While the others loaded equipment and crime scene kits back into their vehicles, Harrow made two stops. The first was Jenny Blake, about to get on her bus.

“Find me everything you can about Shelton,” Harrow told her. “Find out what happened to his family, and get me everything you can about the investigation. Apparently there were two inquiries—local followed by state, when there were some conflict of interest concerns raised.”

She frowned. “But aren’t you going after Shelton now?”

“Yes. I may be in the thick of it when you come up with anything.”

“But you want it anyway?”

“I could well need it. Boil it down.”

“I’ll try not to be verbose,” she said with a perfectly straight face, then she disappeared up into the bus.

Next stop was audio expert Nancy Hughes. The blonde with the ponytail was packing up her boom mike to put in the trunk of the rental car.

He asked, “Can you rig me a special earpiece?”

“How special?”

“I need it for the usual reasons, particularly so Jenny can get to me. But for the main feed, I want to hear the sheriff and his deputies communicating.”

Hughes sneaked a glance over at the Tahoe, where the sheriff was conferring with his two deputies. “You don’t trust the local good old boys?”

“Our suspect has an unhappy history with local law enforcement. There’ll be guns and more guns at this shindig. I just want to know who’s doing what, so neither Carmen nor I wind up collateral damage.”

Nodding, Hughes said, “I don’t think that’ll be a problem—I may need some help tapping into their radio frequency.”

“Check in with Jenny on that, but try not to take up too much of her time.”

“Okay. Still, J.C.—that’ll be a lot of voices in your head.”

He gave up half a smile. “Maybe I’m used to that kind of thing.”

She grinned back, and took him by the elbow into the makeup Winnebago, where she wired him for sound and provided the earpiece.

Minutes later, when Harrow emerged, Gibbons came over. “J.C.! You want to ride shotgun with me again?”

“Sure, Herm. Particularly if it’s a real shotgun.”

“Ha! Come on, then.”

The deputies Gibbons had summoned from Smith Center had already set up a perimeter at the Shelton house. As Gibbons drove, he radioed to reroute them to the new target, and told them to set up a much tighter perimeter there—nothing in, nothing out.

Glancing at Harrow, Gibbons said, “You know that means your cameras too.”

“I’d do the same,” Harrow said with a shrug.

And back in his sheriff days, he would have. But now he knew that Hathaway and Arroyo were used to working commando style, even if the crew from the Topeka affiliate wasn’t. No matter how big a perimeter Gibbons set up, no matter how tight, his two principal cameramen would find a way to get the shots.

And at this point, Harrow doubted if he could even call them off if he wanted to. Hard news was in the air, and this was the Crime Seen! story to end all Crime Seen! stories…maybe literally.

Shifting subjects, Harrow asked the sheriff, “What exactly did happen to Shelton’s family?”

He’d pitched the ball casually, lobbed it in; but there it was.

At the wheel, the square-jawed Gibbons gave him a sharp look in the darkened car. “You of all people can’t be thinking of taking his side?”

That response blindsided Harrow.

He tried to chalk it up to Gibbons being defensive about his old boss’s reputation. After all, the state police had already questioned their investigation, and found no wrongdoing.

“It’s not about taking sides, Herm. It’s about going in to talk to this guy, and wanting the background, so he doesn’t just dismiss me out of hand.”

“Fair enough,” Gibbons said, feathers unruffling. “Shelton worked second shift at the radiator factory in Smith Center. It was a Friday in September, ninety-nine. He got off early that day. Gabe always claimed he took half a day off, to go home and surprise his wife and son with a weekend trip. Which always seemed like a lame-ass story to us, pardon my goddamn French.”

“So what happened?”

“Which version you want?”

“How many you got?”

Gibbons sighed. “I’ve got to tell you, even though I believe one of the two versions—and it’s sure as hell not Shelton’s—there’s really no proving either.”

“Okay. Start with Shelton’s.”

“Gabe claimed it was a home invasion. Said that coming from work, he got passed by a speeding car heading the opposite direction. Said there were three men inside, and all of ’em were wearing black ski masks. Then when he got home, Shelton says, he found his family murdered. Shot, almost execution-style.”

