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proof was absent but he had also taken various FBI training seminars and courses in law and visual investigation analysis. He had just returned from Sacramento and a weeklong session at the California Department of Justice.
    The certificates he had proudly tacked up were simple vouchers of completion; Corde was a bad student. He collected words that described himself. He was
persistent
, he was
industrious
, he had
sticktoitiveness
. ButBill Corde was born C-plus material and that didn’t change whether the subject was one he hated (English, social studies) or loved (criminal psychology or link-analysis-charting techniques). He wrote slowly and produced leaden meat-and-potato reports, and although as detective his official hours were pretty much eight to six he would often stay late into the night muscling through an article in
Forensics Today
or the
Journal of Criminal Justice
, or comparing the profiles of suspects in his cases with those in the NASPD’s
Felony Warrants Outstanding Bulletin
.
    Some people in town—that is to say, the people who worked for him—thought Corde took his job too seriously, New Lebanon being a place where the State Penal Code’s thousand-dollar threshold between petty and grand larceny was not often crossed, and four of last year’s six deaths by gunshot were from failing to open a bolt or breach when climbing over a fallen tree. On the other hand Corde’s arrest-per-felony rate was a pleasure to behold—ninety-four percent—and his conviction-to-arrest ratio was 8.7:10. Corde kept these statistics in a thirdhand IBM XT computer, the department’s major concession to technology.
    He now finished reviewing the coroner’s preliminary report on Jennie Gebben and stood up from his desk. He left the sheriff’s office and strode across the hall to the lunchroom. As he walked a quarter materialized in his hand and he rolled it over the back of one finger to the next and so on, around and around, smooth as a pool-hall hustler. His father had taught him this trick. Corde Senior made the boy practice it with his hand extended over an old well on the back of the family property. If he dropped a coin,
plop
, that was that. And his father had made him use his own two bits. Corde had seen a lot on TV recently about men’s relations with their fathers and he thought there was something significant about the way his father had taught him this skill. He had learned a few other things from his old man: His posture. A loathing of second mortgages. An early love of huntingand fishing and a more recent fear of the mind’s wasting before the body. That was about all.
    Corde was real good at the coin trick.
    He entered the lunchroom, which was the only meeting place in the town building large enough to hold five brawny men sitting—aside from the main meeting room, which was currently occupied by the New Lebanon Sesquicentennial Celebration Committee.
    He nodded to the men around the chipped fiber-board table: Jim Slocum, T.T. Ebbans—the lean, ex-Marine felony investigator from the Harrison County Sheriff’s Department—and New Lebanon Deputy Lance Miller. At the far end of the table, surrounded by two empty chairs, was Wynton Kresge. Corde thought,
Antsy as a tethered retriever on the first day of season
.
    He dropped the quarter into his pants pocket and stood in front of a row of vending machines. He was about to speak when Steve Ribbon walked in. Corde nodded to him and leaned back against the Coke machine.
    “Howdy, Bill. Just want to say a few words to the troops about this case, you don’t mind.” The sheriff’s ruddy face looked out over the men as if he were addressing a crowd of a thousand. Ribbon scrutinized Wynton Kresge who represented two oddities in this office—he was black and he wore a suit. Kresge took the look for a moment, realized he was being asked a question then said, “I’m from the college.”
    “Oh. Well.” Ribbon’s voice enlarged to encompass everyone. “I just