The Touch Of Ghosts: Writer's Cut
Author: John Rickards
Date: 2018-04-12T23:00:00+00:00
Description: "The thing with avenging someone is that the victims who deserve it the most are always the ones who'd want it the least." Boston private investigator Alex Rourke has had to overcome personal tragedy and the emotional trauma it's caused to him before. But that's nothing to what he faces when the disappearance of a young man from a tough part of town takes him to the back country of northern Vermont. Adam Webb wasn't the first person to vanish in this stretch of the Green Mountains, and he won't be the last. Ghost towns, drug trafficking, blood and violence - secrets buried beneath the stark, c

Copyright & Credits

Copyright John Rickards 2012. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License. You’re free to share this work with others however you want, and to remix or create derivative works from it. Just give an attribution to the author, and don’t use it for commercial purposes. Enjoy!

This book should be free. If the place you’re viewing this message/that you got this book from charges money for it, use whatever “report a lower price” link your retailer has to tell them to drop the price, claim a refund if you can, and head to johnrickards.com, where you can at least get the others for nothing.

Cover image:

‘Shandra Stephenson’ by Sylvia McFadden, used under a cc-by license.

0.

Memories are like rare butterflies. Left alone they will dance around your head for a time before fluttering delicately away into the sky, the colors and patterns on their wings blurred by distance until you can no longer make them out at all, knowing as they go that you will never see them again. But if you trap them and pin them under glass, trying to preserve them, the same colors still fade over time, the form crumbles, and all you’re left with is a decayed reminder of living glory you cannot restore, a reminder whose imperfections will either drive you mad or else force you to bury it away, ashamed and bitter, in the dark so that it can no longer torment you.

In my memory, the air is full of the taste of spruce bark, dry and earthy and bitter. It mingles with the scents of a hundred other plants and flowers I can’t name, all combining in harmony to form a singular perfume which, for some reason I can’t place, reminds me of old wine casks. Grass stalks rattle beside my head. July sunlight flushes warm against my skin. The hum of insects going about their daily lives forms a chorus line for the sound taking center stage: a woman’s laughter.

I know that if I open my eyes now, I’ll see a pair of red-brown butterflies marked with patterns like orchid blossom skipping through the air above me in a complex, whirling, mating dance. Then I’ll shade my eyes against the glare of the sun, watching them until they pass behind the tall grass. And then I’ll hear…

And then. And then.

The memory I have now is like one of those butterflies. I can watch it over and over and over again until the colors fade, but I can never reach out my hands to catch it and hold it safe forever. And I can never change it, or the other ones that come after.

1.

Boston, MA.

2003.

I wasn’t a cop, but sometimes I still got to remind people I’d once been an FBI hotshot years after I’d crashed out of the Bureau. We were in a lecture theater much like any other. Rows of padded benches spread up towards the low, wide windows at the back of the room, surrounding the dais at the bottom like the seats of a Roman amphitheater. Forty, maybe fifty men and women were scattered around the auditorium, most concentrated in the first five or six rows. I couldn’t see anyone whose eyes weren’t on the man speaking next to me or on their notes in front of them. Everyone bright and keen and eager even with the winter doing its damndest to smash the building down around them.

“Your instructors at the Academy may have told you that there are two broad types of suspect,” Robin Garrett told them. He was my boss as well as my oldest friend. He’d been a better Bureau man than me, quitting because he wanted to, not because he had no other choice. “There are those who just want to get their guilt off their chest,” he said. “Even if it takes you a while to get the whole story out of them, you’ll get your confession, because they want to confide in someone. And there are those who will clam up and won’t give you a damn thing.”

The people who’d shown up here on a dreary Thursday evening at the start of January to hear our words of wisdom were mostly trainees from Boston’s Police Academy. The rest were newly-graduated police officers willing to sacrifice an hour or two of their spare time on the chance it’d boost their conviction rates and help them make detective.

“The ones who eventually break down and give you everything they’ve got aren’t a problem,” Rob said. “It’s the other kind — whether they’re experienced criminals or just stubborn — that’ll make you work for every ounce of information you can get.”

I could hear hail smashing like handfuls of pebbles against the windows at the back, even over the electrical hum of the projector illuminating the screen behind us. Every gust of wind brought a fresh batch in a rhythm like a heartbeat, the sound of a hundred hourglasses being turned over at once.

“Alex will speak in a little while about interrogation techniques and matching your approach to the individual suspect. That’s his field. Mine is the proper preparation beforehand to maximize your chances of success, whether you’re after a confession or just information.”

Every once in a while Boston PD paid us a small but reasonable amount to give evening lectures to rookie recruits and patrol division newbies desperate to get their shield. We passed on our experience — Rob had been a field agent and I was once a specialist in the Bureau’s NCAVC violent crimes division — and maintained our good standing with the BPD, and they got cops with a slightly broader degree of training for very little budget outlay. Everyone was happy.

