“I feel like I let you down.”

Joe shook his head and grabbed Willy’s good arm, stopping him again to emphasize, “You never have and you never will.”

Willy smiled, if begrudgingly. “I have more times than either of us can count.”

Joe resumed walking. “Ancient history. Different circumstances.”

Houston looked up as they slid open the side door and stepped inside. “I think I’ve got a fix on him,” he said as a greeting.

As usual, he was seated before a bank of monitors, one of which had a map of the surrounding area.

“Where?” Kunkle asked.

Joe sat on a bench to Houston’s right and looked over his shoulder at the screen.

The ICAC man tapped on a blinking dot. “Right there. He was either monitoring what you were doing inside or manipulating things somehow. Whatever it was, he was accessing the internal routers via Wi-Fi. I got hold of the port logs to grab his IP address. That gave me the subscriber information for this guy.” He hit a couple of keystrokes and brought up Clyde Herrick’s name.

“That mean anything?” he asked.

“It does,” Joe told them both. “What’s that location?” he asked, indicating the flashing dot.

The Thomaston police chief, not surprisingly, lived on a dirt road, now paved with snow and ice. Located on the other side of the township from the Shaw estate, it was deep in the woods, on steep terrain, but fortunately approachable from two directions, allowing Joe and Willy, accompanied by the still available TAC team, to approach discreetly and from all sides. For local knowledge and to show his appreciation, Joe had invited young Dillon Rowe to join them.

One final addition to their operation was an associate attorney general for New Hampshire’s Department of Justice, one of which routinely kept company with the New Hampshire State Police’s Major Crime unit on high-visibility outings. Of the many and varied differences between this state’s law enforcement model and Vermont’s, having your own prosecutor on hand—complete with a laptop to secure warrants and a cell phone to reach a judge—had some real advantages.

From outward appearances, Clyde Herrick presented as Lemuel Shaw’s polar opposite. His property was as run-down and poorly maintained as Shaw’s was immaculate and upscale, reinforcing the notion that the latter had formed a relationship with the former solely based on his law enforcement and local bigwig status. Reflective of what Rowe had said about his boss, salted here and there were jarring icons of excess cash—a late-model truck and a shiny Kubota tractor among them.

Joe’s approach resembled their first of the day, with the added presumption that their nemesis knew they were coming. As before, Joe and Willy made the initial contact, climbing Herrick’s cluttered, rotting porch, sagging under piled cordwood, and knocking on his door, but this time with people forming a tight cordon around the house.

A large, unshaven man with bloodshot eyes opened up. “What do you want?” he asked in a hostile voice.