedict County included dozens of rural retreats owned by the idle rich. Saint Stephen, population six thousand, was Benedict County’s only town of any consequence. Earlier in the day Bernhardt had called Lieutenant Peter Friedman, cocommander of San Francisco’s homicide detail, Bernhardt’s