THE SHERIFF'S LAST REPORT
A Sentinel Trilogy Story
By Brian Bullock
A Starborne Studios Production
EVERYONE KNOWS / X @EveryoneKnws1
Sheriff Arden Calloway sat in her office at 11:47 p.m., staring at a file she was supposed to have closed six weeks ago.
The coffee had gone cold hours ago. The heating system ticked and groaned the way it always did in December. Outside her window, Main Street Choteau was empty, the Christmas lights on the storefronts throwing multicolored reflections on the frozen puddles. She should be home. Her husband had stopped asking why she came home late because he already knew the answer.
The Matthews case.
She'd been a cop for twenty-seven years and she had never failed to close a case in her head. That was the thing people didn't understand about the work — the paperwork closed, the jurisdiction transferred, the file handed to whoever had the authority to take it from you, but the case in your head closed separately, on its own timeline, and it closed when you had an answer. An ending. Something that fit the category of things you already understood about the ways human beings came to grief.
Bron Matthews hadn't given her an answer. The federal agents who had taken her case hadn't given her an answer. They'd given her a national security directive and a flat voice and the particular indifference of people who had already decided that she didn't need to know.
So the case stayed open. In her head, where no one could close it for her.
For six weeks she'd been coming in after dinner, after Martin went to bed, and sitting here in the ticking quiet of the department building and going through the photographs she shouldn't still have. Trying to find the thing she'd missed. The thing that would make it fit somewhere, anywhere, in the twenty-seven years of categories she'd built for human disappearance.
She'd been finding nothing. Until tonight.
The file in front of her was mostly black bars now --- redactions over the information she'd gathered herself before the federal agents arrived and took everything. Her own case. Her own documentation. The photographs she'd taken, the coordinates she'd recorded, the ambient temperature readings she'd logged at the scene --- all of it run through the federal redaction process and handed back to her as a document that was more black ink than information.
They'd been sloppy, or maybe arrogant, because they'd left her copies. The ones she'd made the night before they showed up, when she'd already understood that whatever she'd found in that clearing wasn't going to stay in her hands for long. She'd driven back from the scene in the dark and gone straight to the department and made two copies of everything before she went home, and she'd kept one at work in the cabinet they hadn't found and one at home in the desk panel she hadn't told anyone about, and she'd waited to see what the federals would do.
What they'd done was what she'd expected: sealed the site, closed the file, transferred jurisdiction, left her with a redacted copy of her own work as the official record of what she'd seen.
Twenty-seven years as a cop. A decade in homicide in Billings before she moved to Teton County and ran for sheriff. She'd seen every kind of death and disappearance that humans could produce --- every accident and cruelty and failure of judgment that ended with someone gone. She had categories for all of it. Hard-won, expensive categories, bought with years of looking at things most people never had to see.
Accidental. Intentional. The spectrum in between. Domestic, stranger, organized, opportunistic. Environmental --- the mountain cases, the exposure cases, the people who had underestimated the terrain or overestimated themselves and had paid the final price for the miscalculation. She'd worked every category. She knew what the evidence looked like, what the scene looked like, what the particular quality of a disappearance was depending on which category it belonged to.
You developed an instinct for it. Not mystical --- practical. The accumulated pattern recognition of someone who had paid close attention for twenty-seven years. You walked into a scene and it told you things before you'd processed a single piece of evidence, and after two decades of calibrating that instinct against outcomes, you'd learned to trust it.
Her instinct had walked into the clearing and said: none of these.
Bron Matthews didn't fit any of them.
A man had walked into a clearing in his own county and not walked out. No return trail. No body. No signs of struggle. Just footprints ending in mid-stride at the edge of something that had no business existing --- fused soil, glassy and warm, in a perfect circle. And federal agents on scene within twelve hours, moving with the practiced efficiency of people executing a protocol they had run before.
Not surprised. That was the thing she kept coming back to. They hadn't been surprised.
* * *
She'd been through the photographs a hundred times.
Not a figure of speech. She'd started keeping count after the third week, marking each session in the field notebook: Night 17 — photographs, samples, field notes. Nothing new. Night 18. It helped to mark them, for the same reason it helped to document anything --- because the act of recording confirmed that the time had not been wasted, that the attention had been paid, that the failure to find something new in session eighteen did not mean session nineteen would be equally empty.
