At the door I checked for signs that someone had been there while I was out. The faint dusting of sand I’d scattered on the doorstep was unmarked. There were no glistening marks on the locks to show anyone had finessed their way inside. Someone could have entered by the back door, but I doubted that. Everything was still and silent and felt at peace. Bryce still looked like he was expecting to die at any second.

At least Bryce had seen enough sense to put the gun away. It was pleasing: I was growing a little tired at being threatened by someone I had deemed a friend.

We walked inside and I paused to get a feel for the house. It was as I’d left it. No eddies of air shifted to warn of stealthy movement nearby. There was no detectable odor of a nervous man waiting in concealment. I nodded Bryce inside. Bryce moved past me and if I wanted to I could have killed him easily. His fieldcraft had grown rusty, either that or the fear he was under had displaced the rules from his mind. Following him, I saw that his shoulders were rounded, as though he were already a defeated man.

I’d spent last night here, sleeping on a futon in one corner of the living room. The only other furniture was a deck chair. Bryce sat down in it uninvited.

“Tell me everything, Bryce.”

He chewed his bottom lip. He was forced to lean back in the chair to look up at me. “First I want to apologize for holding a gun on you.”

“That’d be a start. But forget it. I knew you wouldn’t use it.”

“I’m surprised you let me get close enough to pull a gun on you.”

“I was there as a friend,” I reminded him.

Bryce indicated his breast pocket. “Not a gun this time.”

I nodded at him to go ahead and he withdrew an envelope and held it out to me. From his pinched expression, it held something nasty. The envelope disgorged a short stack of photographs.

The first photo showed a woman and a teenage boy lying dead in the street. They looked like they’d been gunned down as they were walking out the front door of their home. The second showed a woman lying in woodland. She was dead too. Her eyes were rolled up in their sockets as though she were trying to focus on the single bullet hole in her forehead.

Sighing at the cruel nature of the world, I pushed these two photographs back in the envelope. I didn’t know any of the faces.

Photograph three was different, though.