“If you make sure you have as much relevant evidence and knowledge to hand as possible before you even open your mouth, you’ll have more chance of cutting through any bullshit and lies they try to feed you. You may even be able to make them think you know more than you do and trick them into giving themselves up.” He paused for effect. “Just make sure you get it right.”

The projector glow behind me changed and I knew they were seeing a photo of Bernard Leon, charged with murder in Phoenix two years previously. This was Rob’s part of the show. Now the introduction was out of the way, he’d run them through two examples where police had to rely on confession evidence to make their case: one failure and one success. After the story of the botched Leon investigation, he’d tell them about Dan Rothman, a career criminal suspected of holding up a Detroit jewelry store and seriously wounding a member of staff. The detective who eventually wrung a confession out of Rothman, along with his subsequent successful prosecution, was given a promotion as a result.

I wanted a smoke, and I missed being able to do that indoors. I figured everyone had to have one unhealthy vice, and that was mine. I didn’t drink much, wasn’t violent or prone to gambling, but I liked tobacco. The rest of the city — the rest of New England — didn’t feel the same way though. My girlfriend had started trying to persuade me to cut down from thirty a day, but I didn’t have the willpower. I was working on it, but not hard enough to notice. She was a doctor — a regional medical examiner for a large chunk of northern Vermont, no less — and I didn’t doubt she’d eventually wear me down.

I looked up at the windows, trying not to watch the clock. Three feet high, six across. Black mail-slot gaps gazing out into darkness. Tiny silver lights twinkled and flickered across them as though it was a clear starlit night out there, but they were just smears of sleet reflecting the lights of the city as they dribbled down the glass. My mind wandered as I watched countless drops of icy water trickle and die. Groceries to buy. Laundry to do. The weekend. Gemma.

“And now Alex Rourke will discuss the different interrogation techniques themselves,” Rob said, bringing me back to the present. A hundred-odd eyes were glittered at me. “They’re all yours, Alex.”

An hour and a half later, the last of the BPD’s newest additions had filtered away, leaving us to pack up and head for home. I’d just dropped my laptop back in my bag when we were joined by Lieutenant Aidan Silva, a man who always put me in mind of some kind of Grimm fairytale bear given human form. He had a mop of chestnut hair matched by a bristling beard flecked grey by the years, and between them a round, heavy nose and a pair of dark, sunken eyes. How and when he and Rob had become friends, I didn’t know. They shook hands before Silva leaned over and offered me a paw.

“I don’t know what your people have been putting in their food, Aidan,” Rob said as he stuffed our notes into a bag, “but we actually had some intelligent questions at the end. Caught me by surprise.”

Silva grinned, baring his teeth. “I hear there’s a couple of them can walk and chew gum at the same time, too. Better hope it’s not the start of a trend, otherwise I’ll be obsolete in a couple of years.”

“You and me both. We’ll end up in a retirement community together. Alex can come look after us and make sure our copies of Sports Illustrated are kept up to date. What’s on your mind? Don’t usually see you at these things.”

“Jolene’s decided to invite some people round for dinner and drinks on Saturday night,” the lieutenant said. “I figured an all-Department gathering would be too much like work so I was hoping you guys could shore up the numbers. Fill space, drink my beer, spare me from Jolene’s friends and my neighbors.”

“Sounds good to me,” Rob said. “Unless I’ve missed something, Teresa and me should be able to make it. Al?”

“Gemma’s down this weekend. I’ll check with her when she arrives tomorrow night; if she’s up for it, we’ll be there. Otherwise…”

“Sure, sure,” Silva said and mimed whipping.

After he’d gone and we’d packed, Rob and I hunched against the full force of the elements in the parking lot and contemplated our imminent death by drowning. He said, “You got anything else planned for this evening?”

“Tidying. I’ve got to get the apartment neat before Gemma gets here else she’ll think I’m letting myself go.”

“Don’t wear yourself out. You’ve got to meet a client first thing tomorrow.”

I grimaced in mock pain as he dropped into his car, then hurried over to mine. I didn’t use it often in the city, and gas prices would probably see it sold to someone with more money than sense at some point, but I as it went I owned a genuine, honest-to-God 1969 Stingray Corvette. Pale blue, original fittings, acceleration that would snap your neck if you weren’t sitting back right. It looked like a shark in the wet. I dived into its welcoming interior and wiped water out of my eyes, trying to think warm thoughts. Run-off from the roof sluiced down the windshield in front of me, laced with ice crystals that melted and vanished as I watched. Rob’s tail lights blurred red as his car pulled out of the lot, then disappeared altogether. Only then did I have the cigarette I’d wanted all evening, like I was a spotty teenager afraid of getting caught with a smoke, and watched the world wash itself away around me.

2.

We had a smart if unspectacular office in a smart if unspectacular office building not far from Kenmore Square, and against all odds I made it there on time the next morning. Robin Garrett Associates, the sign downstairs said. Licensed private investigators, process servers, business security and criminal consultants. Missing persons something of a stock in trade, as with most businesses like ours, picking up scraps the cops left behind. We had a secretary and three junior employees. We were, by the standards of the trade, a solid outfit, and we were good at our jobs.