“And the other version?”

“It’s a simple story, about as old as they come. We think, a lot of us anyway, that Shelton committed the murders himself.”

“Why d’you think that?”

“For one thing, he got off early, at seven-thirty p.m., and the 911 call didn’t come in until after ten. Where was he, for all that time? Coroner placed the time of death between eight and nine.”

“Where did Shelton say he was?”

Gibbons shook his head, and his smile was knowing. “You’ll love this—said when he saw his family murdered, he flew into a rage, and went looking for that suspicious car he’d passed.”

Harrow said nothing for a while. Having been in Shelton’s place—or anyway the place Shelton claimed to have been in—he could see how the man might have raced off looking for the killers, full of rage and sorrow and revenge.

On the other hand, this was just the sort of alibi that guilty suspects made up, spur of the moment.

Harrow asked, “Did he find the car?”

The sheriff grunted a mirthless laugh. “Yeah—right where he left it: in his imagination.”

The night out the Tahoe windows was washed in moonlight, the world an ivory-blue that would have been soothing in other circumstances.

“So,” Harrow said, “Shelton claims he went out searching for the intruders’ car—then what?”

“Said, after a while, he just pulled over, and parked. And sat there and cried.”

Harrow could believe that; anyone who’d been through a similar tragedy could. But a hard-bitten law enforcement guy like Gibbons could easily shrug it off.

“Anybody see him, Herm? Sitting by the road crying? You said it yourself—Lebanon’s not a very big town.”

Gibbons shook his head. “Nobody came forward, and we put out the word, that’s for goddamn sure. What’s more, Gabe couldn’t even remember where he parked.”

“Convenient,” Harrow said, his skepticism outweighing his empathy. “Could he identify the car? Did he get the plate numbers or anything?”

“At first, all he could say was that it was a dark four-door.”

“At first?”

“Yeah. When he was first interviewed, that is. Later, he said it was a dark brown Ford Crown Victoria.”

“Like so many cops use, right?”

Gibbons nodded. “In the second interview, maybe an hour or so after the first? Suddenly he’s sure the car was one of the two unmarked Crown Vics the county owned back then.”

Which sounded as weak to Harrow as it probably had to the investigating officers. Witnesses who changed or enhanced their stories automatically slid from the witness category to the suspect list. That Shelton had gone from something so vague to something so specific—especially implicating the sheriff’s department—had to raise alarm bells.

Harrow said, “Surely he’d didn’t just pull that out of the air, deputies killing his family?”

“Pulled it outta his ass is where he pulled it from.”

Harrow tried again: “Why would the sheriff and his people want to kill Shelton’s family?”

Gibbons managed a feeble grin. “That question came up at the time too.”

Again, Harrow had to try a second time: “And?”

“…There were real estate developers or speculators or what-have-you, buying up property in that neighborhood, around then. Shelton claimed the real estate people were using sheriff’s deputies as muscle—you know, to force people to sell.”

“And were they?”

Gibbons frowned at his rider.

Harrow met the gaze evenly. “Chief, I have to ask.”

“Yeah, I suppose you do. And I have to answer. And the answer is no.”

“How’d Shelton get that idea?”

Shrugging, Gibbons said, “You ask me, he was looking to deflect the blame from himself, and the deputies were a target of convenience. After all, we were crawling all over him at that moment. He just made up the first thing that came to mind.”

“No deputies ever worked for those developers?”

“I didn’t say that. A lot of law enforcement guys work second jobs, and in particular do security work for this party and that one. Probably some of our boys did that kind of thing for the real-estate boys. So what?”

Out the window, Harrow could make out a neighborhood that had a few houses and several obviously derelict homes, and some vacant lots. This late at night, no lights were on—the area looked like a ghost town. Still, even in a hamlet where everyone was early-to-bed and early-to-rise, he’d expect to see a light here and there.

But there was nothing.

“Your deputies clear the neighborhood already?”

Gibbons seemed puzzled, then, after a second, got it. “Oh, no…this neighborhood was pretty much all bought up by those speculators. It’s been sitting vacant for a while now.”

