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that he just wanted to welcome me back and see how I was doing.
    I grabbed a cup of coffee from the break room and headed for the administrative offices, which non-administrative employees, mostly the cops, refer to as the West Wing or the Crystal Palace. When I went into the small area adjacent to the sheriff’s office, I spoke briefly with his secretary, Sharon, who told me to go right in.
    I smiled immediately when I entered his office. Sheriff Stephens was laid back in his chair, feet up on his desk, laughing heartily to whomever he was talking to on the phone. Our department had the best sheriff in Ohio, which to my mind was a fact, not an opinion. He had the respect of every subordinate, city official, and John Q. Citizen from there to Cincinnati. During contract negotiations with the Fraternal Order of Police—our union—the sheriff usually told the deputies to ask for a higher pay raise than they requested to begin with. He’ll even throw in extra perks we didn’t ask for. The union ranked our contract as the top contract for sheriff’s departments in the state. Sheriff Stephens remembers the little people, and that is important.
    He waved his hand at me, motioning for me to sit down, which of course I did. He told whomever he was talking to that, he had to go and promptly hung up the phone.
    “Oh Cecelia!” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his desk and his chin on his upturned palms, shaking his head, his smile fading. “You look better, but still terrible. I really would like to get my hands on that asshole.” He looked me straight in the eye and asked, “How are you feeling?”
    “I’m okay, I look worse than I feel, trust me. Thanks for asking.”
    The sheriff sat back up straight, still holding my gaze, and said, “I personally called the county prosecutor’s office to persuade them to stick that dickhead with the attempted murder charge, and, apparently, my persuasive efforts did the trick. He’s going to spend a lot of time every day for the rest of his life wishing that he hadn’t attacked you. Count on it.”
    The remainder of our visit was mostly small talk. After about ten minutes, I thanked Sheriff Stephens again and left.
    I decided to be positive and take on the mound of papers on my desk one at a time. It was two hours later when I got to the statement Coop had left for me. As I read it, I agreed with Coop about it being ridiculous. The guy, Matthew C. Hensley, claimed that Samantha Johnston, or Lizzie, was dead. He gave some trumped-up story about how Lizzie got involved with a guy—whose name, of course, he didn’t know—who was deeply involved in a high-tech drug operation being run by a sheriff in West Virginia. Naturally, he didn’t know the name of the county, but he went on to say, he’d “heard” that Lizzie had suffered a horrible death. Matt Hensley ended his statement admitting that all the information he’d just given had come to him third or fourth hand, and that he couldn’t remember who’d told him. Imagine that. I just shook my head and agreed that it was a ridiculous story.
    I put the statement aside and decided that after I’d finished going through all my papers, I would head out to the street and get a hold of some of my snitches in Roseland and the North End. If there was anyone who could find out what was going on with this girl, they could. I didn’t want to screw around with this case very long, but Kincaid wouldn’t give me anything else until it was closed. I highly doubted that Lizzie Johnston was dead, but I had to find the little bitch regardless. I had already decided that I wouldn’t contact Bobby Delphy unless I absolutely had to.
    My first stop after I left the office was to get supplies. ‘Supplies’ in this context means payment for my snitches: booze, cigarettes, money, and an occasional porn magazine. It’s not exactly ethical, but it gets the snitches motivated and the job done. With my supplies in the trunk, I headed to