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crime scene. They found him working and charged him.”
    â€œDid he say where he’d been earlier?”
    â€œHe’s been pretty vague so far, but he hasn’t denied anything. My turn now. How did things go on your end?”
    I gave him a replay of my visit to the carnival. “Warren Sonders is called Pop by everyone out there, claims they’re like a family. Sonders is definitely in Pepper’s corner. I sensed a little ambivalence in some of the others, but it’s more like they don’t want to believe it happened. They’re pretty subdued. They seem like a close-knit bunch, and now trouble has invaded their world.”
    â€œCourtney pulled together some basic background from what I had and what the police have got.” He slid a neatly typed double-spaced sheet across the glossy table. “For you.”
    When I reached the law library door, Meecham said, “By the way, did I mention who’s prosecuting?”
    He didn’t have to; his forced grin told me.
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    Down the hall in my own modest shop I checked the morning’s mail and then phone messages. I’d been nominated for a national leadership award; all I needed to do was call an 800 number with my credit card to talk about the press release. I decided to hold out for the Nobel. I scanned the notes Meecham had prepared. Troy Samuel Pepper, born Paterson, New Jersey, grew up in Nutley, New Jersey, as a ward of the state and sometime foster child. He didn’t finish high school and joined the service at eighteen. Stayed in six years, discharged nine years ago, worked for a power company—which is where he got the injury that had mangled his left hand. He worked in a warehouse, made foreman. He left that a year ago, did odd jobs for several months, and started with the carnival as a roustabout last April.

    It would give me a few places to stick a pry bar. With that and the file Sonders had loaned me, maybe I could conjure something that Fred could use. I hadn’t missed his oblique mention of the prosecutor. On the job, I’d worked with Gus Deemys. With Ed St. Onge and Roland Cote, too, but at least with them the feelings had ranged from friendship to tolerance. I’d known Deemys as a well-dressed and aggressive little rooster who’d seemed to get off on needling people, friend and foe alike, but it was a mean-spirited needling, never the bonding kind. He’d probably lost his hero when Robert Blake went up on murder charges. Deemys had always been ambitious; I’d give him that. For years he’d attended night school to earn a law degree. Now he was an assistant county DA, and with an audience other than corpses to parade his five-foot-four-inch, well-draped form in front of, he’d proven a winner. His conviction rate was one of the best in the state.
    Ambitious wasn’t a word that leapt to mind when Roland Cote’s name came up. Brilliant wasn’t, either. Dogged worked. Unimaginative (as I’d told Pop Sonders). Loyal. And now large. I’d glimpsed him last night when the detectives showed up, and I almost hadn’t recognized him. His somber, vaguely handsome bachelor’s face was intact, but free donuts and the big meals at his mother’s house, where he still lived at forty-five, had undone him. He was heavy now in a way that no tricks of clothing could disguise. At some point he must have shown promise of some thing to be punched up to detective in the first place. In a typical career arc, he would’ve made sergeant or lieutenant by now, or been busted back to patrol duty for having screwed up somehow—but he hadn’t gone either way, and that was telling. As a cop you got pigeonholed, and if you accepted it and didn’t fight it, you got to stay. As with mediocre schoolteachers (or doctors or judges, for that matter), your peers didn’t have the stomach to kick you out, so they let you dangle at the point of least hassle.