Session fourteen she'd found a detail in the field notes she'd missed: the duty officer at the Teton County line had noted a brief magnetic compass deviation at 4:17 p.m. on the day Bron Matthews disappeared. Logged as equipment anomaly, not terrain-related, filed and forgotten. She'd added it to her copy with a timestamp.
Session twenty-two she'd noticed that two of the federal agents' vehicle plates were registered to a fleet pool she couldn't trace through any database she had access to, which told her something about the agency's operational budget.
Session after session, small details. None of them explained anything. All of them confirmed the same thing: this was real, documented, witnessed. The documentation existed.
Tonight was session thirty-one.
The truck on the service road, driver's door closed, gravel giving way to wild grass where it had pulled over. The corridor of scorched vegetation leading into the trees — she'd photographed it from three angles, and all three showed the same thing: a line of dead undergrowth on both sides of the trail, the leaves crumbled to powder, the trees above unaffected. No fire did that. Nothing she knew of did that except something that had approached from directly overhead and left the corridor as it descended.
She'd had that thought in October and written it in her field notebook and then crossed it out because it was not the kind of observation a sheriff in Teton County could put in an official report. Tonight she uncrossed it in her memory. It deserved to be uncrossed.
The crater. Forty feet across, compressed earth forming a shallow bowl, the glassy center with its faint iridescence in the October light. She had a dozen photographs of the glass alone --- the ambient temperature reading, the heat shimmer visible in the colder air, the edge where compressed earth became fused material with no gradual transition. She had photographs of the footprints, the last clear print pointing toward the center, the weight forward in the toe impression, the stride unbroken.
A man in mid-step, walking toward something. And then not.
She hadn't given them everything. Old cop habit --- you always made copies before you handed anything over, and you never told the people you were handing it to that you'd made them. She'd done it in the field, before she called for the sheriff's department, standing in the clearing in the October cold and photographing everything twice, once for the official record and once for the record she'd keep herself because she was already certain that official record wouldn't stay in her hands for long.
Paranoia, she'd thought then. Foresight, she thought now.
She turned to a photograph near the back of the file. This one she'd taken almost as an afterthought --- a wide shot of the truck from the side, capturing the driver's window and the tree line behind it. She'd looked at it a dozen times without seeing anything worth noting.
Tonight something caught her eye.
Not a decision to look — the cop reflex, the involuntary arrest of attention that twenty-seven years had built into her before the conscious mind caught up.
She almost dismissed it. In the photograph, it was nothing --- a smudge in the reflection on the truck's dirty window, caught in the background of a shot she'd taken to document the vehicle's position on the service road. She'd looked at this photograph thirteen times. She knew it was thirteen because she'd written the number in her field notebook each time, with the date and the notation nothing new. Thirteen times. Nothing.
But the angle of her desk lamp was different tonight. She'd moved it two inches to the left to stop the glare on her coffee cup, and the new angle threw the photograph's surface in slightly different light, and something in the reflection on the window caught it differently, and she stopped.
She reached into her desk drawer for Martin's magnifying glass --- he used it for his model trains, would have laughed at her using it for a case, she'd thought about that every time she'd borrowed it and it had always made her smile. Not tonight. Tonight she held it over the photograph with both hands steady and leaned in.
There.
In the reflection on the truck's dirty window. Partially obscured by road dust and the angle of the afternoon light, but present --- unmistakably present, now that she'd found the angle --- a shape in the sky behind the camera.
Elongated. Smooth. No wings, no rotors, no visible means of staying in the air. Blurry from the low resolution of her copy, but the basic form was clear enough. She had spent her career learning to read photographs --- learning to see past the grain and the angle and the trick of light to the thing that was actually there. She'd sat in evidence rooms and courtrooms and detective bureaus and looked at photographs that defense attorneys had said were unclear and had pointed to the thing that was clearly there and said: look. This. Here.
She was looking now.
What was actually there was not a helicopter.
Not a plane.
Not anything she had a category for, which was the same thing she'd thought about the fused glass crater and the footprints that ended in mid-stride, and the federal agents who had arrived with their staged equipment and their practiced speech and their complete, professional, documented absence of surprise.
It had been there the whole time. Hanging above the Montana wilderness on a clear October afternoon, while she took photographs of a missing man's truck and followed his footprints into the pines and touched warm glass and called dispatch with a hand that wasn't quite steady. It had been there. In the sky above all of it, visible if she'd looked up, visible in the reflection if she'd looked at the right photograph at the right angle with the right light.