The client coming in today was a missing persons one. I’d guessed as much, but the notes that our PA Jean had collected over the phone the day before confirmed it. The sheet of paper was on top of the layered strata of paper covering my desk.

Colleen Webb.

Son Adam (25) last heard of nearly two months ago - Burlington, VT.

Husband dead - car wreck - six months ago.

Moving out of old neighborhood- insurance money, can’t find son to tell him/discuss with him.

And, in Rob’s handwriting:

Don’t think she’s a time-waster. See what you can do.

At the bottom was her phone number and address in Roxbury. Bad neighborhood.

Mrs Webb arrived a few minutes after I did. She was a woman somewhere in her forties. Dark hair going grey, neatly tied back out of her eyes. Steel-rimmed glasses on a lined, tired-looking face. Emerald green wool coat, charcoal sweater and matching pants. Sensible shoes. All of it looked fairly new. Over her shoulder was a brown leather bag.

When she shook my hand, her palm felt damp and papery but her grip was firm. I gave her my best professional smile and offered her a seat. “Mrs Webb, I’m Alex Rourke. How can we help?”

She sat very straight with her bag clasped on her lap. Hazel eyes darted quickly over my desk, me, the rest of the office, as she replied. “It’s about my son Adam. He hasn’t been in touch in months and I haven’t been able to get hold of him.”

“Where was he last time you spoke to him?”

“A place called Burlington in Vermont. I don’t know if he was living there or not. He traveled around.”

“Did he have a regular job?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so. He used to pick up work now and then, but he never said anything to me about settling down. When we spoke last, he said he was a tour guide. But that was back in October, and I don’t know if he would have been for much longer.”

“Did he ever mention a girlfriend or anyone else he knew up there?”

She thought for a moment, then said, “No. At least, I don’t think so.”

“What about relatives in the north-east outside Boston? Anywhere he might have gone?”

“There’s just me now. My husband Billy died six months ago. Him and Adam never got on on; I think that’s mostly why he left and never came back to see us. I thought now Billy’s gone and everything he might like to come and stay with me for a while. I’m moving to a proper house with the life insurance, so there’d be no problem putting him up.” She looked down at her lap and trailed off into silence.

“OK Mrs Webb. I’ve got some standard questions that I have to ask. Don’t take offense at any of them.”

She nodded.

“Have you told the authorities, filed a missing persons report with the police, things like that? If not, you should.”

“I spoke to the Vermont State Police. That was a month ago. They haven’t done anything.”

“Do you remember who you spoke to? I’ll give them a call and see if they’ve turned anything up.”

“I’ve got his name somewhere,” she said, reaching into her bag. After a moment’s search she emerged with a crumpled piece of paper. “His name was Detective Sergeant Karl Flint. I told him everything I knew.”

“OK. Has your son ever had any trouble with the law, been involved with drugs, anything like that?”

“Not since he left Boston. Not as far as I know. He grew up in a rough neighborhood, Mr Rourke. Things happen.”

“And how regularly did he normally keep in touch with you?”

She frowned and her lips pursed. “You think I’m panicking over nothing? You think I’m just a stupid woman who can’t bear to let her boy out of her sight?”

“No, I don’t,” I said. “But I’ve got to ask. I’ve got to know whether or not this is unusual for him, or if he’s ever dropped out of view before.”

“He’d call at least every couple of weeks. And always when he was moving anyplace new.” Without prompting, she reached into the bag again and pulled out a couple of slightly grainy photographs. “That’s Adam,” she said, passing them to me. “They’re the most recent ones I could find, but they’re still a couple of years old. Sorry.”

The pictures showed a young man with short, windblown black hair and narrow, gaunt features, but the photos were taken from too far away and are too poor in quality to get more than a general impression of his face. No distinguishing marks. In both shots he was wearing a cream-colored jacket with red flashes at the collar, pockets and cuffs. The backgrounds were interchangeable town skylines, different in both.

“Does he have any tattoos, piercings, scars, anything that might help identify him?” I asked.

“I don’t know what else he’s got now, but he used to have a tattoo of a wolf on his right arm. Billy hated it.”

I nodded and made a note. “If it’s OK with you, I’ll need to keep these photos for now. If you’ve got any letters, cards, anything he’s sent you in the past year or so, I’d like to see those too. Also the names of any friends here in Boston or anywhere else he might still be in touch with.”

“I’ll see what I can do.” Mrs Webb took one of my cards. She glanced behind her as Kathryn, one of the three ‘kids’, our junior staff, walked into the office with Rob. Rob nodded to me as he took off his coat and headed for his desk. “Do you think you’ll be able to find him, Mr Rourke?”

I shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know, Mrs Webb. It all depends on why he disappeared. If he’s just switched jobs and forgot to call, yeah, I don’t think it’ll be too difficult. Same if he’s taken ill or been in some kind of accident. But if he’s on the run from some kind of trouble or anything worse has happened to him, it could well be that we never find him. The odds of tracing someone who’s been gone from wherever they should’ve been for more than a couple of weeks aren’t good at all, which is why most missing persons cases have a low priority with the police. It’s not nice, but it’s the truth. If it’s just that we don’t know where he is, not that he’s vanished from there, then we might be OK. If not… well, we’ll do our best.”

“Were you ever a cop?” she said. “You sound like you were in the police.”

“I was in the FBI. So was Rob over there. I left four, nearly five years ago.”

“Why? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“Health reasons,” I said. “Then Rob offered me a job here in the private sector.” I didn’t tell her how the death of my parents and the stress of working violent crimes had combined to give me full psychotic episodes and an eventual complete breakdown. I didn’t tell her how I’d spent time in an institution. I didn’t tell her because you don’t say these things to new clients trusting you with finding their nearest and dearest.

She smiled. “I’ll call you if I find anything else that might help,” she said. Then we exchanged pleasantries and she left just as neatly as she’d arrived.

Once she was gone, Rob said, “So, what do you think?”

“I think this is either going to be pretty straightforward, or else he’s gone for good. No middle way. It depends in the State Police found anything and if he’s got any easy-to-reach friends who know more than his mom.”

“I figured it’d he simple for you to check out the Vermont locals next time you’re up in the wilds. If Gemma’ll put up with you for an extra couple of days, that is.”

Rob was an arch urbanite, and as far as he was concerned any place that didn’t have its own international airport was a dangerously rural, alien environment. “It’ll certainly be easier than doing it from here,” I said. “I’ll see if she can put me up next weekend and into the week after. Meantime, I’ll give Detective Flint a call.”

“I suppose Gemma can say if the kid’s been brought in dead at all as well.”

“If the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner’s had anything to do with it, yeah, she should he able to find out. Especially if it happened in Gemma’s patch up north. There’s even a chance she’d have done the autopsy itself if it was. But it’d most likely be a John Doe job; if he was IDed, they’d have contacted his family. I’ll ask her when she gets here tonight.”

“You taking her out to dinner?”

I shook my head. “Cooking.”

“I never thought I’d see the day. Microwave chicken, is it?”

“Ho, ho.”

I reached Detective Sergeant Karl Flint through the Vermont State Police switchboard at the third attempt; he’d apparently spent most of the morning at the scene of a hit-and-run, away from his desk. When I explained my reasons for calling, he sighed. “Look, Mr Rourke, you know how it is with these cases. When the guy’s mother spoke to us, we got what we could out of her. I made a couple of phone calls, checked with Burlington PD, asked them to have a look anywhere that kind of transient might hang out. I had his photo sent to Amtrak, the airport, cab companies, just to see if anyone remembered him. We’ve had nothing back, no one’s seen him, and I’ve got higher priorities than one guy who’s most likely moved out of state.”

“Yeah, I know, and I explained that to her when she came to see us. Did you run him through the system?”

“He’s got a record, but nothing other than juveniles. Nothing on his driver’s license. Nothing on tax he might be paying as an employee, but he’s not claiming welfare. He doesn’t have any credit cards, and the last time he used an ATM was back before he was reported missing. Unless this guy gets arrested or shows his face somewhere someone knows him, my guess is he’ll stay vanished.” Flint paused, then said, “I wish you the best of luck, Mr Rourke, but I don’t think I can be much help.”

“Could you send me whatever you’ve got on his movements? It might not be much, but it could help. It’ll mean I won’t have to go over the same ground as you.”

“Sure, I don’t see any harm in that. You’ll have to give me something in writing first, just to confirm who you are and that whatever confidential information we’ve got stays confidential. Handle the paperwork, cover our asses. Otherwise, be my guest.”

We exchanged numbers, then I said goodbye to the detective and hung up. By noon, I had copies of all the information the VSP had on Adam Webb, and it didn’t amount to much. That was how it went usually. You came into this world screaming and bloody and there wasn’t anyone nearby who could claim not to know you’d arrived, but it was all too easy to leave it without so much as a ripple behind you.

Not that he was necessarily dead, I had to remind myself. But if he was, and there was anyone who’d know, it was my girlfriend, and that meant holding on until the evening.

3.

I’d met Dr Gemma Larson in the far north of Maine while helping out Aroostook County Sheriff’s Department on a murder case in my old home town. At the time, she was the county’s part-time medical examiner. We just sort of clicked out of nothing, that way that some people do. No secret, no memory, was too private or too deeply held to share, and nothing else seemed to matter if we were together. Before we’d met, I’d figured my breakdown had probably put paid to any real hope of a normal family life with someone, and I’d accepted that to one extent or another. Afterwards, I couldn’t imagine going back to how things were before. I’d been in love with her for eighteen-odd months. In April she’d managed to land a post at North Country Hospital in Newport, Vermont, as one of the state’s regional medical examiners. It was still a three-hour drive from Boston, but that was half what it had been to Houlton in Maine. Close enough to spend more than just the weekends together, and that was fine with me, gas bill be damned. If I could’ve worked closer to where she was, I would’ve done.

