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"Habit."

"You looked pretty smooth. Cabrini projects, you were telling me the other night. War zone. Brung a present. You want a drink?"

"Sure."

Ribbon poured John Begg scotch into squooshy plastic hotel cups. They tapped them together and sipped. Ribbon was in uniform and when Mahoney glanced at the top of the sheriffs head Ribbon took off his Smokey hat and dropped it down on the dresser.

"You're not getting tired of our little town, are you?"

"Tired?" Mahoney grunted. "It's heaven on earth." He slipped off his jacket. He hung it up and poured more scotch.

Ribbon's eyes slipped to the large dark gray automatic pistol riding high on Mahoney's right hip.

"Steve, I happened to have a talk with Deputy Ebbans, Jim Slocum and some of the other boys on the case today. I sounded them out about how the investigation's going." Mahoney's eyes tunneled into Ribbon's, which danced a little, looked briefly back then danced away again. This was fun. It was the way Mahoney used to look at perps and he missed doing it. "There're a couple of things I've got to talk to you about."

Ribbon responded exactly the same way the perps had – fiercely studying the scenery behind Mahoney as if memorizing the wall or window or front door.

"But first off. Good news. I just talked to Mr. Gebben."

"Did you now?"

"And you know that reward I was talking about?"

"Reward?" Ribbon frowned. Then he nodded. "Right, yeah, I recall you mentioning that."

"Well, he's authorized me to release some of it now."

"We haven't caught anybody yet, Charlie." Ribbon snorted a laugh.

"Well, I've told him you're doing a good job and he wants to show his support."

"That's real kind of him, Charlie."

"He's a generous man. But I'm afraid we've got to talk about something. Kind of an unpleasant situation."

"Unpleasant."

Ribbon licked the rim of his cup and Mahoney let him fret for a delectable minute before he said, "Again, I don't want to be imposing myself. You're the boss here, Steve."

"I value your opinion. You're surely more of an expert than any of us." Ribbon seemed at sea and took refuge in the scotch. He drank long and busied himself with pouring another glass.

"I hate to say anything."

"Naw, go ahead, Charlie."

"Well, it's about this Bill Corde."

Corde pulled into the Town Hall driveway and saw three deputies standing in front of a new Nissan Pathfinder 4X4. It was a beauty. Corde admired it. He saw nothing wrong with buying foreign as long as the quality was better than American. He had a little problem paying foreign, having testdriven a Pathfinder himself; he knew he was looking at over twenty thousand dollars worth of transport.

Corde turned his attention away from the truck and back to the lardy figure of Dodd Humphries he was helping out of the squad car and through the parking lot. As he passed the truck Corde said to the men, "Who's the proud father?"

"Steve bought her."

Corde laughed in genuine surprise. "Steve Ribbon?"

"Surely did. Walked right into the dealership and drove out this morning."

"Hell you say. He was gonna drive that Dodge till it dropped." Corde looked at the shimmering chrome and metallic-flecked burgundy paint and he said to Lance Miller, "He's gone and set a bad precedent. Now everybody's gonna want their trucks with all cylinders running."

They entered the Sheriffs Department wing. Half the complement was out inspecting the sheriffs new wheels. Jim Slocum was looking at a handful of letters. Corde assumed they were more of the worthless confessions and tip letters that accompany any publicized investigation.

"Dodd, you can't keep doing this," Corde said to his prisoner.

"Doing what?" the man asked drowsily.

The man's Toyota pickup had sheared a leg off the Purina feed billboard on 116 and dropped a painted sixty-foot Hereford on her black-and-white rump. Miller took him into the lockup in the back of the office. When he returned Corde looked up from the arrest report. "Two point four. He's more than legally drunk. I do believe he's legally dead."

Miller said, "Well, he's legally barfing and he's got bits of windshield falling out of his skivvies. It's all over the floor."

Corde said, "Give him some paper towels and make him clean it up. Nobody should be drinking like that on a weekday morning."

"He'll lose his license this time," Miller said.

"Hardly matters," Corde answered. "That was his last truck."

Steve Ribbon appeared in the doorway and looked at Corde. "Talk to you for a minute, Bill."

Corde followed him into his office and the sheriff shut the door. Ribbon sat down and expanded his cheeks like a blowfish's body and started to bounce a Ticonderoga number two off the drum of his skin. Corde decided it might be a long conversation and sat down in the chair opposite the sheriffs desk.

"Bill…" The pencil stopped being a drumstick and became a Flash Gordon rocket crash-landing on the desk. "Damn this bureaucracy, Bill."

Corde waited.

"County and state and everybody."

"Okay, what's up, Steve?"

"I got a call from Ellison."

"Uh-huh."

"Bill, this is a damn difficult thing to say to you."

Corde laughed without humor. "Then spit it out fast."

Ribbon said, "The county's taking over the Gebben and Rossiter cases."

It took several seconds for the fire to burn across Corde's cheek. "The county."

"T.T.'s going to be heading her up."

"Well, Steve, legally, I suppose, the county can take over any murder investigation it wants to. But the point is it's never -"

"Bill."

"The point is it's never happened before. All right. I'm a little angry. That's what you're hearing. I don't think we've done anything to make Ellison feel this way."

"It was the situation at the dorm."

"What situation?"

Ribbon surveyed the rocket pencil's crash site. "They think you burned her letters and her diary, Bill."

Corde said nothing.

"They're thinking it was curious you flew to St Louis so fast after the killing. When you didn't find anything there you went to her dorm room and took them and burned it all up. Don't look that way, Bill. They think you were trying to cover up something between you and her. There'll be an inquest next month and you're off the case till it's over."

4

Wynton Kresge's great-great-great-grandfather, whose name was Charles Monroe, had been a slave, one of two, on a small farm near Fort Henry, Tennessee. The story goes that when the Emancipation Proclamation took effect on New Year's Day in 1863 Monroe went to his master and said, "I am sorry to tell you this, Mr. Walker, but there is a new law that says you can't own slaves anymore, including us."

Walker said, They did that in Nashville?

Monroe answered, "No, sir, they did that in the capital, that is to say, Washington, B.C."

"Blazes," Walker said, and added that he'd have to look into it. Because both he and his wife were illiterate they had to ask someone to tell them more about this law. Their charming innocence was demonstrated by their choice of Abigail, the Walkers' second slave, to confirm the news. She did so by reading from an outspoken abolitionist penny sheet, which printed the text of the Proclamation while avoiding an inconvenient discussion of Lincoln's jurisdiction to free slaves located in the Confederacy.

"Damnation, he's right," Walker said. Then he wished Monroe luck and said by any chance you be interested in staying on for pay and Monroe said he'd be happy to and they negotiated a wage and room and board and Monroe kept on working on the Walker farm until he married Abigail. The Walkers gave them their wedding and Monroe named his first son Walker.