Despite its modest population, the City of Redding was a big town in that it sprawled over sixteen-point-seven square miles that somehow included Lake Anpetuwi and the Redding Castle. I had to drive for nearly fifteen minutes, half of it along the meandering county road leading through the forest and the rest at fifty-five miles per hour on the highway, before I saw a sign that read WELCOME TO REDDING, GATEWAY TO THE WEST. I didn’t know about that, but certainly the terrain had changed dramatically during the short trip. Gone was the lush forest, replaced by flat fields of corn, soybeans, sugar beets, and wheat stretching toward a hard blue horizon, the view interrupted only by the occasional farmhouse and a cluster of grain elevators rising up like the pillars of ancient Greek temples.
The county highway twisted and dipped and suddenly there was a river and a bridge and on the far side of the bridge there was a town that appeared like the setting for one of those Hallmark Channel TV movies where beautiful thirtysomething women and handsome fortysomething men fall in love without ever touching each other and nothing bad happens that can’t be fixed with a smile and a heart-to-heart chat. Certainly the large number of people that I saw as I cruised down Main Street didn’t seem overly concerned by anything in particular. Most walked in and out of any number of shops, cafes, and coffeehouses as if they had never heard of COVID-19 and its variants; nothing was closed, no one seemed to be social distancing, and only a precious handful wore masks.
The voice of my GPS system told me that my destination was on the right. If it hadn’t I might have driven past the building that housed the Redding city offices without noticing it was there. The building was located near the center of town. It was two stories high and narrow and constructed of red brick that seemed as old as Redding Castle.
I parked the Mustang, stepped inside, and was greeted by a sign with two arrows. One arrow pointed left to Administration, City Clerk, Engineering Department, Finance Department, Human Resources, and Planning and Development. The other pointed right toward Mayor’s Office, City Council, Parks and Recreation Department, Fire Department, and Police Department. That’s when I realized that it wasn’t just one structure. The city had repurposed several ancient downtown buildings to accommodate its offices, punching through their walls to create doorways. Such a vast improvement, I thought, over housing them all in one of those flat, pale brick, multipurpose monstrosities that most towns large and small seemed to favor.
I moved along quiet corridors, stepping from one building into the next until I reached the Redding Police Department. As I neared it, I found a wall with the names, ranks, and photographs of nineteen officers mounted on it. At the top was a face and name that I recognized.
“Are you kidding me?” I asked aloud.
A few moments later I was standing on one side of a bulletproof partition and speaking to a young woman who was sitting at a desk on the other side and wearing a powder-blue mask.
“I would like to speak to the chief if she’s in,” I said.
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No, but I’m sure she’ll be happy to see me. Just tell her it’s McKenzie.”
The woman left her desk, walked a few steps down a corridor, and entered an office. I couldn’t see inside the office from where I was waiting but I could hear a voice shouting, “Are you kidding me?”
A moment later an African-American woman appeared in the doorway. She was wearing a dark blue uniform with an American flag and name tag over her right pocket and a gold badge pinned above her left. A tie that exactly matched her uniform was neatly knotted around her neck. The uniform matched her mask.
She looked at me.
I looked at her.
She started laughing.
She laughed as if I was the funniest thing she had seen in years.
“C’mon, now,” I said.
“Let him in, let him in,” she told her admin.
The admin pointed at her face. I pulled my mask from my pocket and put it on while she pressed a button that unlocked a secure door.
“Not my idea,” she said when I stepped inside. “It’s the government’s.”
A moment later, I was standing inside the office of City of Redding Police Chief Deidre Gardner.
“Hi, Dee,” I said.
“McKenzie, what the hell are you doing here?”
“Me? What the hell are you doing here?”
Chief Gardner gestured at a chair in front of her desk.
“Sit, sit,” she said.
I did. She sat in the chair behind her desk.
“I heard that you had been shot,” Chief Gardner said. “LT said it was because you were kibitzing again.”
“I got better.”
“Glad to hear it, but is that why you’re in Redding? You’re kibitzing?”
“Answer my question, first. Why are you in Redding? The last time I saw you, what was it? A year ago? You were working a double homicide in North Minneapolis.”
“A lot has changed since then.”
“Tell me about it.”
“It’s a long story,” Chief Gardner said. “I don’t even know where to begin. George Floyd, I suppose.”
“Yeah, that changed a lot of things.”