She set down the magnifying glass and sat back.
The heating system ticked. The wind moved on Main Street. Somewhere in the building, the duty officer's radio crackled with something routine.
She picked up the magnifying glass again and looked for another three minutes, because she was a cop and cops confirmed before they concluded.
It was still there.
And then she understood, for the first time with her whole body rather than just her mind, what the federal agents had not been surprised by.
They had seen this before.
Not this specific event, and not once. But this category of event, multiple times, enough times to build a protocol around --- the warm crater, the fused glass, the missing person, the shape in the sky. She thought about the lead agent holding his hand over the glass and nodding. The technician who had walked the circle's edge with measuring equipment and not checked his readings against hers because he already knew what the numbers would be. The portable shelters that went up with the practiced speed of a team executing a protocol they had run before, not improvising it on the fly.
They had protocols because they had precedents. They had precedents because this had happened before. Not once. This had happened enough times that an agency she’d never heard of had standing teams and staged equipment and a speech practiced until it ran without variation and a filing system somewhere that already had a category for what she'd found in that clearing.
Someone had seen the shape in the sky. Someone had documented it, and classified the documentation, and made the decision that the American public did not need to know that there were shapes in their sky that didn't fit any existing category. Made that decision and kept making it, every time. Sealed the file, transferred the jurisdiction, told the local law enforcement that their continued interest would be unwise, and moved on to the next one.
Arden sat back and stared at the ceiling.
She was not surprised. That was the strange thing. She had spent six weeks coming here in the evenings and looking at these photographs and she had, at some level, known what was in them. She had known it since the clearing, since she'd stood at the edge of the circle and felt the warmth rising from the glass and looked at the footprints that ended in mid-stride and understood that she was looking at a category of thing that her twenty-seven years had not prepared her for. She had known and had kept trying to find the explanation that fit what she knew, because what she knew was all she had, and you worked with what you had.
None of it applied. She was done pretending it did.
* * *
She thought about Calvin Rourke while she waited for the first drive to finish copying.
She'd seen him twice since the gas station. Once at a county emergency management meeting, where they'd sat at opposite ends of the table and looked at each other once across the room with the specific communication of two people who were not going to talk about the thing they were both thinking about because the room was full of people who didn't know about it. Once at the post office, where they'd had the brief, oblique conversation that was becoming a pattern between them --- you sleeping okay, no, you, no --- the exchange of two people carrying the same weight in the same silence.
Calvin had been Army. Twenty years. He'd walked into that clearing with the calm of someone who had done threat assessments in worse places, and he'd called it right, and then he'd watched the federal agents take it away from him with the particular stoicism of a man who had spent two decades in institutions that made decisions above his pay grade and he'd learned to function within that constraint.
She respected that. She also knew it was costing him. She could see it in the way he looked at the mountains now --- the slight extra attention, the noticing. The sky had changed for him the way it had changed for her. Not dangerous. Just larger. Requiring more attention than it had before.
Calvin Rourke was not going to do what she was doing tonight. That was a choice she understood and didn't judge. He had a wife and a life he'd built carefully and a career that he'd come back from hard places to sustain, and the calculation he'd run was different from hers and it was a legitimate calculation. She wasn't the only one who could decide what the cost was worth.
But she also knew that what she was preserving tonight was partly for him. For the day when someone who wanted to understand what had happened in that clearing would need a record that existed outside the federal database. For the day when the classified file wasn't sufficient and someone needed to know what two law enforcement officers in Teton County, Montana, had seen with their own eyes and documented with their own hands on a clear October afternoon.
If that day came, Calvin Rourke would want the record to exist. He'd be glad she'd made it.
She was making it.
* * *
The smart play was obvious. Destroy the photographs, bury the file, go home to her husband and sleep.
The federals had been careful not to threaten her directly --- they were too professional for explicit threats --- but the message had been clear enough in the space between their words, in the flat voice and the staged indifference and the document she wasn't permitted to read. This matter is closed. Continued interest would be unwise. She'd been a cop long enough to know what unwise meant from a man who knew where she worked and where she lived and had the resources of a federal agency she'd never heard of standing behind him.
She'd worked this through from every angle across the past six weeks. The arguments for letting it go were real and she'd given them their due. She had a husband. She had eleven years of work in this county, a department she'd built, people who depended on the institution she ran. She had a pension. She had a life. The federal agents had not invented the risk they were implying, and a woman who had spent twenty-seven years doing risk assessments understood that this one was legitimate.
