“Well, you’re right about that, John. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Sutherland quite so riled. Look, I’m going to run down this credit card – like as not there’ll be some perfectly logical reason why it was there, somebody from out of town at the party, I expect – then I’ll do what I can to quiet him down. I don’t know if you were in there the other night, but even if you were, I think I understand why, and the hell with it as far as I’m concerned. So just forget this visit, okay? But listen, if you get the old man flustered again, he’s going to start making life difficult for me, and I can’t have that, and I’ll have to do something about it. Do you understand me?”

“Sure, Bo. Believe me, I don’t want to make life difficult for you.”

The sheriff left, and Howell went to the phone.

Scotty moved through the files with almost reckless speed. She knew she might miss what she was looking for at the rate she was going, but she also knew that, with events closing in on her, she might never have another chance. Still, after three quarters of an hour, she was only finished with one drawer and half finished with another. She was aided, though, by the neatness of the files. Nothing seemed mixed up or out of place. Finally, it was color that led her to what she wanted.

In a file marked “Miscellaneous,” full of one standard form used for domestic disturbances, peeping toms, and other minor concerns, she saw something green. Everything else in the file was white. She fished half a dozen sheets of loose ledger paper from the file and looked at her watch. Ten past two. She had been luckier with time than she could have dared wish for. The telephone rang.

“Sutherland County Sheriffs office.”

“It’s John. Sutherland found your credit card outside his office.”

“I know, you sonofabitch. Bo has already written to Neiman’s to find out all about it.”

“He was just here, asking questions. Just so our stories match, I told him we cooked a steak and got to bed early.”

“You told him I slept there? Thanks a lot.”

“He asked, but I told him it was none of his business. We had what you might call a very frank discussion about what’s under the lake, and I think maybe I’ve been on the wrong track.”

“Well, judging from what I’ve got in my hand, here, I’m not on the wrong track. There were some ledger pages stuck in a file where they shouldn’t be. That’s not like Bo.” She glanced quickly through them. “There are a lot of figures on them.”

“Well, you’d better get a copy of them quick. Bo’s already been gone from here a couple of minutes, and if he’s headed for the office, that means you’ve got very little time.”

“See ya.” She hung up the telephone and ran for the copying machine. It hadn’t been used yet that morning, and it took a couple of minutes to warm up. She drummed her fingers restlessly on the machine, waiting for the green light to go on. She had copied only two of the pages when the front door opened. She froze. The filing cabinet was still unlocked, the file was on Bo’s desk, and papers were in her hand that shouldn’t be.

“Thanks, sugar, how do I look?” Mike, the radio operator sauntered by, stroking his hair.

“Slick, Mike,” Scotty managed to croak. She kept making copies. “You’re gonna knock ‘em dead.”

“You know it, sugar,” Mike said, arranging himself in his chair and opening a Playboy.

Scotty grabbed the last copy and, as quickly as she could without seeming to hurry, walked back toward her desk. When she was around the corner and out of Mike’s sight, she ducked into Bo’s office, stuck the sheets back into the file, got it into the drawer, and locked the cabinet. She had been back at her desk, the copies safely in her purse, for five seconds when Bo walked in.

“How’d you like Sutherland’s party?” he asked, casually, as he strolled past her desk.

“Not bad. He was, really pretty nice.”

“Stay late?”

“No, I went back to John’s for a steak.”

“Stay long?”

She looked at him sideways. “None of your business.”

He laughed and went into his office.

In her mind, Scotty ran through what she had just done, just to be sure. She’d replaced the ledger sheets at exactly the place in the file where’d they’d come from; She’d put the file in exactly the same place in the drawer; and, this time, she’d made sure the lock was firmly engaged. Then she stopped in the middle of a sigh of relief. There was something wrong, something out of order, something she hadn’t done properly. The copying machine. In order to make copies, she placed the originals, one at a time, under a flap on top of the machine. The machine drew a sheet of blank paper from a stack on one side, and spat out a copy on the other. She had, she now realized, made the first five copies in the ordinary way, placing an original under the flap, pushing the button, then replacing the original with the next page. She had her own copies, now of all six pages. But, she knew in her bones, she had left the last original under the flap. It was still there.

Bo came out of his office, a letter in his hand, and headed for the copying machine.

“No!” Scotty practically shouted.

Bo stopped and turned. “Huh?”

It was hard to talk with her heart in her throat. “Uh, don’t use that just yet. The paper isn’t feeding properly, and I haven’t had a chance to get at it.”

“Well, I’ll take a look at it. I need this right away.”

Bo never liked to wait for anything, she knew that. She walked over and muscled between him and the machine. “Get out of the way, Bo,” she said, playfully. “You’ll just screw it up. You know you can’t fix anything.” She popped open the side of the machine and removed the stack of blank paper.

“It looks all right to me,” Bo said, impatiently.

“It would look all right to you if it were upside down.” She rapped the stack sharply against the side of the machine, squaring the corners. “Give me that,” she said, snatching the letter from his hands, “I’ll do it.”

“Jesus Christ, Scotty, you’re beginning to act like nobody else around here can work any of this stuff but you.”

“That’s exactly right,” she said. Scotty lifted the flap on the machine slightly and slid Bo’s copy underneath, at the same time, flicking the green ledger sheet already under the flap with her fingernail. It slid across the glass surface, under the back edge of the flap and down between the machine and the wall. She pressed the button, gave Bo his copy and original and went back to her desk, hoping against hope he had not seen what she had done.

“You know, Mike,” Bo said to the radio operator as he strolled back to his office, “I don’t know why we have all these service contracts with the office machine people when we’ve got our own mechanical genius right here.”

Scotty put her hands on her desk and pressed, so that no one could see them shaking. She had pulled that off all right, but now Bo’s files were missing a sheet, and it was stuck behind a machine that weighed a ton.