As the president, he would have his finger on the nuclear trigger. With a twitch of that finger he could launch nuclear missiles. He could obliterate huge cities. He could put an end to the human stink. He could wipe the rotten slate clean.

With maturity, however, had come a more practical perspective, a more realistic sense of what was possible. He knew that the nuclear trigger would never be within his reach.

But other triggers were available. One day at time, one trigger-pull at a time, much could be accomplished.

As he thought about it—and through his teenage years he’d thought about little else—a plan for his future slowly took shape. He came to know what his specialty would be—his art, his expertise, his field of excellence. And that was no small thing, since previously he had known almost nothing about himself, had no sense of who or what he was.

He had so few memories of anything before he was twelve.

Only the nightmare.

The nightmare that came again and again.

The circus. His mother, smaller than the other women. The terrible laughter. The music of the merry-go-round. The deep, constant growling of the animals.

The clown.

The huge clown who gave him money and hurt him.

The wheezing clown whose breath smelled like vomit.

And the words. So clear in the nightmare that their edges were as jagged as ice smashed against stone. “This is our secret. If you tell anyone, I’ll feed your tongue to the tiger.”

Part One: An Impossible Murder

Chapter 1

The Shadow of Death

In the rural Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, August was an unstable month, lurching back and forth between the bright glories of July and the gray squalls of the long winter to come. It was a month that could erode one’s sense of time and place. It seemed to feed Dave Gurney’s confusion over where he was in his life—a confusion that had begun with his retirement from the NYPD three years earlier, after twenty-five years on the job, and had intensified when he and Madeleine had moved out to the country from the city where they’d both been born, raised, educated, and employed.

At that moment, a cloudy late afternoon in the first week of August, with low thunder grumbling in the distance, they were climbing Barrow Hill, following the remnant of a dirt road that linked three small bluestone quarries, long abandoned and full of wild raspberry brambles. He was trudging along behind Madeleine as she headed for the low boulder where they normally stopped to rest, doing his best to take her frequent advice: Look around you. You’re in a beautiful place. Just relax and absorb it.

“Is that a tarn?” she asked.

Gurney blinked. “What?”