The shower and pills performed, to some degree, their restorative magic. By the time he was dried off and dressed and out by the kitchen coffeemaker, pouring his vital first cup, he was feeling a bit better. He flexed the fingers of his right hand, found that the pain was tolerable. He squeezed the coffee cup. Despite the wince it produced, he concluded that he could manage his gearshift if he needed to drive. It wouldn’t be comfortable, but he wasn’t helpless.

There was no sign of either Madeleine or Kim in the house. He could hear a low murmur of voices through an open window by the sideboard. He took his cup to the breakfast table by the French doors. Then he saw them, out beyond the bluestone patio, beyond the overgrown apple tree, in the small mowed area of the field that he and Madeleine referred to as “the lawn.”

They were sitting in a pair of matching Adirondack chairs. Madeleine was wearing one of her wildly colorful jackets, and Kim was wearing a similar one—no doubt provided by Madeleine. They were each cradling a coffee mug in a two-handed grip, as though warming their fingers around a pleasant flame. The lavenders and fuchsias and oranges and lime greens of their jackets were radiant in the pale morning sunlight beginning to filter through the overcast. Their expressions suggested that their conversation, like their clothing, was more animated than Gurney’s mood.

He was tempted to open the French doors to see if the sun was taking any of the chill out of the atmosphere. But he knew that as soon as Madeleine saw him, she’d tell him he should come out, tell him what a lovely morning it was turning out to be after all, tell him how sweet everything smelled. And the more she’d rhapsodize about the glory of being out in the open air, the more he’d insist on staying in. It was a ritual battle they often fought, virtually reading their lines from a script. In the end, after making it clear he was too busy to come out, he’d inevitably reconsider, and, once out, inevitably he’d be pleased by the beauty of the day and embarrassed by his childish opposition.

At the moment, however, he had no desire to initiate the ritual. So he chose not to open the door. Instead he decided to get a second cup of coffee, print out a hard copy of the Good Shepherd profile, and try to approach it with an open mind: a mind open to the possible presence of truth, rather than a mind hypervigilant for the presence of bullshit.

He went into the den and opened the Hardwick e-mails on his desktop computer, a welcome improvement over the tiny screen of his cell phone. While the profile was printing out, he opened the first of the incident-report documents that he’d hurried through the previous afternoon.