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Trainor were en route and were standing by to render assistance as needed. Glen Harrelson’ s wife, Sharon, the Thornton police learned through conversations with the dead man’s coworkers, lived in a remote mountain home in Weston. They also learned more jarring information: It seemed Sharon’s second husband had died five years before, and while there was no murder investigation—that death was ruled accidental, a car wreck—there were some concerns.
    It was a little after 3 P.M. when the pair got into their unmarked detective unit, an Impala, for the long drive south.
    Their minds raced. There was no red flag larger in law enforcement: The woman they were going to see was twice a widow. Her husbands had died untimely, suspicious deaths.
    “Wouldn’t it be weird if we cleared them both?” Det. Trainor asked as he and his partner merged onto I-25.
    “Yeah,” she answered. “It would be.”
    Glen Trainor was three inches shorter than Elaine Tygart, but neither saw themselves as Mutt and Jeff. They were professionals with a job to do. They drove on.
    Most longtime Coloradans know of Trinidad and its surrounding environs. The place, in a word, had a reputation. It was an isolated town, a somewhat inbred haven for the alternative and the strange. Of course, the handiwork of Trinidad’s gender reassignment surgeon Dr. Stanley Biber and his world-renowned sex-change clinic routinely came up when people outside the community spoke of the town. Some in law enforcement considered Trinidad a postcard-pretty place with a dark side of corruption, mystery, and waitresses with five o’clock shadow.
    As one native Coloradan half-joked, “Trinidad has seventy-three churches and eighty bars.”
    The two detectives chatted about the mountain community as they drove Trinidad’s streets in search of the police station and Las Animas County Sheriff’s Department. Keenly aware of their outsider-status, they wondered what kind of assistance they’d get from the local cops. Secluded places like Trinidad don’t like strangers butting into their business. But to the detectives’ surprise, instead of resistance they were greeted with handshakes and offers to help when they arrived in the hand-cut gray stone building that housed both the sheriff and the police.
    As the sheriff’s deputies began to talk about the woman the Thornton pair had come to interview, an unflattering and unsettling picture began to emerge. Sharon Harrelson had been the talk of the town from nearly her first days in the area. It seemed everyone knew her and no one was surprised the police wanted to talk to her. She was lusty, flamboyant. She was a bed hopper that would give the frogs of Calaveras County a run for their money. It seemed like she’d bedded half the men—married or single—in a hundred-mile radius. If you wore pants and were looking for a woman to spread her legs, this lady apparently obliged.
    Some of it was gossip. Some of it was mean-spirited; the kind of talk that comes from horny men who didn’t get any at home. Sitting in the bar, bullshitting the hours away until closing, talking about the women they’d like to screw…the lady in the fancy house on Cougar Ridge frequently came up in conversation.
    Whatever the reality of the basis of her reputation, it was doubtful any grass grew under the lady’s feet.
    The sheriff’s deputy told Tygart and Trainor that as far as they knew, Sharon Harrelson was at home. The lack of phone service in the area made it impossible to give her a call to see if she was there. Though it was late, the only way to confirm it was to take the forty-five-minute trip out to Weston, where her home was perched on a mountainside. The Thornton detectives were put into the backseat of an older-than-the-hills Scout and taken to a house where they picked up a young man—the son of another officer—who knew the location of Sharon Harrelson’ s mountain hideaway.
    “Never find it without a guide,” the deputy said,