“No problem. As a matter of fact, what I was thinking of doing, since you’ve got your other meeting here at nine, and it’s an ideal day for it … I thought I’d take a little ride on the bike up to Syracuse.”

“Syracuse?” There was a time when the name of that gray snow-belt city meant little to Gurney, but now it had become a mental repository for all the terrible events of the recent Good Shepherd case.

Obviously, it had a more positive association for Kyle. “Yeah, I thought I’d take a ride up, as long as I was this far upstate, maybe have lunch with Kim.”

“Kim Corazon? You stayed in touch with her?”

“A little. By email mostly. She came down to the city once. I let her know last week that I planned to be up here with you for a few days, halfway to Syracuse, thought it might be a good time to get together with her.” He paused, eyeing his father warily. “You look kind of shocked.”

“ ‘Surprised’ would be the word. You never mentioned Kim after … after the case was wrapped up.”

“I figured you wouldn’t want to be reminded of that whole mess she dragged you into. Not that she meant to. But it ended up being pretty traumatic stuff.”

It was true that it wasn’t a case he enjoyed talking about. Or thinking about. Very few were. In fact, he rarely considered the past at all, unless it was a past case with loose ends that demanded resolution. But the Good Shepherd case wasn’t one of those. The Good Shepherd case was solved. The puzzle pieces, in the end, were all in place. It could be argued, however, that the price had been too high. And his own position in the final act of that drama had become one of Madeleine’s chief exhibits in her argument that he exposed himself too willingly to unreasonable levels of danger.

Kyle was watching him now with a worried look. “Does it bother you that I’m visiting her?”

In other circumstances, the honest answer would have been yes. He’d found Kim to be very ambitious, very emotional, very naive—a combination more troublesome than he would wish for in any girlfriend for his son. But in the current circumstances, Kyle’s plan struck him as a convenient coincidence—in the same category as Madeleine’s plan to help the Winklers.

“Actually,” said Gurney, “it seems like a pretty good idea at the moment—a bit safer, anyway.”

“Jeez, Dad, you really think something bad’s going to happen here?”

“I think the chance is very, very slight. But I wouldn’t want you to be exposed to it.”

“What about you?” It was Madeleine’s question, repeated in the same tone.

“It’s part of the job—part of what I signed on for when I agreed to help with the case.”