She'd also spent twenty-seven years in a job where smart wasn't always the same as right, and she had never been able to make herself care more about smart.
Barbara Matthews had come to her office two weeks ago.
She'd sat across this same desk --- the chair was still pulled out at the same angle, Arden had noticed it every time she came in since --- and placed a folder on the desk with the careful deliberateness of a woman who had organized her grief into something she could carry. Phone records. Bank statements. A photograph of her son from his last birthday dinner. And a notepad with questions written in neat handwriting, numbered, the way Barbara Matthews apparently organized everything: the way a woman organized a life alone after her husband died, raising a boy by herself, making order out of uncertainty by writing things down and working through them systematically.
Arden had looked at those questions and known she wasn't going to answer most of them. That had been a particular kind of bad --- sitting across from a woman holding numbered questions and knowing you were going to leave most of them blank.
She'd told Barbara the case was closed. That the federal jurisdiction was beyond her reach. That she was sorry.
All of that was true. The part she hadn't said was: I have photographs. I have soil samples. I have a field notebook full of observations that the federal agents never found because I put them in my car before they arrived. I have been sitting on all of it for six weeks trying to decide what to do, and the reason I haven\'t told you is that I\'m afraid of what happens to both of us if I do.
That was the lie. Not what she'd said but what she hadn't. The omission. The careful silence of a cop who was still calculating risk when she should have been telling the truth.
She'd watched Barbara stand up and thank her for her time and fold her numbered questions back into the folder with the same careful organization she'd brought them out with, and she'd watched her walk out of the office, and she'd sat at her desk for twenty minutes afterward doing nothing.
That was six weeks ago. She was done with that.
Arden opened her desk drawer and took out three USB drives.
* * *
It took two hours to copy everything.
She worked methodically, the way she'd always worked --- not fast, not slow, complete. The photographs first, all forty-seven of them, including the one with the shape in the sky that she'd discovered forty minutes ago and was now, in a sense, the reason all of this was happening tonight rather than some other night or never. She copied them in order, labeled each file with date and location and a brief description, because evidence without context was just noise and she wasn't handing Barbara Matthews noise.
The soil samples she'd managed to keep back were in the locked cabinet the federals hadn't found --- the one in the bottom drawer that looked like a filing cabinet but was actually rated for evidence storage, which she'd paid for out of her own pocket when she first took the job and which had never been listed in the department's inventory because she'd never put it there. She photographed each bag, front and back, the labels she'd written at the scene: Sample A, outer ring vegetation. Sample B, compressed earth perimeter. Sample C, glassy center — do not open. That one she'd never opened. She wasn't going to.
Her personal field notebook she photographed page by page. It took forty minutes for sixty pages because she was careful about the angles and the lighting and she took each page twice to ensure legibility. These were the notes she'd written in real time, standing in the clearing and sitting in her cruiser on the drive back and later, much later, in the quiet of her office when the detail had come back to her and she'd written it down before it went away: The footprints end in mid-stride, weight forward, as if he was walking and simply ceased. Not stopped. Ceased. The federal agent — lead, no name given, badge number covered — held his hand over the glass and nodded. Not the nod of someone surprised. The nod of someone confirming. Pages of it. The kind of observation that didn't go in official reports because official reports were read by supervisors and attorneys and whoever else the chain of custody deposited them with, and certain observations ended careers.
These observations would be on the drive Barbara Matthews received. Arden had spent six weeks deciding that, and tonight she wasn't reconsidering.
Three drives. One for herself, hidden in a false panel she'd built into her home office desk and never told anyone about --- not even Martin, because there were things you protected people from by not telling them, and if the federals came looking she wanted to be able to say honestly that she didn't know where it was. One in a waterproof capsule she'd bury in the garden, marked by a stone she'd already chosen, waiting for the day it might be needed by someone she couldn't predict. And one for Barbara Matthews.
That one was the point of the whole exercise.
A grieving woman deserved to know that her son hadn't simply walked away. That what had happened to him was real and documented and witnessed and known by people with the power and the resources to address it, who had chosen instead to file it under a classification level most senators never reached and assign it a case number that would never appear in any public record. That she wasn't wrong to refuse to close it. That her son had walked into that clearing with purpose --- with the stride of a man who knew where he was going --- and whatever he'd found there, it had not been nothing.