She came through the door a half hour late, her face hidden in a haze of shoulder-length blonde. I took her bag to tip the odds in her favor in the struggle against her purse and coat. Then, when she’d won the battle and successfully ditched both, produced a bunch of flowers from behind my back. She smiled then. It lit her up along with everything else around her. She was thirty-three, four years younger than me, but sometimes I felt like we were both kids.

“What have you done?” she said, eying the bouquet. “Something to be sorry for?”

“Nothing. That’s for being here, and this,” I said, pulling out a narrow box covered in gift wrap, “is because I’ve not seen you in a week.”

She opened it and held up the necklace inside. Nothing too fancy because I wasn’t made of money, plain silver with a pendant that was either a flower or a bird or a butterfly depending on how you looked at it. She watched it dance in the light for a moment and said, “That’s lovely. Is that my birthday present?”

“You never cashed in the voucher I wrote for you, so yes. Otherwise I’d still owe you one by the time the next came around. It’s OK?”

She smiled again. “It’ll do.”

We kissed long and deeply then, holding each other tight. I could feel the curve of her figure as it tapered towards her waist and then out over her hips. I could feel every breath she took, every movement as she pressed against me. Each time she went away, I missed that closeness.

Eventually she said, “So where’s my chocolates to go with all this? Don’t tell me you forgot.”

“The store sold out, so I figured I’d have to do you an entire dinner instead. Three courses, wine, the whole nine yards.”

“Three?”

“There are cookies in the kitchen. Treat them as an appetizer.”

She slapped me playfully on the shoulder. “So what are we having? I can’t smell anything cooking.”

“I didn’t know what time you’d be here so I haven’t started yet. It’ll be salmon in a mushroomy sauce with apple pie afterwards. The pie’s not my own work; I bought frozen. I’m not a superhero.”

“No one’s perfect. Since you’re going to be slaving away over a hot stove and I’ve just driven halfway across the country, I think I’ll ditch my stuff and then have a quick shower if that’s OK.”

“Depends if I’m allowed to join you or not.”

“You keep your hands to yourself,” she scolded, shooing me away. “I expect to be fed on my return.”

I saluted. “Yes, ma’am. Whatever you say, ma’am.”

Once talk over dinner turned to work, I showed her the photos of Adam Webb and asked if she could check whether he’d turned up in any of the state’s morgues when she was back in Vermont.

“Who is he?” she asked.

“Bit of a drifter. Grew up here in the city but moved away. His mom’s looking for him. Those photos are old; he’s twenty-five now.”

“Can I take one of them back with me? I’ll show it around.”

“Sure. If it’s no problem. Don’t feel like you have to just because it’s me asking.”

“It’ll do me good, looking so diligent. There’s talk that Dr Kirkland could retire in a few months, which would leave the Deputy Chief ME’s post open.”

“You’ve only been there seven months and you’re already looking for promotion? I never knew I was going out with such a career-minded girl.”

“Hey, it can’t do any harm, making a name for myself. The higher up you are, the more interesting work you get.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “You’re not getting anything interesting at the moment then?”

I refilled her glass. “I’m busy, sure,” she said, “I might have to do an autopsy on a kid killed in a hit-and-run when I go back on Monday. The State Police think it may have been something to do with the heroin trade, and the vehicle impact might have been an attempt to cover prior damage. Blood screens, forensics, everything. I don’t get that kind of thing much.”

“I wouldn’t have thought so.”

“Not the killing.” She speared the last remaining piece of fish with her fork. “But heroin’s huge all over the state. As huge as anything can be in such a quiet place. I’ve had two ODs since I started there, and the way I hear it the trade’s the main game in town.”

The conversation moved on then, before stopping altogether once we’d eaten dessert and drunk the last of the wine. Then Gemma took me in her arms once again and reminded me of one more reason why I loved her.

The following evening we went to Aidan Silva’s gathering at his home over the river in Cambridge. His wife Jolene was in full hostess mode, taking coats, thrusting drinks under the noses of newcomers and merrily performing all necessary and several unnecessary introductions. A few of Aidan’s friends from the force turned up. Rob brought his wife Teresa. Then there were some of the Silvas’ neighbors — whose faces and names quickly merged into one interchangeable set — and a half-dozen or so friends of Jolene’s who clucked and fussed over each couple as they arrived, everything brought to you by the letter O. Oh, she’s ever so nice. Oh, I hope you’re making sure he treats you like a princess. Oh, aren’t you just lovely together. Just as I was thinking we’d never escape our turn in the spotlight, they saw that one of the neighbors was pregnant and descended on her like a flock of Valkyries, leaving Gemma and me to hide somewhere out of the way.

