On one end of the phone, prosecutors say, was a man discussing plans to kill a sheriff’s deputy in Granville County, N.C. On the other end was the sheriff.

Case closed, you might think.

But, according to prosecutors, not only did the sheriff decline to haul the plotter in, he also encouraged him to carry out the killing and gave him advice on how to foil a murder investigation.

“You ain’t got the weapon, you ain’t got nothing to go on,” Sheriff Brindell Wilkins said during a recorded telephone call, according to an indictment released Monday in which he was charged with two felony counts of obstruction of justice. “The only way we find out these murder things is people talk. You can’t tell nobody nothin’, not a thing.”

According to court records, the deputy, Joshua Freeman, was in possession of an audio recording in which the sheriff made “racially offensive” remarks in 2014, which he planned to release to the authorities in nearby Raleigh. The indictment did not specify exactly what was said.