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chest. “I don’t guess DNA would really tell us much, especially in light of the info you guys already have. It’s…well…it’s hard to believe, but it’s hard to believe thatfriends you’ve known for decades are embezzlers or child molesters or wholesale alcoholics, and we see it happen again and again, don’t we? The deacon at your church arrested for a DUI, the Rotary Club president in a trailer park buying dope from some skank. Nothing should surprise us in this business.”
    Perry nodded. “Right, you never know. But this seems clear to me. And to Agent Hatcher.”
    “She got blown up,” Hatcher said curtly. “Fire and animals done the rest.”
    “How much does the DNA cost?” Joe asked. “If there’s no rush?”
    “For heaven’s sake, Joe,” Lisa scolded him. “Haven’t we wasted enough time and money on Lettie VanSandt already? You especially.”
    Perry raised his hands, fingers gaped, palms uncovered. “Okay, Joe, sure, if it’ll make you happy, we’ll send the remains for an analysis. Whatever. I suppose if we can’t make a visual ID, it’s technically called for. We’ll do it by the book.”
    “Appreciate it,” Joe told him.
    “I reckon you already know she left you everything and put you in charge of her affairs. You can ride out there with me first chance you have, and we’ll collect her hairbrush and toothbrush. That’s what they always request at the lab. I’ll pull her prints from her concealed weapon application, but from what we saw, there won’t be nothing they can do along those lines. I didn’t see anything left that looked like fingers.”
    Joe glanced at his wife, then at the sheriff. “I’m her executor, but how do you know that?”
    “We did a walk-through at her house,” Perry answered, unperturbed. “Found her dead and burned, so it follows we’d investigate. Her will was wrote on a sheet of yellow legal paper. It was on a bedroom table. Left you everything and put you in charge.” He smiled. “Quite a gift, huh? A pack of cur dogs and a bunch of starvin’ cats. All yours now, Joe.” The sheriff chuckled. “Plus her three or four acres and her run-down trailer. I don’t envy you trying to administer that mess.”
    “Man, the place is just lousy with animals,” Hatcher noted. He shook his head, amused. “I was expecting that Sarah McLachlan chick from the TV commercials to show up and start singing. That’s how bad it is.”
    “You must’ve found an old will,” Joe said, ignoring Hatcher. “We just did the paperwork here a couple weeks ago, and she left her estate to her son and the SPCA, not me.”
    “Well, this was all in her handwriting, and it…I took it with me, so you can have the original. Maybe it is old. I’ll leave that to you folks with the legal degrees to solve.”
    “Was it dated?” Joe asked.
    “Yeah,” the sheriff answered. “But I don’t recall the details. It was right recent, that much I remember.”
    Joe sawed his teeth across his bottom lip. He touched his temple with his index finger. “Odd.”
    “Why’s it odd, Joe?” Lisa pressed him, clearly irritated. “Lettie was crazy as a loon, okay? She changed her will and rewrote all of her nonsensical corporate bylaws and tinkered with all the other assorted rubbish you drafted for her
every week
, like she was J. Paul Getty or Melinda Gates. Her life was
entirely
about signing meaningless documents and filing her own spite suits and harassing bag boys who didn’t put her frozen hamburger and cans of white beans in the right sack. She was a legal hypochondriac. Jeez.”
    Hatcher grinned.
    “You’re probably right,” Joe calmly said, but he didn’t direct his answer to her or either of the men. His gaze was elsewhere, skipped everyone in the room. “But it is curious she’d suddenly do her own will when she loved to come in here and waste my time and thrived on the attention and the ceremony.”
    “So…I don’t understand,” Hatcher snapped. “What exactly