Out of my peripheral vision I spot Reynolds. He has managed to worm his way further into the open. Two red dots quiver along his shoulders and skull. The lasers, I see, are coming from different directions.

Through the broken phone screen, I see numbers counting down, presumably to give a caller time to reconsider before they are patched through to emergency services.

Three, two, one—

“Throw out the phone,” a female voice shouts from my left. I recognize it as Tiff’s.

“Throw it out!” says a man.

Then, to prove they mean business, one of the red dots veers to Reynolds’s right boot. There is a sharp crack. The crawling man screams as a high-powered bullet pierces rubber and flesh and pulverizes the bones in his ankle.

32

The woman who opened the door for me had skin the color of caramel. She was somewhere between stocky and shapely, with a buzzcut that on anyone else would have been her defining physical attribute. But Bazinet’s daughter, Felice, had beguiling eyes. They were extraordinarily large, and the irises were a mixture of greenish bronze and copper brown.

“Hello?”

She addressed me through the storm door. The glass was covered with enough small handprints to tell me at least one child resided inside.

Her severe haircut gave her a military vibe. She’d gone all in on the bootcamp look with a white tee and green cargo pants. Her arms were toned and tatted.

“You wouldn’t happen to be Felice?”

“I think you know I am. What I can do for you, officer?”

I sometimes fancied that, because of the middling length of my hair and the fact that I didn’t use a razor every morning, there wasn’t a sign above my head announcing to the world that I was law enforcement.

I produced my badge. She squinted at it like someone who wore or would soon wear reading glasses.

“I’m Mike Bowditch. I’m an investigator with the Maine Warden Service. Does Vic Bazinet live here?”

“I think you know that, too.”

“Is he at home?”

“No.”

“Do you expect him home soon?”

“Why? What’s this about?”

Inside a television was going. I saw the flickers of a screen and heard the tail end of a commercial warning that a certain prescription drug shouldn’t be used by women who were pregnant or planned on becoming pregnant.

“I’ve been assigned to take another look into a case we investigated several years ago. A duck hunter drowned in the river above Gulf Island Pond. You knew him, I think. Eben Chamberlain.”

“What is there to look into exactly?”

“Could I come in? It’s not easy having a conversation through this door.”

She glanced over her shoulder, considering.

Now that I was looking at the side of her face, rather than head-on, I realized that she wasn’t as young as I’d first assumed. Late thirties. Maybe even forty.