Two hundred and nineteen seizures. Three criminal charges.Arlen Boyce is the treasurer of a county of nineteen thousand people. He reconciles the road fund, signs the warrants, and walks the deposit to the bank himself on Tuesdays. He has never been in a police car in his life.Then a form crosses his desk with a number on it bigger than the entire road department's budget.Fourteen miles of Interstate 44 run through the corner of Chalmers County, Missouri, and the sheriff's interdiction unit works every one of them. They are good at it. Last year they took forty-one pounds out of a camper shell and eleven kilos out of a trunk, and the money pays for the school resource officer, the overdose kits in all thirty-one cars, and a boat that has pulled two people out of the Gasconade.It also took eleven thousand dollars in truck money off a twenty-three-year-old, and a widow's headstone money, and a drywall contractor's Friday payroll - and charged none of them with anything.Arlen finds that out on a public terminal in his own courthouse basement, in one afternoon, for free. Anyone could. Nobody ever had.Nothing anybody did was illegal. Every stop was lawful, every dog alert was probable cause, every notice was published exactly as the statute requires. The sheriff is not corrupt, drives a nine-year-old truck, and works Christmas.But the money had somewhere it was supposed to go - the state constitution says so, in a sentence written a hundred and fifty years ago - and somebody found a lawful door around it.There is no dirty cop in this book. That is the problem.A standalone thriller. No cliffhanger. The Patriot Files can be read in any order.