Drinks flowed and the details blurred. Expectant faces, waiting for the punchline to a joke. The same faces open in laughter. The joke changed, the comedian changed, a dozen times or more. A pack of guys from the department and a handful of amusing anecdotes from the recent past. Found myself briefly trapped with complete strangers and all anyone seemed able to ask was “What business’re you in?” and “What do you drive?” Scored points with my answers on both counts, but I moved on before everyone’s reserves of small talk ran dry. I ended up standing in circles with the guys I knew best, the same guys I always ended up standing in circles with at parties, telling the same stories as every other time we were together. At midnight, Gemma slipped her arm around my waist and whispered, “Let’s go home.” Free. We made our excuses and walked the three-quarters of a mile back to my apartment, and then we belonged only to each other again for a time.

Sunday passed quickly despite my efforts to hold it back, and all too soon night was falling and Gemma had to leave me for another week.

On Monday, Webb’s mother gave me what little her son had sent her over the past year. I wasn’t surprised to see he hadn’t written often — “He mostly called,” she said — but I was a little surprised by the level of genuine affection he obviously had for her. Not something I’d expect from someone who’d willingly disappear unannounced. Two letters and a couple of cards. The latter weren’t anything much, but in the letters he wrote about working in upstate New York — Buffalo and Albany. In the first it seemed he was working at the rough end of the repo business, but a call to Buffalo PD told me his boss from back then was now in the middle of a year-long stretch for fraud. Adam sure hadn’t gone back to work there. In Albany he’d only been able to land a job flipping burgers and he’d hated it. That left his few remaining friends in Boston as the only available leads I could work from here, and that was — I knew — likely to be diving to, or beyond, the bottom of the barrel.

Late in the afternoon, Gemma rang. I told her how much of a blank I’d drawn. “Well, I still hope he won’t show up here. I sent copies of the photo you gave me to Burlington, as well as every regional and assistant ME and hospital I could think of. I should hear back from most of them in a day or two.”

“Thanks.”

“Just one of the perks of going out with a pathologist.”

“And such a gorgeous one, too.”

“Very smooth. When do you want to come up to look for this guy?”

“Well, I’ll be seeing you at the weekend, so why don’t I stay on for the first few days of next week as well? If it’s OK with you.”

She laughed. “Of course it is. The more time I get to spend with you the better. I can thank you properly for all those compliments you keep paying me. I doubt you’ll have the ideal weather for wandering around Burlington — it’s been snowing on and off since the end of last week. Are you sure Rob trusts you to get any work done while you’re here?”

“He suspects I’ll be too distracted to go trawling around town for missing people.” I glanced across the office, where my partner was shaking his head.

“Tell her I’ll have you fired if she keeps you from doing your job,” he called out.

I relayed the message. Gemma said, “I’ll be at work myself so he needn’t worry. I’d better go now. Duty calls. Love you.”

“I love you too,” I said, and hung up.

Rob rolled his eyes. “It’s enough to make you hurl.”

I finally caught a break of sorts the next day at one of the two addresses listed for friends of Adam. The first was a run-down brick duplex in an equally run-down street. The box-like front yard was overgrown with yellowing grass and creeping weeds, most of them dying off as winter set in. Posted on the front door was a notice that said the property was being repossessed and its occupants evicted. The place was empty. The second was an apartment in a dingy building at the end of a strip mall. The stairwell reeked of piss. My knock was answered by a scrawny guy I guessed around Adam’s age. He was wearing a Metallica T-shirt five or six years past the point where the band had been relevant to anything, stained jeans and had bare feet. A mop of blond hair topped a pale, tired-looking face.

“Yeah?” the kid said.

“Justin?”

“Yeah,” he repeated. “What you want?”

“I’m trying to find Adam Webb — his mom wants to get in touch but she doesn’t know where he is. Have you heard from him recently?”

He stood still, thinking, or so I hoped. Then he nodded once. “I got a call from him maybe two, three months ago. I think. Said he had the two hundred bucks he owed me. Is that recent enough? He in any trouble?”

This was the only outside confirmation I’d had that Adam even existed two months ago. “It’s recent enough, and he’s not in any trouble. What else did he say?”

“We talked a bit, y’know. Asked how he was doin’. I mean, he borrowed the money years ago when he first took off. I’d forgotten, but I guess he hadn’t. He sounded like he was doing pretty good for himself, up north.”

“Did he say what he was doing?”

The kid shrugged. “Not really. Got the impression it might not have been totally on the level, but I didn’t ask. He said he was working with some chick called Jessie, sounded like he maybe had a thing for her. At least, they were friends n’all.”

“Did he say anything else about her?”

“Nah, not to me. Sent me the two hundred, though. I hope he’s OK.”

“Why wouldn’t he be?”

“I dunno.” He sniffed. “Just that when people need to come asking about someone, they usually end up on the evening news, y’know?”

“I hope he doesn’t. Look, if he gets in touch again, or if you remember anything else, give me a call. He’s not in any trouble, and I’m not a cop.” I handed the kid a business card wrapped in a fifty.

“Sure, man. No problem.”

