Free to proceed according to his plan. And trapped by its limitations, by the rickety assumptions on which it rested, and by his own compulsion to press forward. He suspected that Malcolm Claret and Madeleine were right—that there was something pathological in his appetite for risk. But self-knowledge is not a therapeutic panacea. Knowing who you are doesn’t automatically convey the power to change who you are.

The fact that mattered most to him at the moment was that Madeleine intended to stay at the Winklers’ at least through Tuesday, the final day of the fair, safely out of the way. It was still only Saturday. The promotion ads for his Monday-night Criminal Conflict tell-all revelations would start running the next morning on the Sunday talk shows. The ads would be touting not only the revelation of the shooter’s identity in the Spalter case but also the disclosure of the sensitive secret that the shooter was trying to protect. If Panikos wanted to keep that from happening, he had a very narrow window of opportunity—from Sunday morning to Monday evening—to make his move. And Gurney intended to be ready for him.

Driving up the darkening road to his property, he tried to hang on to a reasonable sense of confidence. But Madeleine’s enigmatic story about that damn spirit-bird kept undermining whatever pragmatic thoughts he was able to muster.

As he passed the barn and the house came into view, he noticed that the light over the side door was on, as well as the light in the mudroom. He felt a quick stab of fight-or-flight adrenaline—which subsided into an uneasy curiosity when he saw a glint of light reflecting off the chrome of Kyle’s BSA. He continued up through the pasture and parked next to the motorcycle.

Inside the house, he heard the shower running upstairs. When he found the hall light on and all the kitchen lights, too, his uneasiness was replaced by a little surge of déjà vu—perhaps arising from memories of how when Kyle was a young teenager living with his mother and visiting Gurney on weekends, he’d seemed incapable of remembering to turn off the lights when he left a room.

He went into the den to check for messages on the landline and on his cell, which he’d neglected to bring with him on his trip to see Madeleine. There was nothing on the landline. There were three messages on his cell. The first was from Esti, but the transmission was too broken up to understand anything.