“What about Cheri Pratt?” Sam asked.

Joe replied, “Willy and I will compare notes after we’ve finished with Trevor and Corey. One of us will take her on at that point. Her background report might’ve come in by then, too.” He glanced at Kunkle. “Work for you?”

“You know me, boss,” Willy answered him. “I am putty in your hands.”

The laughter risked waking up Emma at the far end of the house.

In contrast to the rain earlier in the week, it was snowing the next day when Joe pulled up opposite a ramshackle business on Canal Street named Hughie’s. A licensed bar, Hughie’s was otherwise difficult to describe. It had no outward appeal. The building it occupied had a narrow side door leading to apartments upstairs and a more centralized but completely unmarked entrance in the middle. It was unpainted, poorly maintained, slightly swaybacked, and sported no advertisements revealing its purpose. You either knew about the place or you didn’t, and the owner—named Pete and not Hughie, whom nobody had ever met—didn’t care.

Surprisingly, Pete was a pleasant, easygoing man, if a large and imposing one. His encounters with police, licensing agents, and the town’s board of selectmen had always been cordial and cooperative. No one Joe knew understood the business logic of running an anonymous bar, but its longevity spoke to its word-of-mouth appeal.

Hughie’s did in fact cater to a specialized clientele, and where the establishment rarely caught official attention, its customers were a well-known lot to Brattleboro police.

Corey Browne among them.

It was early by most societal standards, being ten o’clock in the morning, but this bar was where Joe had been told to go first to find Corey, and, as he stamped his feet free of the damp snow and closed the door behind him, he could see several patrons already sprinkled about the long, dark, low-ceilinged room. Most of them were alone, all of them silent, and each had a bottle or mug stationed before him. They were all men.

Joe unzipped his coat and shook the snow from his shoulders as he approached the bar running the length of the right wall. The place was very still. There was no music, not even a jukebox, and the TV was on mute. This was a place to drink. Period.

A shambling and bearded behemoth drifted up the bar to greet him, as it turned out, by a title dating many years back. “Lieutenant. Nice to see you. It’s been a long time.”

Pete held out an enormous meaty hand, which Joe shook as he might grasp a slab of beef. “Pete. Good to see you, too. You been well, I hope?”

“Can’t complain. Nobody would listen anyhow.”

Joe nodded at the shopworn phrase.

“Can I interest you in anything?” Pete asked. “If I remember, you were a Coke man.”

Joe gave him a startled look. “My God. How long ago was that? Twenty years?”

The smile was barely visible under the thick beard. “It pays to remember these things.”