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experiments?
    â€œNope,” the fire chief said. “Checked the propane tank the moment we got here to turn it off so’s it wouldn’t feed the fire. Thing was already off.”
    â€œThat’s right,” English remembered. “Mad Dog was trying to get through the winter without turning on his gas. Said he’d huddle up near his Franklin stove with Hailey and not contribute to our nation’s policy of wasting irreplaceable energy resources.”
    The chief shook his head. Everybody knew Mad Dog was peculiar, but he had a way of making folks feel guilty for not making similar lifestyle choices. “Not many things will cause a house to blow up like that. Mad Dog don’t strike me as the type, though I’ve heard him say he tried most every drug, back in the day. Any chance he might have tried to brew up some methamphetamines?”
    The sheriff smiled. Mad Dog had done it all, from grass to LSD to opiates. But that was a long time ago and his brother had turned into one of the cleanest living people you could meet. If peyote was explosive, maybe, since peyote was considered a holy sacrament by some Native American churches. But even that would surprise the sheriff. Mad Dog didn’t need substances to get high. Life got him high. Being Cheyenne got him high. Trying to be a shaman got him higher still.
    â€œNo,” the sheriff said. “Mad Dog might do a lot of crazy things. Turning his house into a meth lab isn’t one of them.”
    The sheriff and the fire chief were wandering about the yard, examining small smoldering clumps that had once been Mad Dog’s house or belongings. The sheriff was having a tough go of it because, though it was below freezing again, it was barely so, and the water the fire crew had been spraying was turning into gelatinous mud. Maneuvering his walker across a surface that swallowed its legs instead of supporting them was a problem.
    â€œHey, Sheriff!” The voice came from over near the road where one of the volunteers had parked his old Dodge pickup. “I think you best come look at this.”
    The fire chief helped the sheriff extricate the walker from a particularly swampy section and get back onto the hard-packed surface of the driveway, then the two of them headed for the road and the man who’d summoned him.
    â€œWhat is it?” The moon was nearly full and the sheriff could see that the man was standing next to something dangling from the barbed wire fence that kept Mad Dog’s buffalo herd from grazing the freshly sprouted wheat across the way.
    â€œI’m not sure,” the man said. “Looks like some big old sawed-off shotgun. There’s a webbed sling that appears to have got tangled up in the fence here, like someone in a hurry climbed out of the pasture and dropped this and then couldn’t pull it free and didn’t feel like hanging around to get it loose.”
    The sheriff considered the ditch and decided against trying to wade across it. “You got a flashlight you can shine on it?”
    The man did and the sheriff recognized it right away. It was a breach-loading M79 grenade launcher. Just like the ones troops were still carrying when he earned a Purple Heart in Southeast Asia.
    ***
    A marked Tucson Police Department unit pulled up near the gate while the Sewa officer continued to question Heather and Ms. Jardine. The Tucson officers climbed out of their squad car and the Sewa captain sent one of his men to meet them. Heather picked up just enough of the conversation to understand they were arguing about jurisdiction. When an unmarked car glided in and deposited a couple of suits at the curb, the Sewa captain’s face tightened and he stopped his interrogation.
    â€œYou two, go and sit on that bench over there.” It was back inside the gate. “Don’t leave it. I’ll be right back.”
    The women didn’t move to obey and he shot them a glare over his shoulder