“Another Black man killed by the white police, this time on film, nine minutes of film of a uniform kneeling on the man’s neck; Floyd begging for his life, begging for his mother, screaming ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.’ On film. The protests that followed, the riots. They burned down the Third Precinct; the city just stood by and let them do it. Then people, the mayor, the city council started talking about defunding the police, abolishing the police. I didn’t blame them. The MPD has always had a troubled relationship with the community, the Black community. Excessive force complaints every single day. Abuse. No one paying attention until Floyd; one of the reasons the city was forced to pay Floyd’s family twenty-seven million bucks.
“You know, I went out on the street with the protesters. We’re not supposed to do that. I wore a mask, not just because of COVID, but because I didn’t want anyone to recognize me, other cops. I listened to what the protesters had to say. It was so demoralizing what they thought of us. The entire department was demoralized. Over one hundred cops left the force, some taking early retirement, some just walking away. Another one hundred and fifty took leaves of absence citing post-traumatic stress; a lot of them being crybabies. ‘You’re picking on me so I’m going home.’ Others because they found it impossible to do their jobs knowing they wouldn’t be supported if something bad happened, feeling the city had turned its back on them. That’s nearly a quarter of the entire force, McKenzie. Meanwhile, people asking me, my people, Black people, getting into my face and asking—‘Are you on their side or are you on our side?’ Cops, also my people, asking the same question just as loudly, just as angrily—‘Are you one of us or one of them?’ My boss—LT.” Chief Gardner snickered. “Lieutenant Clayton Rask. Commands the homicide unit in Minneapolis. You know that.”
“Yeah.”
“He kept saying ‘Just work the job, just work the job’ like if we ignored what was going on around us all of our problems would magically disappear. Like COVID. A couple of months later, while I was at my lowest, I saw a bulletin that said the City of Redding was searching for a new police chief. They wanted someone with the kind of experience that you can’t get working along the South Dakota border and I thought if I could just get out of Minneapolis … McKenzie, all I wanted, all I ever wanted, was to be a cop.”
“What did you do?”
“I applied; whaddya think? Not everyone gets lucky like you. I mean I’d be happy to track down a high-end embezzler in my free time, hand in my badge, and then sell him and his ill-gotten gains to an insurance company for fifty cents on the dollar. How much did you make doing that?”
“About two million after taxes.”
“What are you worth now?”
“Five million give or take.”
“The rich get richer.”
“That’s what my financial adviser keeps telling me.”
“I applied for the job,” Chief Gardner said. “That was on a Wednesday. By the weekend, I had changed my mind. I decided I was going to stay in Minneapolis. If I wanted things to be different, then I had to help make them different. Call it my MLK moment. But then the mayor called on Monday morning and asked me to come down here for an interview. Said they’d put me up overnight at the Redding Castle. Have you seen the castle?”
“I have.”
“You’re staying there, aren’t you? You’re here because of the old woman, aren’t you?”
“Finish your story,” I said.
“I thought, fine, I’ll come down here. They were willing to talk to a woman about taking the top job; that told me something about the town. ’Course, I expected them to take one look at my Black face and nod and cajole and then send me on my way. It’s happened before, people thinking I was a white girl. Does Deidre Gardner sound Black to you? Turned out, though, they knew exactly who I was. They had spoken to people. LT. Sonuvabitch never said a word to me about it. They offered me the job the next day. They called me on my cell early in the morning. I hadn’t even left the castle yet to drive back to the Cities.”
“You must have really impressed them.”
“Yeah, but it turned out that the mayor and the city council also wanted to make a statement.”
“That they were woke?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Chief Gardner said. “A religious order had moved to town that calls itself the Sons of Europa; that worships Odin—”
“Odin? The Norse god Odin? Father to Thor, that Odin?”
“It wanted to build what it called a pre-Christian church in Redding, an assembly hall that’ll attract like-minded Germans, Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, Finns—who else?—from Minnesota, the Dakotas, Iowa, Nebraska. They’re going to call the church Tyr Haus. Tyr is the Norse god of war.”
“Seriously?” I said.
“Unfortunately, they’re not your run-of-the-mill pagans, either. The Sons of Europa proudly labels itself as a white man’s religion that calls for the preservation of white families; that calls for north European descendants to preserve their ethnicity and combat white genocide with—and I’m quoting now—with ‘cunning and physical skill.’ The Southern Poverty Law Center has declared it to be a white supremacist hate group.
