My gut feeling about Dwight Stone is that if you want to get anywhere with him, honesty is the best policy. “I could say it was to help the victim’s family. Althea Payton and her mother-in-law. And I do want to help them. But I also have a selfish reason. I’m trying to nail a man who hurt my father a long time ago.”

Stone studies me for several seconds. “Who would that be?”

“Leo Marston. Judge Leo Marston. He was the district attorney back—”

“I know who he was.” Stone eyes Caitlin. “This your wife?”

“No, a friend. Caitlin Masters. But this is my daughter. Say hello, Annie.”

Annie waves her right hand while clinging to Caitlin’s leg with her left.

“You bring her along for the sympathy factor?”

“I brought her to keep her out of harm’s way. I’ve already been shot at. Not many people want the Payton case reopened.”

A flicker of something in Stone’s eyes. “You convicted Arthur Lee Hanratty, didn’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“I saw you on CNN last night, at the Walls.”

I nod but say nothing.

“That’ll buy you a half hour of my time, Mr. Penn Cage. How about some coffee?”

“Coffee would be wonderful,” Caitlin says, lifting Annie into her arms.

Stone takes a trout bag from his shoulder, then wipes his hands on his shirt and reaches for the cabin door. “I don’t get much company up here, but I think maybe we could rustle up some hot chocolate too.”

Annie breaks into a wide grin.

Stone settles Caitlin and me on a sand-colored leather sofa with Annie between us. Before us is a huge fieldstone fireplace, and Stone quickly builds a roaring blaze in it. The cabin is full of hunting and fishing gear, snowshoes hanging on the walls, rifles over the mantel, a fly-tying bench littered with bright feathers. A large double-paned window faces the Slate, which runs flat and smooth thirty yards from the cabin’s back door. Only a large white propane tank mars the illusion of virgin wilderness, and when there’s snow it’s probably invisible.

After putting the trout in his sink, Stone brings us mugs of coffee and chocolate heated on an old woodstove, then sits opposite us in a rough handmade chair. His waders hang on a hook by the door, dripping into a brass bucket with the sound of men making use of a spittoon.

“You’ve got a nice place,” I tell him. “No neighbors at all. How’d you manage that?”

He smiles. “Everything you see around this place is government land. But this cabin sits on a mining claim that’s been in my family for three generations. Grandfathered down to the present. The federal government can’t do a thing about me.”

“I love it,” Caitlin says.