Jenn and Hendricks sat in silence, digesting his bombshell. Then Jenn glanced at her partner and they came to a silent conclusion.

“What?” Gibson asked.

“There’s something we need to show you,” Jenn said.

She went out and came back with her laptop and a manila folder. From the file, she handed him a crime-scene photograph of a man who had hanged himself in his garage.

Gibson studied it. “Who is it?”

“Terrance Musgrove.”

“The guy who owned the lake house?”

“The same. Now I have to show you another photograph. But . . .” She paused, hesitant to go on. “It’s your father.”

“Duke?” Gibson asked stupidly. “Is it what I think it is?”

“I wouldn’t ask, but you need to see it for yourself.”

He swallowed hard and nodded. She pulled up the photograph on the laptop and turned it around for Gibson to see. For the longest time, he stared away at the edges of the photograph, hoping it would soak into his mind through his peripheral vision. Dull the impact a little. Gibson realized he was breathing fast.

He looked.

What surprised him was how much he remembered wrong. In his mind, his father had been right next to the stairs when he’d discovered him that afternoon, looming over him, close enough to touch. But in the photograph, Duke was on the far side of the room. It was a chair, not a stool, that was kicked over under his feet. His father’s eyes were closed, not open.

“Why am I looking at this?” he asked, looking back and forth between the two photographs. They had everything in common that two dead men could. They were even in their socks. The shoes. Wait. He went back to the other photograph. The shoes were the same.

“The shoes?”

Jenn nodded.

He looked again. In both photographs, the shoes were placed carefully together and pointed away from the body at an angle. The same angle. A man, hanging, would naturally convulse; the rope would twist and spin. It would take time before the rope came to its final rest. The position of the shoes was an impossible coincidence.

“He killed them both.”

“And now he’s reappeared ten years later to kill you.”

“It’s insane,” Gibson said.

“Out of curiosity, was the guy’s nose broken?” Hendricks asked.

“Yeah. How did you know?”

“Fiftyish? White. Thin. Short brown hair, balding. Kind of nondescript?”

“Yeah, that’s the guy.”

Hendricks shook his head. “Same son of a bitch who shot Billy Casper. And I can’t prove it, but I’d throw Kirby Tate in there too.”

“It gets weirder,” Jenn said. “I saw that same guy shoot one of the tactical guys in the back.”

“Friendly fire?” Hendricks asked.

“Nothing friendly about it.”