It was a typical late summer evening in Riley County, Kansas. The kind where the cicadas hummed a lazy tune and the air still held the day's warmth, even as dusk painted the sky in hues of lavender and orange. Maeve O'Connell, proprietor and sole detective of the Prairie Shadows Detective Agency, was on her cabin's front porch, nursing a cup of lukewarm coffee. Her gaze drifted over the familiar silhouette of the Flint Hills, a landscape she knew like the back of her hand, when the shrill ring of her cell phone shattered the tranquility.

In the quiet heartland of America, where the prairies stretch under endless skies, you might imagine life moves at a different pace. Simpler. More predictable. For Maeve O'Connell, a private detective operating out of Riley County, Kansas, that was certainly the case. Her days at the Prairie Shadows Detective Agency were usually filled with the mundane mysteries of rural life – stray cattle, missing heirlooms, the occasional wayward spouse. She was a woman of logic, of tangible evidence, firmly rooted in the practical.

Our case today takes us just west of Manhattan, out into the rolling fields that give this county its backbone. It’s about a man named Arthur Finch. Arthur, sixty-two years old, a retired agronomy professor from K-State, a widower, and by all accounts, a creature of habit. Until June 10th, that is.