“When the natives heard they were coming—you need to remember, this was happening while people in Redding were watching the protests and riots in downtown Minneapolis on their TVs. Maybe the Sons thought that it would be a good time to move to rural Minnesota; that white people out here would embrace them and I suppose some did. But the majority—almost immediately a group formed calling itself Redding Against Hate—”
“RAH?”
Chief Gardner chuckled.
“RAH, yeah,” she said. “That also told me something about the town. Anyway, the group was formed because, as people said, they didn’t want Redding to become the center of hate in western Minnesota. People literally marched on city hall to make sure the Sons didn’t get the permits they needed to rezone the property they had purchased from residential use to allow for assembly. Only the Sons haven’t given up. They claimed the grand opening of Tyr Haus hasn’t been canceled, it’s merely been delayed. They’re still handing out flyers. They’re still recruiting followers. Meanwhile, the city council hired me.”
“A Black female homicide detective from Minneapolis—yeah, that makes a statement.”
“Sometimes I become so depressed by what I see happening in my country,” Chief Gardner said. “And sometimes I don’t. Which brings us back to you. Why are you here, McKenzie?”
“You were right before. I’m here because of Tess Redding.”
“The woman woke up dead.”
“Her granddaughter disagrees. She might have a point.”
“That’s crazy, bro.”
I carefully recited everything I knew, starting with Jenness Crawford’s suspicions concerning her own family and ending with my theory concerning Tess Redding’s balcony and the ladder found halfway down the bank between the castle and the lake.
“Who are you?” Chief Gardner asked. “Jessica Fletcher?”
“A grievously underrated detective.”
“I used to watch Murder, She Wrote when I was a kid. I knew even then that the show never came close to reality. For one thing, there wasn’t anyone on it who looked like me. Only white people killed anyone on TV in those days, you know what I’m saying? I would have paid money, real money, if instead of confessing when Jessica explained in painstaking detail how the crime was committed, the suspect would have crossed his arms, looked her in the eye and said, ‘Prove it, bitch. Prove it in court.’”
“Hey now, don’t be calling Angela Lansbury names. The woman is a national treasure.”
“She’s from England.”
“Okay, now you’re just being mean.”
“McKenzie…”
“Dee…”
“What do you want from me?”
“I want to read the incident report and the supplementals if there are any.”
“No.”
“Dee, if the case is closed, the records should be available to the public, am I right?”
Chief Gardner rolled her eyes and stared at her ceiling for a moment. I had the feeling she was no longer as glad to see me as she had been.
“Fine,” she said.
The chief worked her computer, alternating between the keyboard and her mouse. Finally, she sat back.
“Here,” she said.
I circled her desk and read what was on the screen over her shoulder. It didn’t take long.
“I’ve seen more information on an excessive barking complaint,” I said.
“With a barking dog there’s a crime and a suspect. In this case, we don’t have either.”
“Jenness Crawford says—”
“I don’t care what Jenness Crawford says. I tried to explain it to her as best I could; she just refuses to believe it. What am I supposed to do, McKenzie? Launch a homicide investigation because she doesn’t like her family? The door was securely bolted; there was no forced entry…”
“The balcony—”
“Oh, puh-leez, Jessica. In any case, there was nothing unnatural about the way Mrs. Redding died. There was no sign of a struggle. There was no sign of violence inflicted upon her body. We should all die so peacefully.”
“How ’bout an autopsy report?”
“McKenzie … all right, I’ll play. But know I’m only doing this because you walked some of the same streets I did. C’mon.”
Chief Gardner led me out of her office, telling her admin “I’ll be back” as if there was a chance she might not be. A few moments later, we were on the sidewalk and heading north on Main Street. Chief Gardner removed her mask, so I removed mine.
“There’s always talk about a resurgence, about the Delta variant and other variants that might follow, about remaining vigilant,” the chief said. “Yet only a very few businesses in Redding still insist staff and customers wear masks and the county commissioners are dead set against mask mandates except in government buildings, not that everyone followed them in the first place. The divide was pretty much along party lines out here. If you were a liberal Democrat you wore a mask; if you were a conservative Republican you didn’t. Most businesses, including the bars and restaurants, tried to follow the rules, partly because not infecting customers was good for their profit margins and partly because they could have been shut down and fined as much as twenty-five grand if they didn’t. Even so, it seemed like a lot of people were looking to pick a fight over the mandates, you were either a sheep or a lemming, and the owners didn’t want to put that on their employees. I didn’t want to put that on my people, either, so we took a hands-off approach. We encouraged masks and social distancing, but we didn’t demand. We warned people that they could be cited and fined a hundred bucks only we didn’t write anyone up. That’s the way the mayor and the city council wanted it and at the time I hadn’t built up enough equity with them or the citizens to argue about it.”