“Why let it sit? If they’re developers, why don’t they develop it?”

“Companies that own the houses think they have a plan. Been talk for years about a new four-lane, north-south highway to connect Interstates seventy and eighty. Hasn’t gone through yet, but one of these days…”

Harrow saw it instantly. “And the speculators feel they’re sitting on a goldmine.”

“I suppose.”

“Are they right?”

Gibbons gave an indifferent shrug. “Not my field.”

Moments later, the sheriff pulled the Tahoe to the curb, and killed the lights. The pair sat in the dark for a few seconds. A deputy leading the parade of Crime Seen! vehicles stopped a block farther back.

“Across the street, in the next block,” Gibbons said, with a nod in that direction. “Second house.”

From this distance, Harrow could barely make out the shadowy outline of the structure. “What’s the plan?”

Gibbons’s face was a blank mask. “Well, we’re sure as hell not gonna wait for the SWAT team.”

“Because the county doesn’t have one?”

“Bingo. But we do have a sharpshooter in Colby Wilson. You met him.”

Harrow nodded.

“He can pick a fly off a dog’s ass,” Gibbons said, “at five hundred yards.”

“How often does that come up?”

The two old pros exchanged grins.

The sheriff made a radio call to make sure the perimeter was up. The deputies confirmed the neighborhood had been isolated.

“So your plan,” Harrow said, “is let Colby take him out?”

“That’s it.”

“I have a Plan B, if you’d care to hear it.”

Gibbons said nothing.

“Herm, let me talk to him. Let me bring him in.”

The sheriff’s eyes met Harrow’s. “Are you freakin’ nuts, son?”

Gibbons reminded Harrow of himself when he’d been sheriff back in Story County. If the positions were reversed, he might have said much the same thing.

“I’m asking for a reason, Herm, and it’s not crazy.”

Gibbons stared at him, waiting.

“That’s my team member in there.”

No reaction.

“The note Shelton left at his house was addressed to me. He wants to talk—and he wants to talk to me.”

“Or he wants to kill the big-deal TV star and get his fifteen minutes.”

Harrow couldn’t really debate that one. “Maybe, but if he blames the sheriff’s office for the deaths of his family, what do you think he’ll do to my associate, if he sees one of your men?”

Gibbons considered that.

“And,” Harrow went on, “if he spots Wilson targeting him with a sniper scope, what are Carmen Garcia’s odds to grow old enough to see her grandchildren?”

“Not so good,” Gibbons admitted.

“Herm,” Harrow said, shifting in the seat, “this bastard killed my wife and son. I have killed him in my daydreams and my nightmares—trust me, you can’t want him dead more than I do. But more than anything right now, outdistancing even revenge, I value Carmen’s life.”

Gibbons sighed. “I can understand you putting your teammate first. But you and I know, we’d be doing the world a favor to take this prick out with a head shot, and save a whole lot of money and a whole lot of grief.”

“Maybe not. Maybe we want him alive. There are fifty-some murders out there, with twenty-some families attached, that need closure. He could provide that. We owe those families more than we owe the taxpayers a savings.”

For a very long time, Gibbons just sat there staring out the windshield considering his options.

“All right,” the sheriff said at last. “But you wear a vest and, no matter what, you don’t go in that house. Otherwise, no deal.”

“Fine,” Harrow said, not willing to push the negotiation any further. “And I’m already wearing my Kevlar longjohns….”

They got out, careful not to slam the SUV’s doors, and moved to the back of the vehicle, where the sheriff got out a boldly labeled SHERIFF’S DEPT bulletproof vest, and put it on. As Gibbons was doing this, Laurene Chase and Billy Choi appeared at Harrow’s side.

Laurene said, “Deputy wouldn’t let the cameras any closer back there than the next block over.”

She gave Harrow a raised-brow look that told him Hathaway, Arroyo, and their audio teammates were moving in covertly.

“That’s good,” Harrow said. “You two hang right here.”

Gibbons said, “Your boss is right—no closer than this.”

“Sure about that?” Choi asked Harrow, ignoring the sheriff.

“You have your orders,” Harrow said ambiguously.