""Chapter 1: The Secret in the Red Tackle Box
When My Battered Daughter Collapsed on My Porch, I Answered Her Husband’...
"Chapter 1: The Blood on the Porch
The older man in the straw cap hurried past the cruisers, his rheumy blue eyes widening as he caught sight of Victoria approaching.
"You all right, miss?" the old man called out, his voice thick with a lifelong Ozark drawl. "Saw them two lawmen roughing you up on the shoulder of Nine. Didn't sit right with me. I’ve lived in this county seventy-four years, and I know Raymond Vance’s boys don't put irons on a polite young woman unless they're up to no good. Drove straight to the conservation check station at the bridge."
Victoria stopped five feet from him, offering a weary, genuine nod. "Thank you, sir. You made the right call."
"Name’s Miller," the old man said, spitting a dark stream of tobacco into the gravel. "Jim Miller. No relation to the captain here, though we bought hay off each other's cousins back in the seventies."
Captain Miller approached, his sharp gaze sweeping over Victoria’s scraped knees, her bruised wrists, and the drying blood along her temple. He reached into his breast pocket and withdrew an official laminate badge, holding it out for her inspection before looking at her hands.
"Investigator Victoria Hale?" Miller asked.
"Special Investigator Hale, Public Integrity Division," she confirmed, extending her right hand. Her fingers were steady as they gripped his. "I have two county officers detained on the ground and one in the water."
Captain Miller turned toward the pit.
Out in the murky shallows, Sheriff Raymond Vance was crawling onto a low shelf of limestone bedrock, dragging his waterlogged frame out of the muck on his hands and knees. He was vomiting green, sulfurous water onto the white stones, his uniform torn at the shoulder, his Colt Python lost forever in the eighty-foot abyss behind him.
"Trooper Harris, Trooper Cole," Captain Miller commanded without looking back. "Wade out there and put the irons on Sheriff Vance. Use two pairs if his shoulders are too wide. Double-lock them."
"Yes, sir," two troopers responded, breaking away from the perimeter with plastic zip-ties and heavy stainless-steel handcuffs drawn from their belts.
Victoria walked over to where Deputy Bobby Vance was kneeling in the dust. The young deputy was trembling so hard his teeth clicked together.
"Bobby," she said.
He looked up, tears cutting clean lines through the white limestone dust caked on his cheeks. "I didn't shoot, Investigator. I swear to God Almighty, I didn't shoot. When he told me to fire, I dropped the iron under the wheel. I couldn't do it."
"I saw what you did," Victoria said quietly. "And the state's dashboard camera inside my sedan recorded your exact words on the highway when you told Halloway to take the cuffs off. That will be noted in the primary investigative memorandum."
Bobby let out a ragged sob, letting his forehead rest against his knuckles. "He made us do it. He said if we didn't bring in forty thousand a month through the highway bypass, he’d revoke our deputy commissions and run our families off their leases. My dad farms two hundred acres owned by his holding trust. If Uncle Ray cut the water rights, my folks would have lost the farm in sixty days."
"Your uncle isn't running anything anymore, Bobby," Victoria said. "The holding trusts are being frozen under federal asset forfeiture warrants as of two o'clock this afternoon."
Bobby looked up, his jaw slack. "You... you already had the warrants?"
"The Public Integrity Division doesn't initiate a roadside sting without an active grand jury, Deputy," Captain Miller interjected, stepping up beside Victoria. "We didn't just have warrants for the highway shakedowns. We have twenty-two counts of wire fraud, interstate extortion, falsification of public records, and grand larceny. While Investigator Hale was drawing Vance's attention on County Road Nine, three teams from the state Department of Revenue and the FBI Field Office in St. Louis were executing search warrants at the county courthouse, the sheriff's administrative offices, and the Farmers & Merchants Bank in town."
Halloway raised his head from the gravel, his eyes hollow with despair. "The bank... you hit the bank?"
"Every safe-deposit box registered under the Delaware LLCs," Victoria said coldly, looking down at him. "Every ledger you kept in the false ceiling of the processing shed. We have the routing slips for the Miller shakedown, the cash seized from the freight drivers on Highway 4, and the electronic transfers sent to your wife's personal credit line. It’s over, Greg."
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Two state troopers hauled Raymond Vance across the gravel.
The once-untouchable sheriff was dripping wet, his skin a mottled, sickly gray, his gray hair plastered against his skull with slimy pond weed. His hands were bound tightly behind his back with two pairs of linked cuffs. He staggered under the weight of his own waterlogged boots, but when his eyes met Victoria’s, the dying embers of his arrogance flared one final time.
"You think you won something here, Hale?" Vance croaked, his voice raw from swallowing stagnant water. "You think you're the first state agent to come down into the valleys with a clipboard and a high-and-mighty attitude? This county was built by men like me! The politicians in the capital don't give a damn about these roads! They don't pave them, they don't patrol them, and they don't protect the people living on them! I kept the peace here for thirty years!"
Victoria stepped directly into his path, forcing the two troopers holding his arms to come to a halt.