“Bones, snakes, Hummers, and horseshit. That the place you’re talking about?”

“Sounds like you don’t give Mr. Clinter’s ramblings a lot of weight.”

“You do?”

“I haven’t decided yet what to make of him. There’s a psycho component in the package, but there’s also a performer-pretending-to-be-a-psycho component. It’s hard to pin down the line between them. He said something about PTSD. You happen to know if that came from the drunken crash that got him fired?”

“No. The First Gulf War. Friendly fire from a helicopter blew up a guy next to him. Back then Maxie toughed it out, stuffed it, whatever. But it probably set him up for his big collapse after the Good Shepherd mess. Who knows? Maybe he thought he was shooting at a fucking helicopter that night.”

“Anyone pay attention to his theories about the case?”

“He didn’t have theories. He had wild-ass ideas, based on whatever shit popped into his head. You ever listen to a nutcase explain how the number of legs on a chair multiplied by the mystical number seven gives you the number of days in a lunar month? Maxie was loaded to the eyeballs with that kind of crap.”

“So you don’t think he has anything real to contribute?”

Hardwick grunted thoughtfully. “The only real things Maxie brings to the table are hatred, obsession, and a crazy kind of smarts.”

It was a combination Gurney had run into before. It was a recipe for disaster.

A quarter of an hour later, just outside Auburn, having cruised through the pastoral hills that separated Cayuga Lake from Owasco Lake, Gurney pulled into a combination gas station/mini-mart to refill his tank with gas and recharge his brain with a large coffee. According to his dashboard clock, it was 1:05 P.M.

After getting his gas receipt, he pulled away from the pump to a corner of the parking area to sip his coffee and plan his interview with Meese-Montague.

His cell phone rang. It was a text message: CHECK YOUR E-MAIL.

When he did, he discovered one from Hardwick. The covering message said, “See attached documents: Incident Reports (6), Prior Movements Supplement, ViCAP Reports, Common Elements Summary, Pre-Autopsy Victim Pics.”

The title of each of the incident documents was composed of a number between one and six, which apparently denoted its place in the series, plus the victim’s surname. Gurney selected the document 1-MELLANI and began scrolling through its fifty-two pages.

Included were the responding officer’s observations, crime-scene diagrams, photographs of the site, an evidence-based event reconstruction with hypothetical narrative, vehicle-damage report, evidence-collection report, list of units and officers responding, ME’s preliminary report, and a list of lab tests.

If this first of six incident reports was representative of the others in length and detail, there would be over three hundred fifty pages to wade through. This was not a task Gurney intended to undertake on the three-inch screen of his cell phone.