He took out his phone and called Hardwick first. He was intending to leave a message and was surprised when the phone was answered immediately—and defensively.

“You calling to give me some shit about my bit with Bork?”

Gurney decided to postpone that discussion for another time. “I’m thinking we need to get together.”

“For what?”

“Planning? Coordination? Cooperation?”

There was a short pause. “Sure. No problem. When?”

“Soon as possible. Like tomorrow morning. You, me, Esti if she can make it. We need to put the facts, questions, hypotheses on the table. With everything we have in one place, we may be able to see what’s missing.”

“Okay.” Hardwick sounded skeptical, as usual. “Where do you want to do this?”

“My house.”

“Any reason for that?”

The honest reason was that Gurney wanted to recapture some semblance of control, some sense of his hand being on the tiller. But what he said was “Your house has bullet holes in it. Mine doesn’t.”

After agreeing, with little enthusiasm, to meet at nine the following morning at Gurney’s, Hardwick volunteered to pass the word to Esti, since he was about to talk to her about something else anyway. Something personal. Gurney would have preferred to call her himself—again, for that elusive hand-on-tiller feeling—but he could think of no reasonable way to insist on it.

They ended the call without either of them bringing up the matter of the “deal” with Mick Klemper or Gurney’s allusion to it in his last phone message.

As Gurney emerged from the den, Madeleine emerged from the bedroom. She took the duffel bag she’d packed that morning out to her car, then came back in to remind him once again about the strawberries for the hens.

“You know,” he replied, “Ozzie Baggott down the road just tosses his chickens a pail of table scraps once a day, and they seem to survive quite nicely.”

“Ozzie Baggott is a disgusting lunatic. He’d be tossing garbage out into his backyard whether he had chickens there or not.”

Upon reflection, he found he couldn’t honestly argue with that.

They hugged and kissed, and she was on her way.

As her car passed out of sight below the barn, the last sliver of the setting sun disappeared behind the western ridge.

Chapter 44

The Thrill of the Chase

Gurney retreated again into the den. The deepening dusk had changed the color of the forested ridge above it from a dozen shades of green and gold to a monochromatic greenish gray. It made him think of the hillside opposite Jack Hardwick’s house, the hillside the shots had come from that had severed the power and phone lines.