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general?”
    “Southern religion, honey child, and don’t you forget it, unless you want a reprise of that war in your office. So, I take it tonight is a no?”
    “You take it right, sorry. How did you meet Blake…what’s-his-name?”
    “Fisher. He had the misfortune of having his organist murdered in his church. He found it a great inconvenience.”
    “Murder? Who?”
    “A guy named Waldo Templeton.”
    “Never heard of him.”
    “Neither has anyone else, it seems. Just another anonymous out-of-towner. You know how we feel about them.”
    “Well, there’s your edge, Sheriff, be happy. Can you break for a bite at, say, seven?”
    “Yes, where?”
    “My kitchen, for starters. Then we’ll just have to see.”
    Ike hung up and shuffled through a stack of papers on his desk. He was famous for the amount of paper he managed to accumulate on his desk and still know where everything was. He found the duty roster and looked around the outer office through the glass windows. He couldn’t see Billy Sutherlin anywhere. He looked at the rack holding the radios and saw they were all in place except for the patrol teams, so Billy either had not come in or had gone missing somewhere. He stood up and stepped into the hallway looking up and down its length. No Billy. He tapped on Sam’s door. His tapping resonated through the hollow core. Tap, tap. Thump, thump. He walked in.
    Billy sprawled in the corner reading a magazine. Sam leaned forward in her ergonometric chair studying a flat screen monitor. Her fingers flitted sporadically across the keyboard as she searched through files for something. She stopped and waited. A message appeared on the screen and she rattled the keys some more.
    “I’m almost afraid to ask, Sam, but—”
    “Installing new software, Boss. I have a beta version of a fingerprint matching system. With it we can access any authorized files practically anywhere. I also have the authorizations we need. Now we don’t have to wait for the State’s system, the armed services, or the FBI to get around to doing our checking for us. We can do it here.”
    “That’s good. Um, Sam?”
    “Yes, sir?”
    “How much did that system cost?” Ike had committed himself to the move into the latest technology, but he knew it as an area about which he knew little or nothing and each month, when the bills rolled in, he wondered if he hadn’t made a mistake. His budget had started to look like the federal government’s idea of spending—a big deficit.
    “It’s a freebie, Ike. I know a guy who wrote the thing and he wanted a representative sample of law enforcement agencies to test it. I persuaded him we represented poor and rural—a twofer. So we got the goods.”
    Ike started to breathe a sigh of relief and then stopped. “After the test? What will it cost then?”
    “I said we were a twofer. Poor gets us a free system but—”
    “Do I want to hear the but?”
    “We have to really evaluate the system, not just run it. It’s no biggie Ike, I can do this. I wrote a program like this in college and I can not only test it but I can write the patches if necessary. They’re going to love us.”
    “Okay, good…Billy, why are you in here reading a magazine instead of outside watching the office?”
    “Well, Ike, it’s like this. Sam here said she’d teach me how to work that apparatus so I came in for a lesson, but you can see she’s just lost in cyberspace there so I grabbed this magazine. It’s about computers and all.”
    “You know Billy, I believe this may be the first time I’ve seen you read a magazine that didn’t have a centerfold. I guess I should thank Deputy Ryder for that.”
    “He only came in here because it’s cool,” Sam said and studied another directive on the screen.
    “Outside, Billy, time to go to work.”
    The two men left Sam with her programs, winking red and green LEDs, and manuals.

Chapter Eight
    It seemed unfitting, somehow, that a man should leave this earth with