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hand, always in ink with an Easterbrook steel pen. He had a son in Tucson and one in New York, and he wrote to them frequently. His wife dead, the sons were the only family he had left and corresponding was the only way he could stay in contact with them.
        Unfortunately, they weren’t so good about writing back. One of the sons had gone and had a baby, Dodds’s first grandson, but before Dodds knew anything about the birth let alone the pregnancy, the kid, named Clarence, was born and already walking around his home in New York, where his father worked as an accountant. Dodds lived in a sleeping room two short blocks from the sheriff’s office. He’d moved here after the missus died, selling the white gabled house they’d lived in on the edge of town, and making himself available to whatever kind of trouble arose.
        Many nights you could see Dodds running down the middle of the street still pulling his suspenders up. The law-the jail, more exactly-was Dodds’s life. He was sixty-one and would soon enough retire, and he meant to store up as many war stories as possible. He had some good ones. A drunken Indian, defiant beyond imagining because Dodds had arrested his brother, snuck into the office one night, jimmied up the rolltop desk and took a crap right in it. Then he’d locked the desk back up and waited for Dodds to come in and learn what had happened.
        Another time Dodds had swum out against a hard current on a rainy day and rescued a two-month-old lamb that had fallen into the river. And then there was the Windsor woman, a genuine redheaded beauty with a touring opera company, a woman who also managed to steal a goodly number of diamonds and jewels and rubies from the local gentry who’d given her a fancy party. Oh, yes, he had some good tales, and he loved to tell them, too, over a bucket of beer on cool nights inside screened-in porches. It was too much trouble to find another woman and, anyway, he couldn’t ever imagine loving anybody else the way he had Eva; so he said to hell with it and indulged himself in those pleasures that can only be enjoyed by solitary people. Such as being a fussbudget, which he most certainly was. It was said among the town’s lawyers that you might not piss off Sheriff David Dodds by breaking into his room in the middle of the night but you’d piss him off for sure if you wore muddy boots while doing it.
        Now Dodds sat at his desk, rolling his Easterbrook pen between his fingers the way he would a fine cigar, thinking about the former Pinkerton man he’d run in last fall for being drunk and disorderly. O’Malley, the man’s name had been. For the first week O’Malley had been there, Dodds hadn’t been able to figure out what the man was doing in Myles. The check he’d run indicated that O’Malley had been let go from the Pinkertons. When that happened, it usually meant that the man had been found morally corrupt in some way; Alan Pinkerton was a stickler. So what was O’Malley doing there? During the long and noisy night that O’Malley had spent in one of the cells in back, he’d given Dodds at least some notion of why he’d come to Myles. A man had hired him to find out who had killed his daughter. Dodds had thought immediately of the killing in Council Bluffs, so it was not difficult to intuit from that that O’Malley was looking for those bank robbers people had been seeking so long.
        During O’Malley’s last three days in Myles, Dodds had followed him everywhere. He never learned exactly who O’Malley had decided on but, given the places he stopped at, O’Malley seemed to be giving most of his attention to three men-Griff, Kittredge, and Carlyle. Then O’Malley was gone.
        Since then, Dodds had kept close watch on the three men, noting that while Griff and Kittredge saw each other occasionally, they stayed clear of Carlyle. The three men used to be close friends. He wondered what had gone wrong between