“Sleep is good,” she said, looking tired and serious.

Three deer ran up an embankment just ahead of them.

“You ever hit one?” she asked.

“Yes.”

Something about the way he said it made her look at him curiously.

It had happened six months earlier. A doe had crossed Route 10 from the woods on the left side of the road, well in front of him, to an open field on the right. Just as he was passing the place she’d crossed, her fawn dashed out in front of his car.

He winced now at the still-vivid memory of the thump.

Pulling over. Stopping. Walking back. The small, twisted body. The eyes open and lifeless. The doe standing in the field, looking back. Waiting. He was filled with sadness and horror, could feel it now.

Kim drove past a scruffy hill farm with a dozen scruffy cows and half a dozen rusted cars. “You friendly with your neighbors?” she asked.

Gurney made a sound halfway between a grunt and a laugh. “Some yes, some no.”

Half a mile farther on, they came within sight of his red barn at the end of the lane, next to the pond. “Stop and let me out,” he said. “I want to walk up through the pasture. It’ll wake me up, clear my head.”

She frowned. “The grass looks wet.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’ll be taking my shoes off when I get to the house.”

She pulled up in front of the barn door and turned off the engine, leaving her hand on the ignition key in an oddly preoccupied way.

Instead of getting out of the car, he sat and waited, sensing that she had something to say.

“So …” she began, stopped, and began again. “So … where do we go from here?”

Gurney shrugged. “You hired me for one day. The day is over.”

“Any chance of one more?”

“To do what?”

“Talk to Max Clinter?”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t figure him out. It’s like he knows something about the Good Shepherd case. Something terrible. But I don’t know whether he really knows something or if it’s just some crazy thing in his mind, some kind of delusion. I thought maybe with your shared backgrounds as detectives, maybe he’d be more straight-up with you—especially if I wasn’t there, if it was just the two of you, talking cop to cop.”

“Where does he live?”

“You’ll do it? You’ll talk to him?”

“I didn’t say that. I asked you where he lives.”

“Not far from Cayuga Lake. Pretty close to his disastrous car chase. That’s part of what makes me worry that he’s a little off the wall.”

“Because he wants to live there?”

“Because of why he wants to live there. He says that’s the place he and the Good Shepherd crossed paths and that’s where karma will bring them together again.”