“Bartender down in Auburn—or at least he was at the time. A hipster hangout called the Brass Monkey. As in ‘cold enough to freeze the balls off of.’ He owns a mobile home up on Pill Hill. That’s not the place’s real name obviously. I don’t know if it has a name. It’s just what people started calling the ridge after they built the trailer park.”

I underlined the name in my pad. “Pills as in oxycodone?”

“Narcotics in general. Domestic violence. Your occasional drunken fracas. The sheriff’s department gets a call up there every weekend. I remember when it was just woods. Gil had a deer stand along that ridge he let me use when I was eighteen. Shot myself a ten-point buck.”

In reality it had probably been a four-point buck. Or a little spike. Or even a doe. Maybe Rivard hadn’t shot anything at all. One could never be sure.

“And you said this bartender claimed he saw Chamberlain alone on the river—”

“Yep.”

“That seems convenient, wouldn’t you say, having an eyewitness in a place so remote? How did you happen to find him?”

His dark eyebrows lowered. Not for the first time, he interpreted a question from me as a challenge.

“He came forward during the search. The glamazon had issued a reward of ten grand for whoever found the body.”

I vaguely remembered this. “That sounds like convenient timing on the part of Mr. Burch.”

“You’d think so, but he had no connection to the deceased and no criminal record. I warned her offering a reward would bring out the yahoos. By then, she had lost trust in the Warden Service. She wanted to embarrass us in the public eye. Some concerned citizens even took boats out with homemade dragging hooks. It’s a wonder we didn’t end up having to recover their corpses, too. How did you get out of working the search? I can’t recall.”

I shrugged off the implication that I had a dodged one of my official duties. “I was working that snowmobile crash in Baldwin. The teenage girl who ran into a guy wire and was decapitated.”

“Oh, shit. I remember now. It was, like, her first time on a sled.”

“Not exactly,” I said. “But the snowmobile was an early Christmas present from her father. Two weeks later, he hanged himself in the woods. I was the one who found both bodies.”

His eyes began to well up. “If that happened to one of my kids, I probably would have.…” He massaged his forehead to keep me from seeing him wipe his tears with the heel of his hand. “Suicides are the worst.”

“Yeah, they are.”

“I don’t miss seeing shit like that, I have to say.”

Here was the riddle of Marc Rivard. Every time I became convinced he was a sociopath, he would pry open his hairy chest to reveal a beating human heart.