“I knew you wouldn’t remember. The Winklers. At their farm. In Buck Ridge.”

It rang a distant bell in his memory.

“The people with the odd animals?”

“Alpacas. And you also remember that I offered to go there to help them take care of things during the fair?”

A second distant bell. “Ah. Yes. Right.”

“And that the fair starts this weekend?”

A third distant bell. “Right.”

“So that’s where I’ll be. At the fair with them and at their farm. I was going to go the day after tomorrow, but I’m sure they won’t mind me coming a day early. In fact, they had invited me to stay the whole week. I was going to take a few days off from the clinic. You know, we did discuss this when they first brought it up.”

“I have a vague recollection. I guess it just seemed so far away at the time. But that’s fine—a lot more convenient than going down to your sister’s or something like that.”

Her easy manner stiffened. “But what about you? If it makes sense for me not to be here …”

“I’ll be fine. Like I said, the shooter was delivering a message. He seems to know that Hardwick is responsible for stirring up the Spalter case, so it makes sense that he addressed his nasty little message to him. Besides, in the highly unlikely event that he wants to make his presence known a second time, I may be able to take advantage of that.”

Her face was full of anxious confusion, as if she were wrestling with a major contradiction.

He noted her expression and regretted having added an unnecessary twist, which he now tried to dance away from. “My point is that the likelihood of any real problem here is minuscule, but even if it’s less than one percent, I’d like you to be as far away from it as possible.”

“But again, what about you? Even if it is less than one percent, which I don’t really believe …”

“Me? No need to worry. According to New York magazine, I’m the most successful homicide dick in the history of the Big Apple.”

His tongue-in-cheek boast was supposed to relax her.

If anything, it appeared to do the opposite.

Gurney’s GPS took him into the enclave of Venus Lake via a series of agrarian river valleys, bypassing the blight of Long Falls.

Lakeshore Drive formed a two-mile loop around a body of water that he estimated to be about a mile long and a quarter-mile wide. The loop began and ended in a postcard village at the foot of the lake. The Spalter home—an inflated imitation of a colonial farmhouse—stood on a formally landscaped multiacre property at the head of the lake.