I headed south for Sonoma after breakfast. Beasley insisted on tailing me the whole way to the airport in case Mandibole’s henchmen tried anything cute. During the night he’d gone out onto the porch and spotted a car sitting in the drive with its lights off. He went to fetch his rifle. The car eased on down the road.

Radio news reported that the wet weather and shifting winds were slowly bringing the fires to heel. No sign of the green sedan or the presumed bad guys.

I landed in Albany in the dark. Lionel idled his Monte Carlo at the curb. He didn’t ask questions. Halfway home, it began to snow.

PART IV

RAH, RAH! SIS, BOOM, BAH!

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

March came in like a lamb and I knew what that meant. The roads and the houses were filmed with grit. Fields and lawns lay skinned. Snow gleamed its dirty face among the haggard trees. A man could walk around in a windbreaker during the day before the sun dropped behind the Catskills and frost breathed against window glass.

I made an ear-numbing amount of calls. One of them was to Adeyemi’s lawyer, who set up a conference call on a “secure” line. I kept the update brief and any conclusions to myself.

Adeyemi asked what I’d learned, and I said not enough, which was more or less the truth. I had feelers out for Linda Flanagan and Danny Buckhalter. If I heard something, I’d report. Neither of us mentioned extending the retainer. Any further effort on my part would be itemized and passed along to his lawyer. His thinking was obvious: I’d poked around at some risk to my person, chased promising leads that went nowhere except into brick walls. It was the beginning of a slow, awkward breakup.

He thanked me for my efforts in a subdued tone. Prison wears on weak and tough alike, and tends to knock the starch out of the best of them. He’d held at least a meager hope that someone might be made to pay for his nephew’s death. That little match twinkling in the darkness had seemed like a blaze now that it flickered, pitiful and wan. There were select details I might’ve shared, a plan I might’ve laid out for his approval. I withheld my intentions primarily because my last shot was aimed at the moon. It seemed cruel to revitalize his optimism and then dash it completely in the likely event of yet another dead end.

■■■

The universe, in its boundless perversity, signaled less than a week after that phone conference. I’d gotten ahold of the Jeffers Colony caretaker, Lenny Herzog (who really did check his messages weekly at most), and paid him a tidy sum to act as my eyes and ears in Morrow Village. I allayed his wariness by explaining that all I wanted was a bead on Danny Buckhalter or Linda Flanagan—two people he didn’t actively associate with personal danger.

Who knew a lonely, doddering coot would jump at the chance to play detective? I sent him a photo of Linda and said to buzz me if he saw her or Danny. I promised a hefty cash reward in addition to what I paid him to linger at the likeliest bars in or around Morrow, swilling booze as he’d probably intended to do anyhow. It would be fair to rate my expectations as low. But the phone rang around midnight and Lenny cheerfully related that he was sitting not twenty feet from the woman. She looked sort of awful and was carrying on with a tableful of fellas, one of whom resembled Buckhalter, although he wasn’t sure. The two were more hands-on with each other than a pair of octopi. I asked if he knew where Buckhalter lived. No, but for a hundred dollars he’d follow the couple when they left the bar and report back. I told him that was a great idea.