For entirely different reasons the suggestion fit Betty Kaminsky far better than it fit her first husband. She was more than involved with herself—she was lost in who she thought she was. Her second husband had told Leland that she had been worse. Leland had no choice but to believe it. The facts bore it out. There was no question about her ego, and MacIver had given it a terrible beating over three years’ time. With her, it was simply a matter of saving face.

At the heart of it Karen had been talking about what happens to people when a marriage fails: sometimes, a kind of insanity. It was possible that Leland’s current custody case was only another example, compounded. The ex-wife could be taking on a boyfriend to prove to herself that she could give love; the ex-husband could be hiring private detectives to establish that she had not been worthy of his love in the first place. In custody cases Leland couldn’t entertain such considerations. He rarely had more information than he needed to do his job. Colin MacIver was different. It was exactly into this area that Leland had to press. In this job the justifications and self-appeasements were more than simply lies to work past, they were factors subtly operating on the truth. MacIver had lied to Norma because of who they were, both of them. Leland knew who she was. MacIver was the thing. It was only possible that he had had no malicious intent. There was the way he had treated his first wife—with his reservations, Leland generally accepted her account of MacIver as her husband. She had called him a coward, an apt enough name for a man who came home bleeding after three years of marriage and wouldn’t explain why. Her story made things of her, too—and not just another liar. Leland wanted to know what kind of man divorced a woman like her and then turned around and made little Norma happy. There was Kaminsky, but Leland did not think he could look at Kaminsky and see an image of MacIver. For one thing, Kaminsky wasn’t so interesting, and he did not wear well. Leland liked him less for not knowing his wife as well as he had thought, and for leaving her in the kitchen—there was something despicable in that. The most important thing about Kaminsky was that he was there. He was there because MacIver was not. There was just that much difference between them. No, Kaminsky told Leland nothing about Colin MacIver.

And this was only one facet of MacIver’s life. He had died. He had been on the roof of a racetrack. He had had business up there, and it had been concluded when he had come down.