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Back in her car, with the air conditioning on high, Davis listens to it again.

Then she turns off her phone and stares through the windshield at Cathcart’s dusty Main Street.

She’s thinking of an arson case she worked with Jalbert in the spring.

It was in a rural town called Lindsborg.

On their way to the site, they passed a field where a few cows were grazing.

Ella, riding shotgun that day, counted them aloud, just for something to do.

“Seven,” she said.

“Twenty-eight,” Jalbert replied, with no pause.

She gave him a questioning look and he told her one to seven added up to twenty-eight.

He said adding inclusively passed the time and also kept him mentally sharp.

She thought her partner might have a little touch of OCD.

She’d even looked up the name of that particular compulsion on her phone, then dismissed it.

Everyone had their little tics, didn’t they? She herself couldn’t go to sleep until all the dishes were washed and put away… but she had never considered counting them.

Now, sitting in her car, she thinks of Peter Andersson’s outgoing message.

Five choices, and when you added one two three four five, the total was…

“Fifteen,” she says.

“It was him.

Fuck. Fuck!”

She sits awhile longer, trying to convince herself that she’s wrong.

She can’t do it.

Absolutely can’t.

So she calls Troop C of the Kansas Highway Patrol, identifies herself, and asks for a callback from Trooper Calten, as soon as possible.

While she waits for the callback—which she dreads—she asks herself what she’s going to do with what she now knows.