Downstairs, I called Adam’s mom and asked if she ever heard him mention a girl called Jessie. “No,” she said. “I don’t think so. You think he could be with her, whoever she is?”

“It’s possible.” I played safe, didn’t want to get her hopes up. “All I’ve got, though, is her first name and the notion that she was maybe with him in Burlington. I’ll need more to have any real chance of finding either of them.”

“But you’re going to try, aren’t you?”

“Sure. I’ll be going up to Vermont next week to see what I can find out on the ground. I’ve eliminated a few possibilities, but who knows what else will turn up. I’ll keep you posted.”

She thanked me and I hung up. I felt a little bad, sounding so optimistic when I spoke to her, but I guessed I wanted to put her mind a little at ease. No sense making things out to be worse than they were before they were.

I spent the walk home after work making a list of places where he might have stayed or worked around Burlington. I was hoping that the more I completed before I left, the more extra time I’d have with Gemma. The idea of a night or two spent by the fire with a bottle of wine instead of trawling dive bars had a lot of appeal.

At eight thirty in the evening the phone rang and I listened, stone-eyed, as a total stranger told me Gemma was dead.

4.

In my memory, the air was full of the taste of spruce bark, dry and earthy and bitter. It mingled with the scents of a hundred other plants and flowers I couldn’t name, combining in harmony to form a singular perfume which, for some reason I couldn’t place, reminded me of old wine casks. Grass stalks rattled beside my head. July sunlight flushed warm against my skin. The hum of insects going about their daily lives formed a chorus line for the sound taking center stage: a woman’s laughter.

I knew that if I opened my eyes now, I’d see a pair of red-brown butterflies marked with patterns like orchid blossom skipping through the air above me in a complex, whirling, mating dance. Then I’d shade my eyes against the glare of the sun, watching them until they passed behind the tall grass. And then I’d hear…

“Mr Rourke.”

I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t hear a thing except the sound of my own thoughts beating against the inside of my head. There were no butterflies and that sun went down a long time ago. I couldn’t go back to that hiking trail near Smuggler’s Notch, not without going alone and in the cold. The memory was all I had.

“Mr Rourke.”

I looked up at the white-coated figure in front of me. A grey-haired woman in her sixties. Lined face, wide brown eyes with the studied sympathy of a professional. She had blue doctor’s coveralls beneath her lab coat. “Mr Rourke,” she said, “I’m Dr Kingsley, the Chief Medical Examiner. If you’re sure you want to do this, follow me.”

I said nothing, just stared bleakly at her as I climbed out of my seat. She led me down the hallway to a small office. A couple of desks with computers sitting on them. Textbooks, papers. Everything was clinically clean and so tidy you’d have thought no one ever worked here. The air carried the faint ammonia odor of disinfectant. A door in the far corner led through into what looked like a laboratory. The adjoining wall had a large window running a good ten or twelve feet along it. There was a surgical screen across it but bright blue-white light bled around the edges. A set of aluminum double doors led from the office into the room beyond the window: the mortuary proper.

“I know how hard this must be for you,” Dr Kingsley said. It was an off-the-peg platitude but didn’t care much about her words anyway; they didn’t seem to matter next to the awful knowledge that this wasn’t some dream I was about to wake up from. “It’s always terrible when something like this happens. It’s cruel and senseless, and obviously we do what we can to accommodate the wishes of loved ones. Her family haven’t contacted us, so if you’re not sure you want to do this…”

“Her mom and dad are on vacation,” I muttered. “They aren’t going to be back until Friday. I don’t know about the others.”

She nodded. “Well, OK then. We’ll start slowly. We can stop at any time.”

Dr Kingsley opened the file she was holding, pulled out a pair of glossy photos and handed them to me. I glanced at them, swallowed once and said, “I’m not interested in pictures, Doc.”

She took them back. “You’d still like to see her?”

“Yeah.”

She pushed a button on the desk. Inside the morgue, a technician in blue coveralls drew back the screen that blocked out the window to reveal a gurney draped in white.

“I’d like to go in,” I said.

The disinfectant smell was even stronger in the mortuary, and the fluorescent lights in the ceiling seemed to throb and hum louder than they should. Gemma lay with her eyes closed, skin nearly as pale as the thick, heavy sheet that ran almost up to her chin. Her hair hung in limp drifts around her head. There was a faint bluish tinge to her lips, which had opened the tiniest fraction, just like they used to do when she was asleep.

For a long, long time I stared down at her lying there, cold and sterile and dead. My mind stayed empty. Blank, fled to some happier place, leaving me alone without any thoughts of grief or comfort, sorrow or anger, anything at all. I knew I should be in tears, or railing in anger against the unfairness of the world, or doing something to express my grief. But my head stayed silent and hollow and all I had left was a gut-tightening sense of longing that could never be fulfilled.

