Joe gave her Lucy’s date of birth along with the funeral home’s name and hung up.

“Ah,” Willy commented. “The beauty of knowing people in the right line of work.”

The Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire, is a colossus—towering, hulking, gleaming, and imposing. Surrounded by trees and hills as if buried in the countryside, it looks like a transplanted castle whose architect had enjoyed one Star Wars movie too many.

It is arguably the biggest hospital complex in northern New England, with satellites all over the region, like the offshoot housing Trevor Buttner in Keene.

It was also where Beverly Hillstrom was employed part-time by Dartmouth Medical School.

By the time Joe and Willy found their way through the inner workings of the place to the large and busy pathology department where the medical examiner’s office conducted autopsies on an as-needed basis, the remains of Lucy Shaw had been delivered from the funeral home where she’d been awaiting a death certificate and subsequent cremation.

Beverly, an hour and a half away in Burlington, still had fifteen minutes to go, a time slot put to use when the two cops saw Lemuel Shaw pacing the hallway just outside the pathology department.

“You feel like having a little fun?” Willy asked softly. Shaw hadn’t yet spotted them.

“Sure,” Joe replied.

Shaw reached the end of the hallway, turned on his heel, and was heading back when he saw them studying him.

“What?” he asked, pegging them as cops by their demeanor. “You here for my wife?”

Joe nodded. “Yes, sir. We are.”

The man’s rage came off him like radiant heat. “What the fuck for? She died of natural causes. She took medicine. She had a doctor. He’d warned her to be careful. What do you people want, anyway?”

Joe indicated a cluster of upholstered chairs by a distant, windowed alcove. “Why don’t we sit over there?” he suggested.

“I don’t want to sit,” Shaw fumed. “I want an explanation for why you’re about to cut her open like a Christmas turkey.”

“Sit anyhow,” Willy said in a flat tone, all the more menacing as a result.

Shaw studied him for the first time, recognizing something about him that deserved watching and merited care—like the aura given off by a natural predator.

He stalked over to the alcove and sat rigidly. “There. Happy?”

Willy settled down comfortably opposite him as Joe sat with his back to the window. “Delirious,” Willy said.

“You’ve got an attitude,” Shaw grumbled.

“I’ve heard that.”

He shifted his attention back to Gunther. “You gonna answer my question? Where do you get off taking my wife out of the funeral home? You’d better know I’m considering legal action.”

“We’re investigating a serious and expanding criminal case,” Joe began. “And your name keeps turning up, first as a victim, then as a person of interest, and finally as something murkier. Speaking honestly, Mr. Shaw, we’re not quite sure what to make of you in all this.”

“But not as an innocent bystander,” Willy added.