For several seconds, nobody spoke.
Finally, Collins looked at Reyes.
"We need to contact the county."
Moren's face went pale.
Because the problem was no longer just her damaged SUV.
It was the possibility that the land she'd been threatening to take from Hank Briggs concealed evidence capable of exposing an entirely different scheme.
And she had driven her own vehicle directly into the middle of it.
Eighteen months earlier, Hank's greatest worry had been whether the early summer rain would arrive before the corn needed it.
He lived on 160 acres outside Lincoln, Nebraska, in a two-story farmhouse that had belonged to the Briggs family since 1952. His grandfather bought the original parcel after years of saving money while working agricultural jobs across eastern Nebraska. The land wasn't especially impressive then. Much of it needed drainage improvements, the fencing was poor, and the old barn leaned slightly toward the west.
But his grandfather saw opportunity in the soil.
He worked the fields with borrowed machinery, repaired the fences by hand, and planted corn during the first growing season. Over the following decades, he improved the property one project at a time. He added a workshop, expanded the barn, and established the irrigation and drainage arrangements that allowed the farm to survive both dry summers and heavy spring storms.
Hank's father, Thomas Briggs, took over the operation in the late 1980s.
Thomas wasn't a talkative man.
He preferred early mornings, strong coffee, and machinery that worked when he needed it. He believed farming required patience because the weather, markets, and equipment rarely cooperated with anyone's plans.
Hank grew up following him.
At six, he collected tools.
At ten, he helped clean equipment.
At fourteen, he could explain the difference between several common mechanical failures before he knew how to talk comfortably to girls at school.
His father insisted he learn the farm's boundaries as carefully as he learned the engines.
"That land isn't just dirt," Thomas told him one afternoon while they repaired a fence near the eastern field. "It's responsibility. You need to know where it begins, where it ends, and what you've promised other people they can do on it."
Hank remembered the words.
But it took years before he understood their full importance.
Thomas died when Hank was twenty-seven.