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statement to the cause, but since you’ve made such a fuss about me going home tonight, I suppose I don’t have much choice.”
    Oh, please. If I hadn’t been busy rubbing the throb from my knee and trying not to appear scraped from the ceiling, I’d have rolled my eyes at her lame attempt to pawn off her mind-change on me. As it was, all I could manage was a disgruntled “fine.”
    “Leroy’s going to bring the prints out to the house in the morning for me to look over. We’re also going to take some more shots there. We’ve decided to go for one of those heart-wrenching photo documentary things. That’ll get some attention.”
    We could all bet on that. And I wanted no part of it. “Sounds perfect.”

Chapter
Three
    Morning dawned entirely too early. Nevertheless I was up watching Lucille ham it up for the camera. Photographer Leroy stood about ten yards away, on the far side of the house, getting a shot that showed the would-be parkland behind Lucille’s house. He had light meters and filters and lenses and, strange as it was to say, he looked like a pro.
    Mother Dearest’s behavior, on the other hand, was leaning more toward goofy. She had cleverly, or so she thought, chained herself to the front porch post. I had no intentions of pointing out that no one was trying to drag her off of said porch or park campers on it, although it might have added a touch of real emotion to the pictures as she tried to get herself unchained to whack me for saying so.
    I glanced at my watch. “Better finish up. Jerry should be here any minute.”
    “Yeah,” Leroy agreed, a little more readily than expected. “He sure asked a lot of questions when he called back last night. I didn’t tell him about any of this though. I’m not on the clock anyway right now.”
    Oh, shit, I’d forgotten to tell him to call. “I’m sorry, Leroy. He told me to tell you to call and I forgot.” I had no good excuse, except for my mother and the complete ridiculousness of the bizarre situation I found myself in that seemed to suck out all my brain cells. “I’ll tell him it was my fault when he gets here.”
    “It’s okay. I think he kind of understood.”
    Why didn’t that make me feel better?
    “I need to get going anyway because I’ve got to get these on the computer to see if they need any work before I print. Dad’s working the desk for me until I get back.” He glanced at Lucille, but she turned up her nose, apparently still holding a grudge against Fritz for something. “He’d sure like it if you gave him a call, Miz Jackson. He’s been real down in the mouth since you two had words.”
    Lucille lifted her chin even higher and sniffed haughtily. “If you all are through with me, I believe I’ll go make a fresh pot of coffee for Jerry Don.”
    After she’d gone inside, I walked over to where Leroy stood, repacking his camera case. “Seriously, Leroy, I hate to butt in, but are you sure you should be doing this? Doesn’t this sort of qualify as one of those pesky conflict of interest issues that a deputy sheriff probably ought to avoid?” At all costs.
    “Huh?”
    “Taking these kinds of pictures, of someone charged with a crime. Since you’re the one who kind of charged her with the crime, it could be a bit of a conflict.”
    “Nah, I’ve done it before. The gallery people think it’s kind of neat that I’m in law enforcement and take photos inside the jail. Think it gives me insight into the human condition. I don’t usually have people in the pictures, but they say you can still feel them there. They really like that.”
    Wow. Big words in a big sentence. Scary. And how had it come to this anyway, chatting amicably with Leroy Harper? It was unnatural and unsettling, to say the least. Almost made me wish for the good old days when he breathed fire and looked ready to behead me. That, I understood. I didn’t know what to make of this version of Leroy that sounded halfway coherent at times, and it made me