“You were trying to keep the peace,” I said.
I didn’t mean to be funny, yet Chief Gardner laughed just the same.
“I’ve been a cop for twenty years and no one has ever asked me to do that before,” she said. “Mostly I just arrested people. But yeah, I tried to keep the peace. Turned out the county got away with it, too; the lack of enforcement. I mean if you think fifty-five hundred documented cases and seventy deaths is getting away with something.”
“Seventy so far.”
“Don’t be unpleasant, McKenzie. Half the county still refuses to get vaccinated mostly because masks and social distancing and vaccines are intruding on the personal freedoms of hardworking ’Mericans; that they’re interfering with their God-given right to be morons. Now we have the health people warning us about the upcoming flu season and what that might mean and people pushing back claiming it’s all a government conspiracy. Welcome to the new normal.”
“Do you like living in Redding, Dee?” I asked.
“I do. I wasn’t sure I would. I’m a city girl, you know? I like clubs, I like music, I like to dance; I like to sit in the stands and root for my Lynx to win another WNBA title. I like to have my choice of restaurants serving every kind of food in the world. I like to stay up past ten o’clock. I even like the noise. People around here talk about how quiet it is like it’s a wonderful thing. Silence makes me nervous. At least it did. I’m starting to get used to it. On the other hand—here, let me show you something.”
Gardner didn’t wait for a response. Instead, she took my hand and pulled me into the street. The traffic immediately stopped. Not only that, no one leaned on their horn or shook their fist or called us dirty names. One driver actually smiled and waved as we crossed over.
Gardner was laughing when we reached the other side.
“Imagine,” she said. “Imagine growing up in a town where you don’t have to look both ways before crossing the street.”
I couldn’t, but I wasn’t trying very hard. That’s because I was distracted by two women sitting close to each other, their heads nearly touching, as they spoke softly at a small table on the sidewalk just outside a coffee joint called Java House, a couple of paper cups with lids set between them. One was Olivia Redding, dressed in tight blue jeans, tight T-shirt, black knee-high boots, and an unbuttoned cable-knit sweater; her hair pulled into a ponytail. The other was at least two decades younger and dressed for work in an office. Olivia glanced at me as Gardner and I strolled by. Her body jerked upright as if she had been caught doing something illegal. I kept walking; pretending that I hadn’t seen her.
My inner voice started reciting questions—who was Olivia speaking to? Why did it trouble her to be seen with the woman she was speaking to? Where was Big Ben? I ignored them all for the moment.
“What about being African-American in Redding?” I asked aloud.
“What about it?”
“It must be hard.”
“No harder than being a sister in Minneapolis, in the Cities,” the chief said. “People are probably just as racist out here, but they tend to keep it to themselves. Minnesota Nice. Besides, it’s not like I’m alone. Redding has a population of just over eleven thousand. Six percent are African-American, five and a half percent Hispanic, five percent Asian—the numbers not hugely different from the rest of the state.”
“Who knew Redding was so cosmopolitan?”
“Let’s not get crazy. It has one—count ’em—one Asian restaurant, a Thai joint. So, are you going to tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“Who the woman was that freaked when she saw you walking by.”
“What makes you think it wasn’t you dressed in your nice neat uniform that made her anxious?”
“Don’t play with me, McKenzie.”
I explained.
“So she’s one of your suspects, huh?” Chief Gardner said. “A sixty-year-old woman dressing like she’s twenty—sure looks dangerous to me.”
“Where are we going, anyway?” I asked.
“We’re here.”
Unlike the rest of the town, Redding Memorial Hospital looked as if it had been built yesterday. It featured plenty of tan and beige brick, thick glass windows, thick glass doors, and pillars. Except for the fountain that the driveway circled, it looked as if it could stand up against a tornado.
The hospital was located at the intersection of Main Street and First Avenue and I told Chief Gardner, “Only small towns have intersections named First Avenue and Main Street. St. Paul doesn’t. Neither does Minneapolis.”
The chief gave me what I call the ignorance-apathy shrug, the one that said that she didn’t know and she didn’t care.
She led me to the front entrance to the hospital, through the lobby, and down a carpeted corridor to an office suite with a sign that read REDDING COUNTY MEDICAL EXAMINER AND CORONER. We were wearing our masks because several signs we passed said that we would be removed from the premises if we didn’t.
