That was it, without drumroll or high fives. As Joe watched the three of them file out the door, shrugging on their coats against the outside cold, he could imagine Sam heading for a serious snuggle session with her daughter, with Willy in close support, and Lester driving north to Springfield in time to catch Sue before she left for the hospital. It was a comforting feeling, Joe’s knowing their support systems.

This had never just been an investigative squad for him. In the purest sense—the one invoking choice over fate—these people were kin. He’d selected them, nurtured them, and in return been supported by them with more purpose and intensity than he’d seen among most blood relations, where family ties were either taken for granted or frankly abused, as seemed to be the case with Melissa Monfet and young Angie.

On the other hand, that now left Joe alone in the quiet office, where the very stillness was a reminder of his separate status within the group. Older, a childless widower, with decades on the job, he had reached a place in life at once vaunted and privately precarious. He was a statesman in his profession, a secular rabbi whose words were valued for their insight. But his wisdom had been earned by accepting that such a reputation could be fragile.

Joe’s father had been a taciturn, hardscrabble farmer, holding his own for a wife and two sons and dying young but debt-free. Of the few pieces of advice he’d ever given his eldest, the one that had stuck was the hard-to-hear adage that success usually lagged behind failure as a teacher.

Keeping that close to heart had kept Joe honest and ethically hardy, and receptive to the costs of hubris and human blunder.

Every case, every time, he experienced a moment as he was now—sleep deprived and challenged for answers—when he wondered what would finally be his: the just deserts of righteous toil, or an empty-handedness earned from too much self-confidence.

It was a tightrope walker’s dilemma.

Willy Kunkle was not comfortable with introspection. His excess of emotional scar tissue saw to that. The same instinct that drove others to seek shelter in a storm was precisely what kept him outdoors and fighting the elements. As he saw it, action kept him safe, not soul-searching, and the unexpected harbor represented by Sam and Emma meant less that he should stay home enjoying their company, and more that he should fight for its preservation and welfare by keeping hard at work.

And so it was that after escorting Sam home and tucking her and Emma into bed together—following a family meal of laughter and play and a half-hour nap—he was back in night-shrouded Brattleboro, in search of Robin Whiteman, the late Don Kalfus’s girlfriend.

The Department of Motor Vehicles was always an early stop to locating someone’s address, right after the police databases, which were called Spillman and Valcour, and variously favored by agencies across the state. The problem with all these resources was that their accuracy depended on people living for more than a few months in one place, which often proved challenging among those of interest to the police.