“You again?” she asked upon opening, a cigarette in hand.

“You know how these things go,” he told her. “They take a lot of digging and a lot of time. Can I come in?”

She shook her head wearily and stepped back, leaving the door wide and commenting, “I never know why you people bother askin’.”

“You could say no,” he reminded her, stepping in.

She was walking ahead of him toward the kitchen. Given the bedlam of the rest of the house, he guessed it was the only place left with space enough to sit.

Which is what she did upon entering, settling before a cup of coffee he couldn’t imagine she’d had time to pour.

He sat across the chipped and cluttered old metal breakfast table in the room’s center.

“What d’you want?” she asked, not making eye contact.

“I don’t know how connected you are to the internet and the news,” he began, “but you might’ve heard some buzz about a man killed by a vest bomb in northern New Hampshire.”

“Nah. Don’t care about that.”

“Don’t blame you. It’s relevant, in that the dead man was connected to Lemuel Shaw, who you knew, it turns out.”

She blew out a cloud of smoke. “Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah. Remember that silver ashtray you claimed you knew nothing about, from him to his wife, Lucy?”

“Vaguely. That was Donny’s shit. I told you that.”

“Well, yes and no,” Willy corrected her. “We’ve been filling in some holes in this case, making sure everything’s tucked away, and we found you’d been a lot more active in Don’s life lately than you said. Your fingerprints, for example, were everywhere in that storage shed and elsewhere.”

“That doesn’t prove anythin’.”

“It does get you closer to colluding with a criminal enterprise, to put a legal slant on it.”

“You must be desperate. That enterprise is history. Donny’s the one you wanted, and he’s dead.”

“Yeah,” Willy drawled. “Poor old Donny. He was another bump in the road for us.”

He let that dangle, causing her to catch his eye for the first time. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“He wasn’t really your son, was he?”

“Close enough.”

“And the box we found you holding in the storage shed?” he asked, moving on. “Lighter, jewelry, ashtray?”

“I told you. All Donny’s.”

“Without a single print of his on any of it. Just yours.”

“I’d been lookin’ through it.”

“Not when we grabbed you. You’d just walked in.”

“Earlier.”

“How about Shaw’s car, where Donny was found dead? We found your prints there, too.”

She flared. “That’s bullshit.”

Willy tilted his head. “Nah. You tried to wipe them away. Movie stuff. People never remember what they touched. We missed them the first time.” He held up his hand, adding, “But not the second time.”

Her response caught him by surprise, which later he ruefully admitted. For all his renown as a human predator, no one was infallible, and hubris, along with a creeping gentleness, had dulled his edge.