Arden tucked the drives into her jacket and shut down her computer.
The screen going dark made the office feel different. She'd been in this room so many times, at so many hours, that she'd stopped seeing it --- the way you stopped seeing the furniture in your own house, just moved around it. Now she was seeing it.
Eleven years. The photographs on the wall behind her desk: her swearing-in, the department Christmas party from last year, the photo someone had taken at the scene of the Larimer fire when she'd stood with her deputies at the edge of a field they'd spent eight hours containing and the exhaustion and the relief were the same feeling. The commendations in their frames, the ones she'd put up because the officers who'd earned them deserved to have their names on a wall. The coffeemaker she'd bought herself when the department's broke and the county said there was no budget for a replacement. The window that looked out on Main Street, where she'd watched a town go through four years of drought and two years of recovery and a wildfire season that had taken three structures on the east side, and through all of it the people here had done what people in small towns did: kept going, helped each other, showed up.
She'd built something here. It wasn't perfect and it wasn't always easy and there had been nights when she'd wondered if she'd made the right choice leaving Billings, leaving the bigger cases, the more visible work. But it was real. It was hers. And what she was about to do could end it.
She'd thought about that. The federal agents hadn't threatened her directly because they were professionals and professionals didn't threaten directly, but she understood the architecture of what they were telling her. Continued interest in this case would have consequences. The kind of consequences that eroded institutional support and complicated budget requests and made things difficult in ways that were hard to trace and impossible to fight.
She thought about her father, who had ranched forty miles east of here on land that had been in his family for three generations, and who had believed without complication that the truth was the truth regardless of who found it inconvenient. Who had taught her, by example rather than instruction, that there were lines that didn't move no matter who was standing on the other side of them. Not because moving them was always dangerous. Because moving them changed something in you that couldn't be changed back.
She'd been a cop for twenty-seven years without moving those lines.
She wasn't going to start tonight.
She looked at the room one last time — the coffeemaker, the commendations, the window on Main Street. Then she turned off the light and picked up her jacket and walked out into the December cold, and the Christmas lights on the storefronts threw their colored reflections on the ice, and it was a small town on a quiet night in Montana, and she drove home carrying three USB drives and the weight of something that was larger than all of it.
* * *
The drive home took twelve minutes.
She knew every turn of it the way she knew most things in this county --- by repetition, by attention, by the accumulated familiarity of a woman who had patrolled these roads long enough to know which intersections flooded in spring and which section of highway 89 needed resurfacing and which properties had dogs that ran to the fence when a car slowed. She drove on autopilot, thinking about Barbara Matthews.
Barbara Matthews had driven herself to the department in October, right after her son's case transferred. She'd parked in visitor parking and walked in with the folder and the numbered questions and had not called ahead, which Arden had appreciated --- there was a directness to that, a refusal to be managed, that she recognized as the quality of someone who had decided she was not going to let this disappear. She'd sat in the chair across Arden's desk with her hands folded on top of the folder and she'd looked Arden in the eyes and she'd said: He didn\'t just walk away. I need you to tell me what you know.
Arden had told her what she was permitted to tell her, which was almost nothing. She'd watched Barbara absorb this with the steadiness of a woman who had expected it and had come anyway because she needed to say to someone's face that she wasn't done.
She wasn't crazy. Whatever the federal agents and their sealed files and their national security directives had tried to imply by their thoroughness, Barbara Matthews wasn't crazy. She was right. Her son had walked into a clearing in his own county and something had taken him, and that was real and documented and witnessed, and Barbara was the only member of his family and she deserved to know it.
Arden was going to tell her in the morning.
* * *
She buried the second drive in the garden at 2 a.m.
The temperature had dropped to eleven degrees. She'd put on her work coat and her heavy gloves and brought the pickaxe from the shed, and she stood for a moment in the yard before she started, locating the stone she'd chosen last week --- a flat piece of limestone she'd placed at the edge of the vegetable bed with the apparent casualness of someone doing garden maintenance. It was the kind of detail that was invisible until you knew what it marked. She hoped it would remain invisible for a long time. She hoped it would never be needed.
The frozen ground took twenty minutes to break through and another ten to dig to the depth she wanted. She'd sealed the drive in a waterproof capsule --- the kind used for geocaching, which she'd bought at the outdoor store in Great Falls and paid cash for, which was probably excessive caution but she was a cop and excessive caution was a professional habit. The capsule went in. The earth went back. The stone went down.
