In the well-lighted room above, the investigators were pacing: sober faced men in grey vests, each a firm advocate of lynch law; able-minded frontier jurists with silver-tipped canes and gold watches. Glowering down on them all was a portrait of Chester A. Arthur. Another man had been elected president more than nine months ago, they all knew, but a new portrait had yet to arrive. Every few minutes one of the investigators would break from his pacing and cigar-chewing to lift the trapdoor and peer down at the motionless body beneath them, as if alert for some sprouting clue. When the trapdoor was dropped again, the red dust that had blown through the crevices and attached itself to the underside of the floor would float down onto the dead man’s lips, adding more red to his color. He looked more alive with each drop of the trapdoor, and the men all wanted the case closed in a hurry.

In the center of this circle of men, square on a cinnamon Persian carpet, bolt upright on a Louis XIV copy chair, sat Dolley Kenninac, mother of two, and prime suspect in the death of Sheriff Saz Temiz—though none of the men in the room was sure as yet that any crime had actually been committed. The men in their brocade vests kept close eyes on Dolley, as if expecting her to somehow ascend out of their circle and pass through the ceiling. They knocked pipe or cigar ash onto the cold firedogs, then spun around to ask another impertinent question.

The hands who had brought Dolley in, who had snatched her up in a dark alley, white-eyed as a scared colt, stood just outside the locked French doors, grinning and nodding, pleased with their deed, and with their memory—how pale her skin had been; how dark the blood on her knees; the odd garment that had barely covered her; how it had felt as thin as mattress-ticking over her curves as she kicked at them. Their hats were stoved in, but they were pleased.