“You gotta go, Robin,” Willy encouraged her. “I appreciate your help. We’ll talk later, but don’t worry about this. Nobody knows we met. You just take care of yourself, okay?”

She looked frail and exposed, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “Okay,” she half sobbed.

“Go, go,” he urged her. “Get to work. Focus on your job. It’ll help. Trust me.”

He watched her go, waving as she looked back over her shoulder.

“Corey Browne, you piece of shit,” he said to himself. “This, I look forward to.”

Brattleboro’s Overnight Inn was a landmark of sorts, its pool once available to local families, as well as guests, and its selection of conference rooms serving everyone from the Lions to the Chamber of Commerce to the Rotary Club. Telling anyone to meet you at the Overnight was a well-known bit of currency.

Over time, along with a succession of owners less and less committed to the facility’s upkeep, the same reference either drew a blank from newcomers or a rueful look from old-timers. The Overnight, with the sad and erosive progression of dementia, had slowly slipped from its apex to ending up on the state’s list of forgotten motels, now designated as low-income, Section 8 housing.

In principle, Willy was supportive of the program and empathetic toward many of its users. In practice, he readily acknowledged how tough it was to make such a notion successful. Putting a large, disparate population of disadvantaged, poor, sometimes disoriented, troubled, and even haunted people under one large roof, run by a threadbare staff, was at best a challenge and at worst akin to sharing a voyage on an old and leaky ship.

Willy had gone straight from leaving Robin Whiteman to visit one of these landlocked travelers. Corey Browne wasn’t an actual resident. He made it his business to come and go from their midst, sowing as much quiet destruction as he could without being caught. Like a virus introduced into an ICU, Browne was a lethal if inconspicuous presence.

Willy, reasonably enough, was also a familiar sight to some of the Overnight’s denizens, but where one might expect a drug dealer like Browne to be embraced and a cop to be shunned, Willy had never suffered that fate. His manner and appearance aside, he was known for being evenhanded and honest, and even generous when it came to balancing infractions against the law. It was understood to this slice of society that Kunkle valued justice above all and would only rarely use an arrest to get his way, and then usually with good reason.

Thus, he entered the Overnight nodding familiarly to the young man at the desk, who didn’t challenge him, and began wandering the long, dimly lit corridors in search of familiar faces who might tell him of Corey Browne’s whereabouts.

Because that was one thing of which he was almost certain: Browne was also prowling these hallways, a hyena circling weakened prey.

“Hey, Detective Kunkle. Long time no see.”