“Not troubled yet,” he agreed. “But definitely burdened. This case has pivoted, and you were there when it did. We’ve gone from the quirky discovery of a dead thief in the trunk of the very car he stole to something darker, more elusive, and a lot more complicated.”

He paused to watch the shadow of a long, low-flying bird skim across the one remaining ice patch on the water’s smooth surface, far away.

“It’s got to be the same for you,” he resumed. “Every time a body bag is opened at the morgue and you set your eyes on its contents. All those impressions at once—clothing, condition, gender, odors, facial features. You have to sort through a flood of information. For me, the phone ringing is that starter’s pistol.

“Except I usually start with nothing. Especially with homicides. They’re more like algorithms that spread out in widening circles. Family, friends, associates, enemies. Routinely, it doesn’t take long to find blood on somebody’s hands. The bad guys make it easy and make us look smarter than we are.”

“But not this time,” she suggested.

He paused, not wanting to sound melodramatic. What was truly bothering him had less to do with facts. He was haunted by Kalfus’s curled-up body, little Angie’s betrayed innocence, Lucy’s nakedness, stripped of all high-fashion defenses under Beverly’s autopsy light. Which didn’t include the ghost of Scooter Nelson or the nameless Boston boy.

“No,” he conceded. “Something truly evil’s going on.”

Fred Houston hesitated at the door of the VBI office on the second floor of Brattleboro’s municipal building, peering in to see who might be there.

“Hello?” he called out.

The answer came from behind him. “Hello yourself, Fred.”

He whirled around to see Joe in the hallway with a pitcherful of water for the coffee machine. “Damn. Don’t you make any noise when you walk?”

Joe patted his shoulder as he preceded him into the office. “I used to. Hanging around Kunkle cured me of it. I think he’s got us all tiptoeing like cats by now. There’s got to be some herd behavior explanation for that. What’re you doing on this side of the river?”

Fred instead looked around the small, cluttered office, its four desks almost precluding passage among them. “I thought I had it bad,” he said. “At least I’m behind a locked front door.”

Joe was tending to the coffee machine. “We tried that, briefly. None of us liked it. And the rest of the building has to stay open for the public anyhow. So far, either nobody knows we’re up here or they don’t care. You want some java? Proof positive it’s fresh.”

“Sure,” Fred replied, sitting at Spinney’s desk, being careful not to disturb his array of stork artifacts—accumulated tributes to his birdlike appearance and his nickname at the police academy.

“You here for us?” Joe asked. “Or were you in the neighborhood?”

Fred produced a thin folded file from his coat pocket. “Special delivery. Plus, I did want to get out of my office. It’s nice to see what the weather’s doing every once in a while. I don’t have one of those.” He indicated the window.