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“Of course, Wendell. Married, are you?” He had been looking at the gold band on the man’s finger.

“Yup. Can’t imagine what the wife’ll think if I bring this home. She doesn’t usually get into things I’m interested in.” The man’s face briefly fell.

Nabler, who would be the first to admit he was not particularly skilled in the areas of marital intimacy, decided to put on a happy face. “You might be surprised. She might take to it. Like a duck to water, as they say.”

Wendell ran the tips of his fingers over the engine’s surface. “You can actually feel the rivets. That’s some nice detailing. And there’s a little engineer in the cab and everything.” He took his fingers away briefly, then delicately touched them to the engine again. “That’s weird,” he said.

“Yes?’

“I get... I get a little buzzing in my fingers when I touch it.”

“I wouldn’t think that’s possible. It’s not on a length of powered track.”

“But I feel... something.”

Nabler nodded with a sudden understanding. “I know what you’re feeling. That’s what we model train aficionados call the tingle of excitement.”

Ten

Chief Harry Cook had seen his share of bad shit since taking the top policing job in Lucknow seven years earlier. Seen a lot even before that, too, when he was a regular cop and not the guy in charge.

Plenty of car accidents, of course. You had to have a strong stomach for those. First time he responded to one, he lost his biscuits. A tractor trailer with a load of lawn tractors ran a red and broadsided a woman in a little Corolla who’d already proceeded into the intersection. The impact sent the car flying a good hundred feet. When Harry looked into the Corolla and saw what was left of the woman, his stomach rolled over like an empty trash can in a windstorm. He ran over to the ditch to throw up, and, while he had his hands on his knees, had a very brief conversation with himself.

You are either going to be able to do this job, or you’re not. Make up your mind.

He stood, took a couple of deep breaths, and resumed his investigation of the accident, which involved administering a Breathalyzer test to the truck driver, who blew so high he was basically a walking brewery.

There’d been plenty more stomach-churning scenes since then. A bar fight where a bouncer took the jagged end of a broken beer bottle in the neck. Nothing short of a miracle that he survived. Less fortunate was the fellow who worked in the service department ofLucknow Ford whose wife took a baseball bat to the side of his head while he was eating a bowl of Cream of Wheat at breakfast. That guy never woke up, and based on what Harry had learned from the dead man’s bruised and psychologically damaged wife, he had it coming.

And then there was that house fire on the north side of town.

Single mother with three kids under the age of five. No smoke detectors. Fire started in the middle of the night. Some kind of electrical fault. By the time the smoke woke the woman from a deep sleep, the flames had already overtaken much of the house.

No one made it out.

That had been the worst thing Harry’d ever seen in his career. Until last night.

Some six hours before he’d shown up at the diner and had that restorative cup of coffee, the cell phone on his nightstand started buzzing, only two feet from the pillow where he laid his head. He’d been to bed late, having had a meeting with all six of his staff to discuss whether there were any other possible leads they might pursue when it came to those two missing men. And as if that weren’t enough, Dell Peterson, who had a dairy farm on the road heading south out of town but also had a few animals that were not cows, had called around ten to say his pet goat was gone.

This was not, in the overall scheme of things, a high priority for Harry. But he told Dell he would get back to him the next day, take a run out to his place. Maybe the goat had managed to get free, had gone exploring, and by morning he (she?) would be back.

Picking up his cell in the dark, Harry said quietly, “Yeah.”

“Sorry to call at this hour, Chief. It’s Stick.”

His real name was Ben Bloodworth, but he was a skinny dude and topped out at six-foot-six, hence the nickname. One of Harry’sbrighter officers, who was more valuable dayside handling weightier responsibilities, but everyone had to take a turn working overnights, responding to the odd burglar alarm or car accident. Someone having too much to drink and rolling their pickup into the ditch was a weekly occurrence. Harry was not one to pine for a return to Prohibition—he liked a tumbler of scotch at the end of the day as much as anybody—but, honest to God, the list of mishaps that could be traced to alcohol was too long to compile.

“What’s up, Stick?”

“Out on Miller’s Road? Before you get to the cutoff? Guy coming home thought he saw a coyote in the ditch that had gotten into something?”

Harry said, “Yeah?”

The pause at the other end of the line was long enough for Harry to think the call had dropped out.

Finally, Stick said, “Looks like it might have been a person at some point.”

Harry let that sink in for a second. “Be there soon.”