She stood in the yard with her breath fogging in the cold and her hands aching from the pickaxe and looked at the stone for a moment. A flat piece of limestone in a garden bed. Nothing.
Everything.
Martin slept through all of it. She could hear him through the bedroom window when she passed beneath it, the particular rhythm of someone deeply asleep, the breathing of a man whose wife had told him enough times that her work hours were unpredictable that he no longer woke when she came home late. He was a good man who had made peace, across twenty years of marriage to a cop, with not asking certain questions. She'd loved him for that more than she'd ever found the words to tell him.
After, she stood at the bedroom window and looked at the moon.
She'd been looking at it this way every night since October --- not the way she'd looked at it her whole life, as a fixture, a thing that rose and set and lit up the dark, as reliable as the schedule she'd built her work around. She looked at it now with the specific attention of a person who understood that what she’d taken for granted all her life wasn’t fixed the way she’d thought. That the sky she’d watched from this county for eleven years had things in it she hadn’t known to look for.
Twenty-seven years of cop work, and she'd thought she knew the full catalog of what human beings could do to each other. She'd known it was incomplete --- every experienced investigator knew the catalog was incomplete, that there were crimes and cruelties still being invented --- but she'd assumed the gaps were human in scale. Comprehensible, eventually, with enough patience and enough data.
Bron Matthews had not been in a human-scale gap.
She’d spent two decades in homicide cataloging the worst of what people did to each other, and nothing in that catalog had a word for what she’d found in that clearing. The catalog just stopped.
He wasn't dead. She knew that the way she'd known other things across her career --- not from evidence, not from reasoning, but from the accumulated weight of paying attention to the world until the world occasionally told you things it didn't tell people who weren't paying attention. The footprints. The deliberate pace. The paperback three-quarters read. A man who had walked toward something with the stride of someone who had made a decision --- not stumbled into something, not been taken by surprise, but chosen to go.
Bron Matthews was alive. He was somewhere that was not here. And the shape in the sky in that photograph had been part of how he got there.
She didn't know what that meant. She'd stopped expecting it to fit the categories she had.
What she didn't know was whether any of what she'd done tonight would matter. Whether the drives would be found before they were needed. Whether Barbara Matthews would believe her, or whether the federals would find out what she'd copied and come for all of it.
She was a sheriff in a small county in Montana. She had photographs and soil samples and sixty pages of field notes that didn't fit any existing category. She was one person who had seen something she couldn't un-see, doing the only thing she knew how to do with it: documenting it, preserving it, getting it outside the reach of people who had decided it should disappear.
But it was what she had, and she'd done it, and in the morning she would find Barbara Matthews.
She climbed into bed and lay in the dark next to her husband and listened to the wind off the mountains.
In the morning she would find Barbara Matthews.
Tonight she let herself sleep.
* * *
Three USB drives.
One behind a false panel in a desk drawer, waiting in the dark of a home office in a house where a good man slept, waiting for the day it might be needed or the day it wouldn't be.
One in frozen Montana ground, under a flat piece of limestone in a vegetable garden, waiting for a spring that would come and go without knowing it, and then many springs after that, patient in the cold soil.
One in the inside pocket of a sheriff's jacket, waiting to be handed to a woman with numbered questions and a photograph from a birthday dinner and a refusal to close the file in her own head that Arden Calloway understood completely, because some files didn't close just because someone told them to.
She would sit across from her and tell her the truth --- the documented, evidenced, witnessed truth --- and she would hand her the drive and let her do whatever she needed to do with it. What Barbara Matthews did with it was Barbara Matthews' decision. Arden's job had been to make sure it survived long enough to be a decision.
She had put it somewhere safe. Labeled correctly. Marked with a stone.
Arden Calloway was counting on that.
She climbed into bed beside her husband and closed her eyes, and outside the window the moon moved slowly across the Montana sky, the same moon it had always been, in a sky she no longer took at face value, and the drives were where she had put them, and in the morning she would find Barbara Matthews, and she slept.
END
The Sheriff's Last Report is a short story set in the world of THE SENTINEL OF CRATER DAEDALUS, Book One of The Sentinel Trilogy.
— Brian Bullock / Everyone Knows Podcast | Starborne Studios | brianbullockwriter.com | X @EveryoneKnws1