The reason for his silence, he told himself, was that telling her would only upset her. But a small voice in the back of his head told him otherwise—that his real reason was to avoid debate, to keep his options open. He told himself that the concealment would be temporary, therefore not a matter of truth, only of timing.

When they got home, half an hour before dawn, she went to bed with the same concerned look that had crossed her face so many times that night.

Too agitated to doze off, he sat at the table, wrestling with the implications of the things he didn’t want to talk about, especially the growing string of murders.

Of all the ways that killers end up being caught, few apply to killers who are intelligent and disciplined. And the Good Shepherd might be the smartest and most disciplined of all.

The only reasonable chance of identifying him would be through a massive coordinated law-enforcement effort. It would require reevaluating every piece of data from the original case. Overwhelming manpower. A mandate to start over with a clean slate. But in the current atmosphere, there was no way that was going to happen. Neither the FBI nor BCI would be able to step far enough outside the box. It was a box they’d built themselves, a box they’d been reinforcing for ten years.

So what was he supposed to do?

Ostracized and demonized, with a possible felony charge hanging over him and a PTSD label slapped on his forehead, what the hell could he do?

Nothing came to mind.

Nothing but an irritatingly simplistic aphorism.

You play the hand you’ve been dealt.

What the hell was in that hand anyway?

He concluded that most of his cards were garbage. Or unplayable with the near-zero resources at his disposal.

But he had to admit that he did have one wild card.

It might be worth something, or it might be worth nothing.

• • •

The sun rose behind a morning haze. It was still low in the sky when the house phone rang. Gurney got up from the table and went into the den to answer it. It was someone from the clinic, asking for Madeleine.

As he was about to take the handset to her in the bedroom, she appeared at the den door in her pajamas, extending her hand for it as though it were a call she’d been expecting.

She glanced at the ID screen before she spoke—in a pleasantly professional tone that contrasted with the sleepy look on her face. “Good morning, this is Madeleine.”

She then listened quietly to what was evidently a long explanation of something—during which Gurney returned to the kitchen and put on a fresh pot of coffee.