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“And the other one?” Emery asked.
“I’ll get to him in a minute. The deputy who found them, his name is Glover.”
“Jesus.”
North cocked an eyebrow.
“He’s not that bad,” John-Henry said to the unasked question. “Well, he’s pretty bad—lazy, aggressive, all-around incompetent.”
“Oh,” North said, “a cop. Got it.”
“Incompetent doesn’t begin to describe it,” Emery said. “That’s like saying the Hindenburg was a whoopsie.”
John-Henry’s smile was a shadow and then gone. “The point is, Glover might not be a good deputy, but nobody seems to think he’s a corrupt one.” Emery opened his mouth, but John-Henry kept talking. “We don’t know that for sure, obviously; we’re going to have a major case squad here tomorrow, possibly a special prosecutor, the Highway Patrol. Glover’s going to have so many people crawling through his life, if he’s dirty, we’ll know pretty soon.” For a moment, John-Henry was silent as though gathering his thoughts. “According to Glover, last night, another deputy should have been on duty. His name is Adam Ezell. He showed up for his shift and then left; Glover doesn’t know why.”
“That’s not suspicious,” Emery said. “If he was involved, he couldn’t have picked a worse way to draw attention to himself.”
“A little before eight, the sheriff left to do rounds; Glover insists that the sheriff offered to do it, which I have to admit is in keeping with Engels’s personality. When Engels didn’t come back, Glover tried to get him on the radio.”
“Weren’t they concerned because the cameras weren’t working?” Shaw asked. “I think they’d try to call someone. Maybe go into lockdown.”
“They probably should have, yes,” John-Henry said. “But you’ve got to understand, this is a small jail in a small county.”
“With a small budget,” Emery said.
“That’s true too. It’s not a high-security prison, and it’s—well, it’s Wahredua. Glover said the sheriff was going to have someone come out first thing in the morning.”
“But it’s convenient,” North said, “the cameras going out like that.”
“It’s more than convenient,” Shaw said.
John-Henry nodded. “We don’t know what happened in that cell, but by the time Glover went to check, both the sheriff and Dalton Weber were dead.”
“When did they find Ambyr?” North asked.
“Not long after that. They did a head count, of course, and that’s when they learned she’d hanged herself.”
“Conveniently,” Emery said sourly.
John-Henry gave a weary shrug. “That’s also when they discovered that Philip Welch was missing. That’s who I want you to find. Hold on, I’ve got his photo here.”
He sorted through the papers in front of him and found a folder, which turned out to be Welch’s file. North studied the photo clipped to the inside. The photo was only a headshot, but Welch’s height and weight were given on the intake form—five-five, a hundred and eleven pounds. That might not qualify for a world record, but Welch was officially tiny, and in the photo, he looked even smaller because he was so young. The form listed his race as Black, but he was light-skinned and wore his hair buzzed. His lantern jaw gave his otherwise fine bone structure an oddly distended look.
Flipping through the rest of the file, North tried to paint a picture of the man in front of him. “He’s a frequent flyer, huh? Gangbang stuff in Jeff City. Dealing in Columbia. What’d they pick him up for here?”
“Possession with intent to distribute,” John-Henry said.
Emery grunted and held out a hand, and North, because he could, leaned back in the chair and fanned himself with the file. With a snort that could have been anything from amusement to murderous intent, Emery snatched the file from him and leaned against John-Henry’s desk as he began to read.
“How did the sheriff die?” Shaw asked.
The emptiness of his voice made North take a considering look. Shaw wouldn’t meet his gaze, but he hugged himself, angling his body toward John-Henry.
John-Henry said, “He was stabbed. I’m not even going to try to guess how many times, but a lot; the medical examiner has him now.”
“Shiv,” Emery said without looking up.
“That seems likely. Dalton died the same way.”
