Chapter 1

Sheriff Dane Kessinger wrote the name in block letters at the top of the intake form. M-A-R-I-S-O-L. R-E-Y-E-S. He pressed down hard enough that the carbon sheet picked up the impression, then he tapped the pen twice against the steel ring bolted to the booking desk.

"Attitude gets you a cell," he said, not looking up.

The woman on the other side of the desk said nothing. She stood with her wrists cuffed in front of her, a thin silver ring on her right hand catching the hard yellow light from the back window. Long dark hair pulled back. Slate-gray blouse. Dark trousers. She looked like she'd walked out of a real estate office, not a county booking room at four in the afternoon.

Kessinger slid the form across the desk. "Sign it."

She didn't move.

"Sign it," he said again, "and we're done. Public intoxication, disturbing the peace, resisting. Or you can keep the attitude and I'll add another night to the stay."

The woman looked at the form. Then she looked past him, toward the back window that faced the county impound lot. Her eyes were the calmest thing in the room.

Deputy Rennie Voss was standing at that window, chewing gum he'd forgotten to chew. He'd brought the woman in from the DQ parking lot where she'd been sitting in a rental car with the engine off, waiting for nothing, as far as Kessinger could tell. No warrant out on her. No record in the county. She'd simply refused to roll down her window, and then she'd refused to explain herself, and then she'd said something about the sheriff's department that Voss had written down in his notebook with the kind of care a man gives a live snake.

"What'd she say exactly?" Kessinger had asked.

"She said —" Voss had flipped through the pages. "She said, 'Your red phone is going to ring today. Tell the sheriff not to be the last one to answer it.'"