“Oh, how could you forget? Oh, I am so hurt, Detective Gurney!” the caller cried with jokey exaggeration—and suddenly the laughing timbre and inflection of the words conjured up the person: a wiry, clever, high-energy blonde with a Queens accent and a model’s cheekbones.

“Connie. Jesus. Connie Clarke. It’s been a while.”

“Six years, to be exact.”

“Six years. Jesus.” The number didn’t mean much to him, didn’t surprise him, but he didn’t know what else to say.

He remembered their connection with mixed feelings. A freelance journalist, Connie Clarke had written a laudatory article about him for New York magazine after he’d solved the infamous Jason Strunk serial-murder case—just three years after he’d been promoted to detective first grade for solving the Jorge Kunzman serial-murder case. In fact, her article was a little too laudatory for comfort, dwelling as it did on his record number of homicide arrests and referring to him as the “NYPD Supercop”—a sobriquet that lent itself to scores of amusing variations created by his more imaginative colleagues.

“So how are things up there in peaceful retirement land?”

He could hear the grin in her question and assumed she knew about his unofficial involvement in the Mellery and Perry cases. “Sometimes more peaceful than other times.”

“Wow! Yeah! I guess that’s one way of putting it. You retire from the NYPD after twenty-five years, you’re up in the sleepy Catskills for about ten minutes, and all of a sudden you’re in the middle of one murder case after another. Seems to me you’re kind of a major-crime magnet. Wow! How does Madeleine feel about that?”

“You just had her on the phone. You should have asked her.”

Connie laughed as though he’d said something wonderfully witty.

“So between murder cases what’s your typical day like?”

“There’s not much to tell. It’s pretty uneventful. Madeleine stays busier than I do.”

“I’m having such a hard time picturing you in the middle of some kind of Norman Rockwell America. Dave making maple syrup. Dave making apple cider. Dave getting eggs from the henhouse.”

“I’m afraid not. No syrup, cider, or eggs.” What came to his mind was quite a different scenario describing the past six months. Dave playing the hero. Dave getting shot. Dave recovering too goddamn slowly. Dave sitting around listening to the ringing in his own ears. Dave getting depressed, hostile, isolated. Dave viewing every proposed activity as an infuriating assault on his right to remain in a paralyzing funk. Dave wanting to have nothing to do with anything.

“So what will you be doing today?”

“To be absolutely truthful with you, Connie, damn little. At most I’ll walk around the edges of the fields, maybe pick up some of the branches that blew down during the winter, maybe rake some fertilizer into the garden beds. Stuff like that.”