“Mm-hmm,” she hummed absently without looking at me.

“Then why does Mimi work?”

She turned to me then, her expression incredulous. “Just because her husband is wealthy, she can’t have a job? A little independence? An identity of her very own?”

I held up a palm. “Cook, can we put the feminist movement on hold for a moment? I’m asking for a reason. Hy told me someone has been making night deposits, putting a thousand bucks into her banking account on the first of every month for the last ten years. Harold and Wanda said Mimi visits them religiously. She brings the kids and stays the night with them on the first of every month. Cook, Mimi is making those deposits.”

She took a moment to think about what I said, then lowered her head and nodded in resignation. “But that would mean she feels guilty about something, wouldn’t it?”

“It would seem that way. But people feel guilty for different reasons, Cook. It doesn’t mean she did anything wrong.”

“She told her mom she’d made a mistake. Charley, what happened?”

“I don’t know, sweetheart, but I’ll find out. And I’d bet Garrett’s left testicle, it has something to do with our Senate hopeful.”

I turned the ignition key. Misery roared to life as Cookie stared out her plastic window.

“Do you have any idea what this means?” she asked.

“Besides the fact that Kyle Kirsch is most likely a murderer?”

“This means that we are about to bring felony charges against a United States congressman. A man who is hoping to be our next senator. A hometown hero and pillar of the community.”

Was Cookie having second thoughts because he was a bigwig? Bigwigs had to follow the constructs of the law just like medium-sized and little wigs.

She turned a starry-eyed expression on me, her aura brimming with a fiery passion. “God, I love this job.”

Chapter Ten

I WAS AN ATHEIST UNTIL I REALIZED I WAS GOD.

—BUMPER STICKER

By the time we stopped at the Mora County Sheriff’s Department, Cookie was on fire. She was taking charge of the investigation and doing a pretty good job of it, too. If you didn’t count the dropped calls, the slow Internet access, and the lashing from an eighty-year-old woman claiming she was Batman when Cookie dialed a wrong number. Cook was getting a little annoyed with my repeated impersonation of the woman. She really shouldn’t have put her on speakerphone if she didn’t want to reap the consequences.

After we climbed out of Misery, she pushed past me and said, “You’re messing with my flow.”

I tried not to giggle—well, not real hard—and asked, “Didn’t you have surgery for that?”

Unfortunately, the current head honcho was out on business. The clerk told us the former sheriff, Kyle Kirsch’s dad, was now living in Taos with his wife, working in security, so we didn’t get to chat with him this go-around. But the clerk did give us copies of everything they had on the Hana Insinga case for the low cost of a round-trip ticket to a dark and dank basement and the shuffling of a few file boxes.

The clerk herself was too young to remember the case, which was a bummer. But I was sure with all the hoopla going on underneath all the hoopla going on up top, we would ruffle a few feathers just for the asking. If nothing else, we would get Kyle’s attention, and fast. Of course, between the fake FBI agents and my new friends from this morning, we may already have revealed our secret hideout and nefarious plans to stop Kyle Kirsch from taking over the world.

I sort of got off on making bad guys sweat. Which was not unlike my love of making good guys sweat, just by very different means.

On the way back, we had to pass through Santa Fe, which gave me the perfect opportunity to have a one-on-one with Neil Gossett, a deputy warden at the prison there. Actually, he’d called while we were en route and pretty much insisted that I stop and see him. He had his assistant schedule us an appointment, as prisons were big on appointments.

“Do you think Neil will give you access to that kind of information?” Cookie asked when she got off the phone with her daughter, Amber. From the sound of things, Amber was having a good time at her dad’s, which seemed to ease Cookie’s concerns. “I mean, aren’t visitation records kind of confidential?”

“First things first,” I said as we drove to the prison. I took out my cell and called Uncle Bob.

“Oh,” Cookie said, tapping keys on her laptop. “Your Mistress Marigold just answered my e-mail.”

“Really? Did she mention me?”

She chuckled. “Well, I asked her what she wanted with the grim reaper, and she said, and I quote, ‘That is between me and the grim reaper.’”

“She did mention me! She’s nice.”

Cookie nodded as Uncle Bob answered, his tone brusque. “What have you got?”

“Besides great boobs?” I asked.

“On the case.”

He was so testy. “Do you want the whole shebang or just a partial?”

“All of it, if you don’t mind.”

Thus I spilled our entire case for the next ten minutes while Cookie did some research on her laptop. She barked out a few details from time to time, apparently dissatisfied with my rendition of Kyle Kirsch Takes Over the World: The Musical.

After a long pause that had me wondering if he’d finally succumbed to his blocked arteries, I heard some huffing and puffing and a door squeak just before he whispered, “Kyle Kirsch?”