“Christ!” Tina says. “Do you smell that?”

“I think he shit himself,” says Tanner.

“Bowditch?”

“No, the other one. People do that when they die. The muscles in your ass loosen and out comes the crap.”

“Gross!”

Reynolds is in here with me. They’ve thrown his body into the SUV, too.

This really is a hearse.

That’s going to complicate matters for the crime scene investigators back in the field. From the blood, they’ll know someone died, and not from the crash. There will be footprints and drag marks showing a body was removed. And the license plate of the wrecked van will lead them to Reynolds. But they won’t be 100 percent sure his is the missing corpse, not without first processing the physical evidence they collect.

Tina has rolled down a window and lit a menthol cigarette to obscure some of the stench inside the cab, but the smoke, from my perspective, only makes the miasma even more stomach-turning.

“We’re going to have to burn this vehicle anyway,” says Tanner. “We can’t just drop it in a quarry like we did that other one. Those CSI guys can pick a fiber off a body and match it to a blanket that’s only for sale at Marden’s.”

“Half that stuff is made up for TV,” she says.

“Gram won’t take that chance. I’m glad we didn’t take my Toyota. I love that 4Runner. I couldn’t have torched it.”

“You would have done it if Gram told you to.”

He actually laughed, the son of a bitch. “Hell yeah, I would. I saw what she did to Lynda for being cute with the warden.”

But I’m thinking about what Tina and Tanner said before how the twins’ father died. He crashed into a moose.

It’s not an exotic way to die in Maine. I’ve stood over a dozen of those fatals.

But Tina mentioned that her own father had perished in prison.

All day I have walked around with a vague discomfort, haunted by shadowy thoughts that refused to take shape into suspicions. I knew I was being played but I was too blind to understand why. The “Dillons” were batting me around like a cat with a stunned mouse.

In my mind now their names began to stream downward like credits at the end of a movie.

Tori.

Tiff.

Tina.

Tanner.

The kid I’d met in Jewett’s woodlot, the one I’d shot when he rushed Reynolds’s van, his name began with a T, too.

Todd.

Now the realization passes through me like a hot flash.

These people aren’t who they are pretending be. In an effort to escape their criminal history and start anew, they have changed their last name since our paths last crossed.

These people aren’t Dillons.

They are Dows.

And suddenly I understood the reason behind the family’s hatred for me.