I knew she wasn’t going to let me go.

I also knew that if I woke up my partner, Darrell, at three o’clock on Christmas morning, I’d better have more to show him than an angry trophy wife.

“Did you notice anything out of order in the house when you came home?” I asked. “Any sign of intruders or a break-in?”

“No.”

“Any footprints in the snow? Tire tracks?”

“No. Other than my own.”

“Did you check the outbuildings?”

“Yes, I walked around the entire property. I went inside all the other buildings except the guest cottage. Gordon uses that as his office.”

“Why didn’t you check the office? I thought you said he was going to work until you got back.”

“The office is where he keeps confidential legal files on the litigation. The door is always locked when he’s not there. No one else gets inside. I walked down there and checked. The lights were off.”

“Still, if that’s the one place you didn’t go inside, I think we should check it out, don’t you?”

Erica frowned with obvious reluctance. “Yes, all right.”

We hiked through the snow beside the trees and needed flashlights to guide us. Erica stayed close to me. I could tell that the wilderness made her nervous, but to me, the sounds in the darkness were like old friends. And of course, I did what I always did when I was near the woods. I listened for him. I’d been searching the forests of Black Wolf County for years to try to find the beast again. I knew he was out there somewhere, and I had the strange sense that he was looking for me, too.

The one-story A-frame cottage that Gordon had been using as his office was on the far side of a shallow hill. In the snow, I could make out Erica’s footprints where she’d come here earlier to look for her husband. The front door was locked, just as Erica had said. I knocked, but there was no answer. I circled the entire cottage and peered through each window, but the curtains were closed, and there were no lights on inside.

“I think we should go in,” I said.

“I don’t have a key.”

“I can break a window, but I need your permission to do that. The alternative is to wait until morning to see if Gordon comes back.”

Erica’s face tensed with indecision. I could see that the idea of breaching her husband’s private work space made her uncomfortable. That was probably one of the cardinal rules of their marriage.

Regardless, her worry won out. “Yes, okay, do it.”