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pile—working on her second rain forest—then started at the top and began studying, instead of just swiftly scanning.
    Placida was a Gulf Coast town of less than a thousand souls. Maybe fifty miles south of Sarasota and just north of Ft. Myers, the hamlet lay on a jut of land out into Charlotte Harbor. Local law was a town marshal and three part-timers. For any real trouble, the Charlotte County sheriff handled it.
    The median age of the citizenry was just a hiccup short of sixty. The average income was twenty-five thousand dollars above the national average because 71.2 percent of the population had white-collar jobs. Placida was a classic bedroom community—or anyway it was until the night town marshal Ray Ferguson came home to find his family murdered near their kitchen.
    The murders took place back in September, not long after Crime Seen! first aired. When Carmen went to start an electronic file on the case, she noticed one already existed. She opened it and read it quickly: in early October, segment host Shayla Ross had done a cursory study of the case, then abandoned it as a dead end.
    The dirtiest little secret about Crime Seen! was the mandate to choose crimes that had enough threads for their team to follow. Cold cases were avoided, as were crimes where no suspects were on the horizon. TV viewers wanted closure, and soon.
    As Carmen pored over material from the case, she could not shake the feeling that some important detail had been overlooked. Something small and insignificant to Shayla and the investigators, but enough to set off a tiny if mournful alarm in the back of Carmen’s mind, a foghorn on a faraway shore.
    She stopped, rubbed her eyes, shook her head, then rose, stretched, and walked to the break room for a soda—maybe a little distance would shake something loose. She fished change out of her pocket, got a Diet Coke from the vending machine, and tapped lacquered nails against the lid as she mentally riffled through thousands of bits of information she’d read about the Ferguson murders.
    At the end of his shift, Ray Ferguson had come home in a well-tended Placida neighborhood. Though he didn’t make nearly as much money as the other members of the community, his real-estate agent wife, Stella, did. The Fergusons had two kids, a boy, Jeff, eleven, and a girl, Jessica, fourteen.
    Like Harrow’s wife and son, mother and children had been shot in the chest. Unlike Harrow’s family, each was only shot once. Also unlike her boss’s case, these victims were shot in one room, apparently executed in turn—Harrow’s wife and son with a .357, the Fergusons with a nine millimeter (though in the latter case the efficient assassin had gathered up his shell casings).
    A gruesome touch set the Ferguson killings apart, however—the fourth finger of Stella Ferguson’s left hand had been cut off, post-mortem. Forensics indicated a gardening tool had been used.
    As at the Harrow home, no fingerprints were found, the only piece of evidence (if that) turning up on the Fergusons’ driveway: a leaf from a corn plant. As far as the investigators were concerned, that leaf might have come from anywhere. But Illinois farm kid Carmen discerned a clue.
    Some quick work on the Internet garnered Carmen more—seemed Florida produced more corn than she’d have thought, nearly one hundred thousand acres in all. But compared to the twelve million acres harvested in Harrow’s home state, that wasn’t much….
    And a particular photo at the Placida News website sealed her suspicions—it showed a transparent plastic evidence bag with that single corn plant leaf inside.
    Rural kid Carmen recognized the difference between a sweet corn plant and a field corn plant. Charlotte County, Florida, home to Placida, was on the northern edge of the highest-producing area for sweet corn in Florida. Virtually no field corn was grown in the northern half of the state. The state’s small field corn crop, produced in the southern end,