Deputy Armstrong gave me a doleful look. “We don’t have Royce’s body, and we’re not going to be able to search the creek for a long time to recover it.”
I put my cup down. Suddenly I longed to be back in my own kitchen, where homicide, arrests, and missing partners who had embezzled enormous sums of other people’s money couldn’t touch me. “Let’s start over. What is the status of the Royce investigation?”
“Okay,” Armstrong said grimly. He knew he was giving me terrible news. “De Groot and Hersey were up at the site first. Shockley sent them because the report we’d gotten said the two people who might be hurt were involved somehow with Prospect Financial. It’s getting to be a joke around here, how hysterical the captain is about his retirement account. Anyway, the trucker had driven some b
