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The sheriff's office smelled exactly as it had the first time: burnt coffee, wet wool, paper, and the old fluorescent heat of a place where facts waited to be believed.

Hutchins sat behind his desk without his hat.

His silver hair was flattened on one side. Reading glasses hung against his shirt. The coffee carafe had burned down to an inch of tar. Two files lay open in front of him, one old and one new.

He looked up.

The pause came first.

Not long. Half a second, maybe. But I knew pauses. I had lived by them.

"Miss Marsh."

Surprise, filed immediately beneath procedure.

"Sheriff."

He stood. His eyes moved over me once: snow packed into my braid, coat crusted white, jeans wet to the knee, hands shaking hard enough that the keys rattled.

"How did you get here?"

"I drove."

"I gathered that."

"The highway's closing."

"I'm aware."

"I got here before it did."

His mouth tightened. "Apparently."

Then he said the thing before I could decide whether to ask it.

"Mr. Calloway was released two hours ago. He's at the ranch."

Something went out of my knees. I put one hand on the back of the plastic chair and did not sit in it.

"Released."

"The complaint's collapsed. Your witness recanted this morning — Mr. Prewitt. And your emails came in overnight." He said it in the same voice he'd have used for a stock count. "Mr. Kane is being sought for interview."

I stood there in my wet socks and let it go through me.

He was out. He had walked out of this building while I was somewhere west of Norris with both hands on the wheel, and nobody had been able to tell me, because there had been no way to tell me. Every mile of that road, I had been driving toward a locked door that had already opened.

A plastic chair faced his desk, but I stayed standing.

"I want to give a statement."

Hutchins went still.

"Regarding?"

"Derek Kane."

My voice held.