“No, nothing came up. But I have some questions about the Good Shepherd case. A book of hers on serial murder was footnoted in the FBI profile. And I think she may have written some articles about the case later on.”

“You couldn’t ask your questions on the phone?”

“Too many. Too complicated.”

“What time will you be home?”

“She’s giving me forty-five minutes, ending at two o’clock, so I should be home by three at the latest.”

“Three at the latest. Remember that.”

“Why?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Are you asking why you should remember it?”

“What I mean is, is something happening at precisely three o’clock that I don’t know about?”

“When you tell me you’re going to do something, I think it would be nice if you actually did it. If you tell me you’re going to be home at three o’clock, then I’d like to be able to rely on the fact that you’ll be home at three o’clock. That’s all. Is that okay?”

“Definitely.” If Kim weren’t standing there, he might have been less immediately agreeable, more tenacious in asking why the issue was of particular importance that particular day. But he’d grown up in a home where even the slightest disagreement would never be aired in front of an outsider. That stiff Irish-English reticence was still in the marrow of his bones.

Kim looked worried. “Shouldn’t I be coming with you?”

“It barely makes sense for me to go. There’s certainly no need for two of us.”

“Come on,” said Madeleine, turning to Kim. “I’ll get you some boots. While the sun is out, let’s head for the ridge.”

Two minutes later Gurney, still in the den, heard the side door being opened and then being shut firmly, and the house became very quiet. He turned to his computer screen, closed the document with the photos of Dr. Brewster’s crushed Mercedes, and entered a Google search for the terms “Holdenfield” and “Shepherd.”

The top result referring to Rebecca’s work on the case was a journal article with a daunting academic title. “Pattern Resonance: inferences for personality formation, as applied to an unknown shooter (aka The Good Shepherd), employing bivalent inductive-deductive modeling protocols. R. Holdenfield et al.”

Gurney scrolled down through the results—skipping over hits in which the search terms had brought up everything from a news article about a man in Holdenfield, Nebraska, who had been bitten by a German shepherd to an obituary for Shepherd Holdenfield, a black trombonist. In the end he counted a dozen relevant entries that linked Rebecca to the murder case, all citing professional articles.