Bram’s profile picture, I explained to Carson Gates, showed a Caucasian male in his midthirties with dark hair and blue eyes. Hair dye, colored contact lenses, and photo filters were a given; it’s witness-based composite sketches, not manipulated photos, that tend to get us our guy. Still, something about his picture tugged at my gut. His face evoked a memory, dog-eared and soft from use but long ago misplaced. I’d seen Bram before, but couldn’t say where.

The guy’s bio claimed he liked airport novels and Bill Murray movies. More lies. Historical data from the app’s administrators told us he updated his profile often, no doubt trying various combinations to see what stuck. There was just one constant among the write-ups, a line of text present every time. Blake Bram was from a town called Swanton, Vermont.

“Swanton. Sounds pretty as a picture, right?” I said as Carson listened with parted lips. “Back in the sixties, the Queen of England gifted Swanton with a pair of Royal Swans, and swans still swim in the town’s Village Green Park. To the west, you’ll find Lake Champlain; to the north, Canada. The 2010 census put the population of Swanton at 6,427. I know this because Swanton is where I grew up.”

There it was. It took an embarrassingly long time for me to go on. “When I heard the killer claimed to be from my hometown, I understood why the sergeant asked me to drop everything for this case. There was a two-week time span between the disappearances, and no reason to think Bram’s spree was done. We were roughly the same age, he and I, and six thousand people wasn’t a lot.”

Carson waited, cupping the back of his baby-smooth neck with both hands.

“They were hoping I could ID the guy,” I went on. “Surely you know him, they said.”

What I didn’t tell Carson, or anyone else, is that they were right.

ONE

Thirteen months later

Murder,” I repeated, the word clumsy on my tongue. The last time I spoke it, I was in another world.

Tim rocked his office chair, testing the bounce on springs sticky with dust, and raised his empty coffee mug. “Murder on an island,” he said. “If it didn’t make me a heartless creep, I’d call this your lucky day, Shane.”

It was a nickname I hated, but I was still trying to reconcile Tim’s news with the water coursing down the window behind him, so I let it slide. Shane! Tim said my first day on the job. Don’t tell me you’ve never seen Shane! Old western movie? Gunfighter with a mysterious past? Get it? I didn’t, hated westerns with their drama and dust, but Tim was convinced it was funny.

That morning, no one was laughing. Tim took the transfer call from dispatch while I was putting a second pot on to brew, listening to the thunder rattle the panes and expecting nothing more from the Saturday than dry skin from the electric heat. As much as I wished the call was a joke, too—Tim needling “the new guy” or a prank by some bored townies—I knew it wasn’t, for three reasons. The first was Tim’s face. He had cartoonish eyebrows, so wide and straight they might have been drawn with a Sharpie. I’m not saying I’m perfect. Most people, when they look at me, see only my scar. But I wondered if in spite of Tim’s athletic build, perps saw him as a hapless clown with no sway. As I watched him ask the routine questions on the phone and scribble notes on a lined yellow pad, Tim’s face got hard as stone. It was an entirely new look on him. At least, it was new to me.