“Hey, Chief.” Jodie Metzger, my second-shift dispatcher, is sitting at the phone station, a magazine spread out on the desk in front of her.

“Hi.” I stop at her desk and glance down to see her quickly stash the nail polish in a drawer. “I like the blue.”

She grins sheepishly as she hands me a stack of messages.

My conversations with Hoch Yoder and the Seymours dog me as I walk to my office and unlock the door. While I have no concrete proof that any of them were involved in the murder of Dale Michaels, I can’t discount the connections.

I’ve barely made it to my desk when my cell phone vibrates. I glance down and see BCI LAB on the display and snatch it up quickly. “Burkholder.”

“Hi, Chief. This is Chris Coleman with the lab. I have some preliminary info for you.”

“Anything on the blood in the car?”

“We’re still processing the car, but we do know the type is O positive. There was quite a bit, actually, so he may have sustained the gunshot wound right before being put into the trunk or maybe even while he was in the trunk. DNA is going to take a few days. Sorry for the delay, but things are stacked up here.”

“Prints?”

“All over the place. We were able to match Michaels’s. We should have the rest tomorrow sometime.”

“What about the tire marks?”

“We picked up a successful tread. I scanned them into the computer, and we were able to match it to Michaels’s Toyota.”

I’d been hoping the tread would implicate an as-of-yet unidentified vehicle, and I try not to be disappointed. “Did you guys look at the wooden doll yet?”

“We did. There’s not much there. No prints we could pick up. Blood is the same type as the victim’s.”

I think about that a moment. “Is there any way to tell if the doll is old or new?”

“I can have one of the other lab guys take a look at the paint. Might be able to give you a ballpark.”

“That’d be great.”

“Back to the car,” she says. “We found yellow nylon fibers on the rear bumper.”

“From the rope?”

“We’ve still got to do the matching, but I’m betting they’re one and the same.”

“Any idea how the fibers got there?” But my imagination is already running with possibilities, none of them good.

“We inspected the rope and found that it had some recent damage, as if it had been abraded. A few of the nylon strands were sort of scraped off; some were broken. Could have been from the bumper or even the wooden beam in the barn.”

Disturbing images flood my mind. “As if someone tied one end of the rope around the victim’s neck, looped it around the beam, and tied the other end to the bumper of the vehicle and strung him up.”

“I’d say that’s a possible scenario.” She pauses. “But get this: Remember the tear in the victim’s jacket?”

“I do.”

“We found fibers from that jacket on the trunk latch.”

“So maybe he caught his jacket on the latch?” I ask.

“Jacket is canvas, which is a pretty sturdy fabric,” she tells me. “I’d say the jacket caught on that latch while he was being forcefully pulled from the trunk.”

“You mean with his own vehicle?”

“I can’t say for certain, of course, but that’s a possibility.”

I think about that a moment and try not to shudder. “Anything else?”

“Saved the best for last, Chief. We found an iPhone registered to Michaels.”

My interest surges. Michaels’s daughter had told us her father owned a cell phone. Glock and I did a cursory search of the vehicle, but once we discovered the blood in the trunk, I decided it would be best not to risk contaminating possible evidence, so we stopped and turned everything over to BCI.

“Where did you find it?” I ask.

“Trunk. Under the mat. Looks like while he was inside the trunk, he dropped it or was incapacitated and couldn’t get back to it.”

“Did you get any phone numbers off of it?” I ask.

Paper crackles on the other end. “I put all the names and numbers into a spreadsheet. You want me to e-mail it to you?”

“That’d be great.” I give her my e-mail address and disconnect. In the outer office, I hear Jodie talking to someone on the phone, laughing. She’s got her radio turned up too loud, but I don’t mind. My exhaustion from earlier is gone. I’m energized by the prospect of new information. I launch my e-mail software and a flurry of messages pours into my in-box, the last of which is from the BCI lab with a PDF attachment. I open the document. It’s a spreadsheet with names, phone numbers, dates, and a slew of unrelated numbers that are meaningful only to the technician who entered the data. I hit the Print key as I skim the document on my monitor.

There aren’t many calls, incoming or outgoing. Apparently, Dale Michaels wasn’t much of a talker. In the month leading up to his murder, he received thirty-two calls, most from his daughter, Belinda Harrington, and lasting a few minutes. I skim over several names and numbers I don’t recognize, then go to the second page. There are twenty-six outgoing calls, several to his daughter. Local businesses. A car dealership. The farm store. Some of the names I don’t recognize.

I go to the final calls Michaels made. One to Belinda Harrington on the morning of March 6. At 11 P.M. on March 7—which was probably the last day of his life—he made a call to The Raspberry Leaf, which is a local art gallery. A few minutes later, he made a call to Jerrold McCullough, whom I don’t know. Shortly thereafter, he made his final call to a name I do recognize. Artie “Blue” Branson is a well-known pastor of a local multidenominational church—and the last man in the county I’d have paired with Dale Michaels.

In his early fifties, Blue spends every Sunday preaching the gospel from his pulpit at the little frame church he built with his own hands. The rest of his time is dedicated to counseling troubled souls—drug addicts, prostitutes, and ex-cons—and providing for people who can’t provide for themselves. Known for his trademark black suits and sporting a goatee, Blue looks like a modern-day version of Johnny Cash, but he and his church have done more good for the impoverished than anyone else in the area.

I look at the list, but there’s only that one call to Blue. It lasted fourteen minutes. Did the two men know each other? Were they friends? Was Dale part of Blue’s congregation? There could be a dozen or more reasons for the call, but the timing of it bothers me, and I’m compelled to take a closer look.

I forward the PDF to Jodie with instructions to run all the names through LEADS to see if any of the callers or recipients have a criminal record or warrants.

On the third page, incoming and outgoing texts are listed in order by date. The BCI technician transferred the actual text into a separate cell, so I’m able to read them. Again, there are several to his daughter. Dinner @ 7:00 PM Sun. Damn good game! Thanks for all the help. Will call U when I get home. Meet for lunch noonish? At the bottom of the page, the final text Dale Michaels sent snags my attention. Meet is on. Will call 2 let you know outcome. I look at the date column and see that it was sent on March 8 at 12:45 A.M. to Blue Branson.

Who did Dale Michaels meet with that night and why? What does Blue Branson know about it? And why, if he’d received news of Dale’s murder, didn’t he come forward?

“Only one way to find out,” I mutter.

Grabbing my keys off the desk, I start toward the door.

*   *   *

The Crossroads Church is located on an acre or so of what had once been farmland, four miles outside of Painters Mill. Bounded on three sides by plowed fields, the clapboard structure reminds me of the Amish school where I received my early education. I’ve heard that Blue Branson built the place with his own hands and paid for the materials out of his own pocket. Rumor has it, he worked like a man possessed—going without sleep for days at a time—until the church was complete. Word around town is he’s a good public speaker and gives a rousing sermon twice on Sunday and once every Wednesday evening.