“I’m not a tourist, Darren. Get to it.”

“I am, I am. Don liked the southern part, where all the people live. And he liked to unload what he found in Vermont. That was just him being old-fashioned, like the cops couldn’t cross state lines or something. In a way, he’s right. It does make it harder on you guys to build a case, so maybe he was right.”

He read Willy’s expression and spoke a little faster. “Anyhow, to get to it, what I heard had somethin’ to do with this general neck of the woods. You know, Hinsdale, Keene, Claremont area. The border towns. Scuttlebutt was that this somebody—and I swear to God I don’t know who—was lookin’ to straighten things out with Don. Which I guess he did.”

“Any idea what Don had done? Was it something he stole or something he saw?”

Bader reflected a moment, which was the first time Willy had ever seen the expression on him.

“I never thought of that. I don’t know.”

“This is cool,” Lester said half to himself, his eyes on his computer screen.

“What?” Sam asked from her desk, four feet away in the tiny VBI office.

“It’s from Fred Houston. He sent us the map download from Don Kalfus’s stolen car. I’ve never seen one of these before.” He twirled his monitor around so she could see the screen. Against a blue road map background was a tangled, self-interweaving, utterly confusing yellow ribbon.

“Looks like spaghetti,” she observed. “Can’t make head or tail of it.”

“Well, we know where it ended up,” Lester stated, “and from what we’ve figured so far, the part we’re interested in begins at the strip club, where Don became the proud new owner. It’s hard to read. I’ll give you that. But I bet it’ll get easier if we retrace it in real time.”

Sam saw the wisdom in that. “He had the damn thing for almost a week and clearly covered hell’s half acre in it.”

Lester didn’t argue, adding, “Filling it with stolen goods, one of which may have gotten him killed.”

She gave him a long, appraising look. “Okay. Might turn out to be an interesting trip.”

Diagonally across the state, in the basement of the University of Vermont Medical Center, Dr. Beverly Hillstrom positioned her camera, equipped with an LED halo light, and carefully squeezed off a couple of shots.

She was in the morgue of the OCME, shorthand for Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, finishing up Don Kalfus’s autopsy. Despite her comments to Joe at the scene, she hadn’t been able to get to this as quickly as she’d anticipated. Returning to the office, she’d found two other procedures in line.

But she was nearing the end with young Mr. Kalfus now, just shy of peeling down his face and scalp in order to open his skull. The head was the last part to examine in her process, the rest of him speaking of her thoroughness so far. He was unzipped like a grisly duffel bag, his organs removed, awaiting her doing the same to this sole remnant of his intact anatomy.