Chapter 4

The county came three weeks later.

Marlene was putting out the garbage when the white county car pulled up to the curb. Two people got out — a woman in a navy suit with a badge clipped to her belt, and a man in his fifties carrying a battered briefcase that had seen better decades. They walked up the driveway with the patient, slightly bored air of people who had done this a hundred times.

"Mrs. Resting?" the woman asked.

The woman — she identified herself as Senior Inspector Diane from the county auditor's office — could not have been more different from Boyd. She was sixty-ish, wiry, with gray hair pulled back tight and a face that said she had been lied to by better men than most people ever met.

"The paperwork you filed was thorough," Diane said. She looked at the rose bush, its two petals on the concrete, and her mouth tightened. "We've already started pulling the records. The management company has been cooperative. More cooperative than they needed to be, but you can't blame them for wanting to get ahead of it."

"Boyd Wheeler," Marlene said. It wasn't a question.

Diane nodded once. "Your HOA president has been signing off on violations on his own lot for three years now. We found seven instances. Same pattern every time: he files a violation, the homeowner pays, he never files one for himself. His sister's appeal was buried in the management company's shred bin — we found fragments. It took our forensic team two weeks to reconstruct the date, but it matches your timeline."

The man with the briefcase — he'd introduced himself as Analyst Todd — held up a manila folder. "We also found something else."

Marlene's heart did a small, careful thing. "What?"