I opened the note:

The death in my blood

I gave it to you.

On the other side of the grave

I’ll be waiting for you.

I handed the note back as if it were on fire.

“Wanted the kid to be afraid even after he was dead. That’s Alec,” Lief said. “And maybe you never did meet, but he asked for you specifically. Remember that.”

I nodded.

Dolquist’s voice was hesitant. “Do you need me?”

Lief shook his head. “Write me up a report, have it on my desk in the morning, and I think we’re okay, Ron.”

Dolquist stopped just outside the van and shook my hand. “Nice meeting you, Mr. Kenzie. I hope everything works out.”

“Same here.”

He nodded but wouldn’t meet my eyes and then he nodded curtly at Lief and turned to walk away.

Lief patted him on the back, a slightly awkward gesture, as if he’d never done it before. “Take care, Ron.”

We watched the little muscular man walk down the path a bit before he stopped and seemed almost to jerk to his left and cut across the lawn toward the parking lot.

“He’s a little weird,” Lief said, “but he’s a good man.”

The great shadow of the prison wall cut across the lawn and darkened the grass and Dolquist seemed wary of it. He walked along its edge, in the strip of sunlit grass, and he did so gingerly, as if he were afraid he’d step too much to his left and sink through the dark grass.

“Where do you think he’s going?”

“To check on his wife.” Lief spit into the gravel.

“You think what Hardiman said was true.”

He shrugged. “Don’t know. The details were precise, though. If it was your wife, and she’d been unfaithful before, wouldn’t you go check?”

Dolquist was a tiny figure now as he reached the edge of the grass and cut around the shadow of the prison into the parking lot before disappearing from view.

“Poor bastard,” I said.

Lief spit into the gravel again. “Pray Hardiman don’t make someone say that about you someday.”

A sudden stiff breeze curled out of the dark shadows under the wall and I shrugged my shoulders against it as I opened the back door of the RV.

Bolton said, “Nice interviewing technique. You study?”

“I did my best,” I said.

“You did shit,” he said. “You learned absolutely zero about these current killings in there.”

“Oh well.” I looked around the RV. Erdham and Fields sat at the thin black table. Above them, the bank of six monitors played five recordings of our interview with Hardiman, the sixth covering real time as Alec sat in the same position we’d left him in, his eyes closed, head thrown back, lips pursed.

Beside me Lief watched the second bank of monitors on the opposite wall as a series of prisoner photos rolled across, angry faces being replaced by fresh angry faces at a rate of six every two minutes. I looked over and watched Erdham’s fingers whiz over a computer keypad and I realized he was rifling through the prison files of every inmate.