But I couldn’t. My card was like the modem Lucy knew was under the floor. Both were tenuous lines leading to Gault. He was playing games, but one day he might overstep himself. He might get too reckless and high on cocaine and make a mistake.

‘Doc,’ Marino went on, ‘you’re getting too wound up with this. You need to chill out.’

Gault might want me to find him, I thought. Every time he used my card he was sending a message to me. He was telling me more about himself. I knew what he liked to eat and that he did not drink red wine. I knew about the cigarettes he smoked, the clothes he wore, and I thought of his boots.

‘Are you listening to me?’ Marino was asking.

We had always assumed that the jungle boots were Gault’s.

‘The boots belonged to his sister,’ I thought out loud.

‘What are you talking about?’ Marino said impatiently.

‘She must have gotten them from her uncle years ago, and then Gault took them from her.’

‘When? He didn’t do it at Cherry Hill in the snow.’

‘I don’t know when. It may have been shortly before she died. It could have been inside the Museum of Natural History. They basically wore the same shoe size. They could have traded boots. It could be anything. But I doubt she gave them up willingly.

For one thing, the jungle boots would be very good in snow. She would have been better off with them than the ones we found in Benny’s hobo camp.’

Marino was silent a moment longer. Then he said, ‘Why would he take her boots?’

‘That’s easy,’ I said. ‘Because he wanted them.’

That afternoon, I drove to the Richmond airport with a briefcase packed full and an overnight bag. I had not called my travel agent because I did not want anyone to know where I was going. At the USAir desk, I purchased a ticket to Hilton Head, South Carolina.

‘I hear it’s nice down there,’ said the gregarious attendant. ‘A lot of people play golf and tennis down there.’ She checked my one small bag.

‘You need to tag it.’ I lowered my voice. ‘It has a firearm in it.’

She nodded and handed me a blaze orange tag that proclaimed I was carrying an unloaded firearm.

I’ll let you put it inside,’ the woman said to me. ‘Does your bag lock?’

I locked the zipper and watched her set the bag on the conveyor belt. She handed me my ticket and I headed upstairs to the gate, which was very crowded with people who did not look happy to be going home or back to work after the holidays.