Duckworth now knew Trevor was seeing someone. He knew her name. He even knew where she worked. Should he let Trevor fill his mother in at some point when he felt the time was right? And if he followed that course of action, what would Maureen do to him when she eventually found out he’d had this intel all along?

What a bloody mess.

He knew he’d tell Maureen. There were some things you couldn’t hold back. The trick would be trying to tell the story without making himself look like a total idiot in the way he’d handled things.

If that was even possible.

“Shit,” he said again.

He kept replaying the scene at Starbucks in his head. I embarrassed him, he thought. Trevor had every right to be angry. The first time his father meets his girlfriend, he submits her to a police interrogation.

“I blew it. I totally blew it.”

What a terrific first impression. No wonder Trevor was pissed. Duckworth decided he’d have to apologize. Tell his son he was sorry for not handling things more tactfully.

You’re a cop for twenty-six years, and you still make mistakes.

God, he just wanted a donut. No, that wasn’t true. He wanted half a dozen donuts.

He had to put his problem with Trevor aside for now. Duckworth had something else to think about.

Craig Pierce.

Why had it taken him this long to think about Craig Pierce?

Okay, he had to cut himself a little slack. It had only been a few hours since Brian Gaffney had been brought into the police station. Only now were some of the similarities coming into focus.

Both Gaffney and Pierce had been sedated before horrible things were done to them.

In both cases, retribution appeared to play a major role. Craig Pierce was being punished for something he’d done, and it certainly appeared Gaffney was being made to pay for what had happened to “Sean,” whoever that turned out to be.

But there might come a time when Gaffney would actually consider himself lucky, at least compared to Craig Pierce.

Craig’s night to remember was 3rd February. Duckworth remembered the details of his statement.

Craig awoke to the sound of falling water. Torrents of it. An unrelenting rushing.

As he began to be more fully aware of his surroundings, he noticed how cold he felt. From the waist down, anyway. It was, after all, winter. (If Craig had anything at all to be grateful for, it was that this particular February was a mild one for upstate New York.)

His buttocks and the backs of his legs were particularly cold. That, he soon realized, was because they were resting on a thin layer of snow. He was outside, flat on his back, and all evidence pointed to the fact that he was half naked.

He’d have sat up and assessed his situation, but there were some problems there. He couldn’t see, for one thing. He had some kind of woolen hood on, like a ski mask, except there were no holes for eyes or nose or mouth. The damn thing was on backward.