Pulled up by the park entrance, Ricci and Thibodeau looked out at the solitary figure of Rob Howell on the other side of a high chain-link fence surrounding the courts. His back to the plastic-coated mesh, hands deep in the pockets of his barn coat, Howell stood watching the dogs chase each other in repeated energetic circles around the wet artificial turf.

Thibodeau shifted around to face the woman.

“We won’t trouble him any more ’n we need,” he said. “I promise you.”

She nodded without turning from her window. Dressed in jeans and a light brown corduroy jacket that closely matched the color of her hair, Meredith Wagner was about thirty-five, plain, thin, soft spoken, and visibly worn. They had found her at the ranch-style house she shared with her husband, Nick; three-year-old daughter, Katie; and, since yesterday, her brother Rob and his five greyhounds in a quiet suburban development outside Sonoma.

“He’s so used to caring for those animals . . . I don’t think he could make it if not for them,” she said. “I don’t think he’d have anything left to keep him in one piece.”

Thibodeau did not comment. He wasn’t sure whether she had been addressing him or thinking aloud to herself. In either case, he could say nothing except what she would already know—that he wished things were otherwise, wished events hadn’t brought them to where they were right now.

He thought in silence a few moments. When you went fishing for information, you could never predict which facts would take a long cast of the reel to pull in, which ones would jump into your hands, and which would lead you toward a rich bounty of others. After Ricci had reminded him how he’d gotten Erickson to let out that Rob Howell was staying with relatives, Thibodeau had thought it might be a while before they could identify the particular family members and track them down. But that had proven to be as easy as stopping at a gas station to buy the Monday-morning edition of a regional newspaper called the Mountain Journal. Though they had originally picked it up to see what the police and emergency freq chasers might have found out about the crime from early dispatcher-respondent radio exchanges that would flurry over the air before law-enforcement put a stopper on open communications, it had been of far greater help than they’d bargained for. The paper’s freelance police stringer had picked up on the double homicide near the state park in time to get a jump on local television stations, learn where Howell had gone through his homespun contacts, and include the sister’s name and town of residence in his story. Once they read it, Ricci had only needed to call directory information for her phone number and street address.