The Gentry County Sheriff's Office occupied the ground floor and basement of the Annex, a flat-roofed brick building from 1974 that sat behind the courthouse like a dog behind its owner. The jail was on the lower level, forty-two beds, built for thirty, holding on any given morning anywhere from fifty to sixty, most of them for something to do with methamphetamine or heroin or fentanyl or pills or the things people did to get them. The office was on the upper level: a lobby with a glass window where the civilian clerk sat, a hallway with the chief deputy's office and the detective's office and a room for the six road deputies with three desks among them, an evidence room with a steel door and a keypad and a logbook, and at the end of the hall, the sheriff's office, which had a window looking out on the parking lot and the back of the courthouse and, in October, one very good sugar maple.
In the lobby, across from the clerk's window, was the blue drop box.
He passed it on the way in, as he passed it every morning, and as he did every morning he put his palm flat on the top of it for a second, the way some men touch a doorframe. He did not know when he had started doing that. It was cold under his hand. Every two weeks the evidence technician emptied it into a carton sealed with red tape, signed and logged and driven to an incinerator in Indianapolis. Last year it had taken in four hundred and eleven pounds. The number was on a sign by the box. Nolan had insisted on the sign.
"Morning, Sheriff," said Doreen, at the window.
"Morning, Doreen. You see the thing from Washington County?"
"The old man with the scripts? I saw it. Sounds like half the county."
"Sounds like me," Nolan said, and she laughed.
His office smelled of the coffee from the machine in the break room and of the radiator, which had come on for the first time that week and was burning off a summer's dust. On the wall behind his desk was his framed commission and a photograph of him shaking hands with the governor, and a photograph of Verlie on the dock at Patoka Lake in a straw hat, laughing at something off to the side of the camera, and a photograph of Dakota in his football uniform at seventeen, number thirty-four, kneeling on one knee with his helmet on the other.
And on the wall across from the desk, where he could see it every time he looked up, was the board.
It was a corkboard, four feet by six, the kind a school would buy. It had been there since 2012. On it, pinned in rows with red pushpins, were index cards, plain white three-by-five, one for each person in Gentry County who had died of an overdose since Nolan Caudill had been sheriff. Each card had a name, an age, a date, and nothing else. He had written every one of them himself, in block capitals, with a black felt-tip pen. There were thirty-one. The newest was from July: BRITTANY DOTSON, 34, 7/19/2026. The oldest, top left, was from his second year: DARVIN LEE HAGER, 41, 3/2/2012. A reporter from the Louisville paper had once asked him how he stood to look at it all day, and he had said, That's the point. I'm not supposed to stand it.