The waiting room looked as if it had been furnished by the same guys who did the AmericInn hotels. Chief Gardner went up to the reception desk. A woman was bent over the bottom drawer of a file cabinet on the other side of it, showing us her behind.
“Boss in?” Chief Gardner asked.
The woman glanced our way without straightening up.
“Afternoon, Chief,” she said. “Door’s unlocked.”
Chief Gardner rapped her knuckles on the receptionist’s desk like she was sending a signal and moved to the door and pulled it open. She hung a right and marched down a short carpeted corridor to an office, its door also open. I followed behind.
“Hey, girl,” the chief said.
A woman with long, straight hair that matched both the white linen lab coat and white mask that she wore was sitting behind a desk and reading a file. Her head came up. She was wearing reading glasses that she deftly removed and quickly set aside.
“Dee,” she said. “What’s up, babe? And who’s this young man standing behind you?”
“Dr. Angelique Evers, this is Rushmore McKenzie. Don’t ask him how he got his first name, he’ll only tell you a long story that really isn’t very funny. He has questions for you in your capacity as the Redding County medical examiner and not as the world’s foremost authority on Elvis Presley and single malt scotch.”
“Whaddya want to know, hon?”
“I want to know what killed Tess Redding,” I said.
Dr. Evers glanced at the chief and made a gesture that asked, “Who is this guy?”
“Humor him,” Chief Gardner said.
“What killed Tess Redding?” Dr. Evers repeated. “According to the death certificate, it was natural causes.”
“Who made out her death certificate?”
“I did.”
“What were those natural causes?” I asked.
“Could’ve been arrhythmias, stroke, undiagnosed congestive heart failure, respiratory arrest, various sleep disorders—shall I go on?”
“I was looking for something more specific.”
“How ’bout old age?”
“Dr. Evers, did you perform—”
“I’m going to insist that you call me Angie because I don’t believe you’re nearly as rude as you sound or Dee here wouldn’t be rolling her eyes the way she is.”
I glanced at Chief Gardner, who was indeed rolling her eyes.
“My friends call me McKenzie,” I said.
“Not Rushmore? Now I really do want to hear the story behind your first name.”
“Angie, did you perform an autopsy on Tess Redding?”
“No, only an external examination.”
“Why didn’t you perform an autopsy?”
Dr. Evers glanced at Chief Gardner again before answering.
“Why would I?” she asked. “Listen, hon, in cases like this there usually isn’t an autopsy. That’s reserved for homicides, suspicious deaths, and unusual deaths of people who had no other health problems.”
“Did Tess have health problems?” I asked.
“Not that we’re aware of, but you need to remember—the woman was eighty-seven years old. A death like hers is usually due to cardiac arrhythmia, basically, an irregular heartbeat. Sometimes you can die in your sleep because of a massive stroke or a ruptured aneurysm. In those cases, the deceased usually will have complained earlier about symptoms like a headache or other pain. Tess didn’t, at least that’s what her granddaughter and her staff told me. ’Course, they also told me that she was one tough old bird; not prone to whining.
“In any case, when we found Tess she was curled up in a sleeping position, the blankets tucked neatly around her, no evidence of thrashing about. Her face was serene; her eyes were closed. By contrast, when death comes while not sleeping, there’s a fifty–fifty chance the eyes will be open.”
“What you’re telling me—”
“What I’m telling you, hon, is that when a patient dies without any symptoms, absolutely and without question the most common reason will be cardiac arrhythmia, specifically ventricular fibrillation or pulseless ventricular tachycardia. Trust me, McKenzie; if you have to die, that’s a great way to go.”
“What about poison?”
Again Dr. Evers glanced at Chief Gardner, who was again rolling her eyes.
“Yeah, I don’t believe it, either,” she said.
“Did you perform a tox scan?” I asked.
“Why would I do that?” Dr. Evers said. “McKenzie, on average medical examiners perform autopsies in about a third of the cases that come to us. We run tests to determine the presence of toxins in even less than that. I mean, you’d have to give me a pretty good reason.”
“Tess Redding’s granddaughter believes that she was murdered.”
“Since when?”
“What?”
“This is the first I’ve heard about it. She certainly didn’t say anything like that to me when I was examining Redding or during the few days after we took possession of her remains.”
“She didn’t?” I asked.
