of the parking lot behind the courthouse. “A lot of
Alzheimer’s patients will try to get away, but the nurs-
ing home has said all along that Mitchiner wasn’t one to
wander off. For some reason the place reminded him of
spending the summers at his grandparents’ house with a
bunch of cousins, so he was pretty content there.”
“So content that they didn’t put an electronic brace-
let on him?”
“Exactly. Another reason that the family’s claiming
negligence. You do know that the town’s speed limit is
thirty-five, don’t you?”
I braked for a red light and adjusted his mirrors while
I waited for the green. “When’s the last time a Dobbs
police officer stopped a sheriff ’s deputy for speeding?”
“That’s because we don’t speed unless we’ve got a
blue light flashing.”
“Hmmm,” I said, and reached as if to turn his on.
He snorted and batted my hand away. “You try that
and I’ll write you up myself.”
167
MARGARET MARON
“Any theories as to how and why he wound up in the
creek? Who profits?”
“Nobody. That’s the hell of it. He was there on
Medicaid. No property. No bank account. His nearest
relatives are the daughter who’s suing and a sixteen-
year-old grandson and everybody says they were both
devoted to the old man. One or the other was there
almost every day for the last two years, ever since she
had to put him there because they couldn’t handle him
at home anymore what with her working and the kid in
school. Wasn’t like the Parsons woman.”
“That the one down in Makely?”
“Yeah. She had children and grandchildren, too, but
when she went missing, none of them noticed till the
nursing home told them. They say nobody from the
family had come to visit her in nearly a year.”
“Didn’t stop them from trying to get damages for
mental anguish, though, did it?” I said, recalling some
of the details.
He laughed and relaxed a little as I merged onto the
interstate where it’s legal to go seventy and troopers
usually turn a blind eye to seventy-five.
“What about Buck Harris’s place?” I asked. “Anything
turn up there?”
“Oh yes,” he said, his jaw tightening. “He was butch-
ered in one of the sheds back of the house.”
Without going into too many of the grisly details, he
hit the high spots of what they had found—a locked
chain, the fact that Harris had been naked and probably