“She asked me how her grandmother died, of course she did, and I told her. At the time she seemed comforted by what I told her. Now she’s calling it murder? Honey…”
“First I heard about it was what?” Chief Gardner asked. “Three weeks after Tess’s death? They were in the process of settling the old woman’s estate. And Jenness Crawford gave me nothing to support her allegations except her unhappiness with her family.”
“Is it possible to—” I began.
“Exhume the body?” Dr. Evers finished. “Dear heart, no. We don’t do that here. It doesn’t matter, anyway. Tess Redding’s remains were cremated three days after she passed.”
“On whose authority?”
“Her eldest son, Benjamin, who was also the executor of her estate. The family declined to hold a public funeral with half the town in attendance; there was still some lingering fear of COVID and large gatherings. Plus, I think they actually wanted to hold a small, private memorial service and the virus gave them an excuse. I was told that they scattered the old woman’s ashes over Lake Anpetuwi.”
I turned to look at Chief Gardner. She was leaning against the wall. She folded her arms across her chest, looked me in the eye, and grinned.
“Anything else you want to know, Jessica?” she asked.
A few minutes later, the chief and I were back on Main Street and walking toward the city’s offices.
“Well, that wasn’t as enlightening as I had hoped it would be,” I said.
“What are you going to do, McKenzie? You can’t go back to Redding Castle and tell your poor grieving friend that her aunts and uncles and her parents didn’t actually conspire to murder her grandmother, can you? The woman will be heartbroken.”
“All right, all right.”
“You could tell her Tess’s death was all part of a giant conspiracy and that the county medical examiner is in on it.”
“That would mean that you’re in on it, too.”
“The sinister Black woman who appeared out of nowhere to wreak havoc across rural America—you could sell that.”
“To whom?”
Chief Gardner gestured at the scene on the corner in front of us.
“To these guys, for one,” she said.
I watched as a maskless young man offered flyers to the people walking past him. Some refused the flyers, some took them and immediately threw them away; others stopped to read them carefully. An older woman nimbly circled the young man with a digital camera as he made his pitch.
“I look around Redding and I see so much anger and divisiveness,” he said. “It saddens me. People like us were once the leaders of the free world; we were the role models, what everyone else aspired to be. Now we’re called racists and bigots and are told we should be ashamed of our glorious past. Yet there is a new sun on the horizon, a sun that will bring light to these dark times.”
Chief Gardner and I reached the corner and stopped. The woman with the camera gave a wave. The young man pivoted toward the chief and spoke directly to her.
“The Sons of Europa have followers everywhere across this great land; followers with the noble cause of rebuilding the future…”
Rebuilding the future? my inner voice asked.
“Where the sons and daughters of Europa, with the blessings of our holy Gods, will resume the path walked by our ancestors and once again take their rightful place as the leaders of the brotherhood of man…”
Isn’t that a song from a Broadway musical?
“The Sons of Europa will show the way.”
The young man thrust a flyer at Chief Gardner.
She smiled and shook her head.
“Trust me, Brian,” she said. “I’ve heard it all before.”
The woman with the camera took their photograph.
“I expect you to pick up the flyers that are littering the sidewalk,” Chief Gardner said.
She moved past the young man and continued down the street. I walked with her. Behind us I could hear the woman calling “Thanks, Brian” and then “Chief, wait up.”
She caught us about a quarter of the way down the block.
“That’s going to be a great photograph,” she said.
“I don’t suppose I could convince you not to print it,” the chief said.
“I don’t think so.”
“Thanks, Barbie.”
“C’mon, Chief.” The woman tucked her camera in a bag. “I’m just doing my job.”
“I know. Barbara, McKenzie; McKenzie, Barbara. Barbara is the owner of the Redding Weekly Bulletin.”
“Owner, publisher, editor, news reporter, and chief bottle washer,” Barbara said. “And you are?”
“McKenzie is an unlicensed investigator from the Cities.” When Chief Gardner stopped walking we did, too. “You two should get together. I’d bet you’d have a lot to talk about.”
“Such as?”
“That’s one of the things you need to discuss and don’t let McKenzie stonewall you, Barb. Toodles.”
“Toodles?” I asked. “Is that street?”
The chief resumed walking to her office, leaving me standing in the middle of the block with Barbara, who had rested her hand on my wrist like she was afraid I’d get away.
“Dee,” I called.
“Give me a shout before you leave town,” she said without breaking stride.
“Dee.”
“Enjoy yourself, Jessica.”