I trudged out of the mortuary. Dr Kingsley said something to me in her office, and I had the vague memory of signing a piece of paper, but I don’t remember hearing the words or reading the form. I just found myself back in the corridor outside, alone, and everything was done. The hallway seemed gloomy after the stark, dead light of the morgue. Tubes spaced along its length spat out a yellow glow so dirty I couldn’t tell if the walls were genuinely beige or just badly-lit plain white. The reflection on the uneven surface of the polished floor made dark whorls and pools collect like a desert mirage. I walked up the corridor and slumped into one of the chipped chairs back where I’d originally been waiting. Dropped my face into my hands and stared emptily at the liquid blackness beneath me, wishing I could fall into it.

Then I heard footsteps, heeled shoes rapping against the floor, the walls distorting the sound so much I couldn’t even tell if they were coming or going. “You must be Alex,” a voice said next to me.

I looked up to see a woman, maybe in her late twenties, wearing a thick coat over a sweater and jeans. Brown hair tied back in a ponytail, thin features and green eyes. There was a note of genuine sympathy and warmth in her voice which Dr Kingsley — and everyone else I’d spoken to since that first phone call, despite their best efforts — hadn’t been able to match. The woman dropped into the chair next to me.

“I’m Bethany,” she said. “Gemma was my friend.”

“Oh.” I couldn’t remember if Gemma had ever mentioned her to me or not. “Did you work together?”

“No, not really. I have a job here with the OCME. I heard that she was… y’know. Dr Kingsley said you were coming and that you might like a friend to be here. Have you been in yet?”

I nodded, slow and leaden. “Yeah.” I tried to show interest, feign normality, and added, “How did you two meet? Work the same case?”

“No,” Bethany said. “There was a meeting for OCME staff here in Burlington a few months ago. We were both new to everything around here, so we got talking. We met up a few times after that.” She sighed. “Do you know what happened to her?”

My throat clamped shut and talking was a heavy struggle. “The police told me she was driving home. Someone shot her, they think through the windshield. She got hit in the throat. They reckon she died instantly.” Breathe. “When the cops saw her car, they thought it was just someone gone off the road in the snow. They didn’t realize what’d happened until later.”

She was silent for a while, then said, “Do they know who did it?”

An orderly walked past pushing a cart full of cleaning equipment. He stared strangely at me for a moment, then saw me looking back and his eyes flicked forwards and stayed there until he was out of sight.

“I don’t know,” I said. “The State Police are handling it. It was the county sheriff’s department who called me with the news. The VSP will question me tomorrow. Did she have any enemies, any trouble at home, et cetera. The usual.”

“Did she?”

“Enemies? No, of course not. They speak to you at all?”

“I don’t know if they will. I hadn’t seen her for a while.” Silence for a while. Then, “Gemma said you were in the FBI. Can you help the police?”

“Don’t be stupid. Cops don’t let civilians. especially the victim’s loved ones, in on the show.” I sighed. “Look, I’m sorry I snapped. I’d like to catch whoever killed her, I really would, but it doesn’t happen that way. Even when I was in the Bureau and my parents died, all I did was answer the standard questions. Cops worked the case, not me. Much good I’d have been even if they’d asked. You can’t stay focused, not that close to things. Not when your world’s been smashed to pieces.”

“Will you try if the police get nowhere?”

I didn’t answer. This wasn’t a talk I wanted to have, and the scratchy feeling around my heart meant if we carried on with it there’d probably be an argument. And I’d probably be the one to start it.

Bethany rose to her feet. “I’ve got to go now,” she said. “I’m supposed to be at work in about eight hours. It was nice meeting you, Alex. I’m just sorry it was like this.”

“Sure.” I looked up as she adjusted her coat. “Thanks for talking to me, I needed it. I’m sorry I’m not in the best of moods right now.”

“You’ve got nothing to apologize for. If you need me, here’s my number.” She handed me a slip of paper. “Take care.”

I stayed in the chair for some time after her footsteps had faded, still dazed, before an internal autopilot suggested I find a motel and try to sleep. My legs felt weak like all the life had been kicked out of them, and I didn’t want to leave Gemma behind. Dark, dirty slush and ice blanketed the parking lot outside, but although the sky above was utterly black, cloud cloaking the stars, no fresh snow fell. I was too numb to feel the cold.

The nearest motel was a local chain franchise called the E-Z Rest. Burlington was dead at two thirty in the morning and I saw almost no other traffic braving the conditions. The motel wasn’t at the absolute bottom end of the accommodation food chain but it was close. They had vacancies, though, and a bored night manager on desk duty. The light in my room buzzed and flickered a while before holding. I turned on the TV and emptied my pockets before collapsing into the only armchair to doze.

The voicemail symbol was showing on the screen of my cell. I almost dropped the thing when I heard the voice on the message. It was Gemma.

5.

“You have… one… new message. Message received… yesterday at… five… thirty-three… PM.”

“Hi, honey, it’s me.”

Gemma was calling from the car; I could hear the vibration of the engine in the background. There was no steady traffic noise around her, so I guessed she must have been out of Newport already, on the backroads.

Her voice made me miss her all the more.

“I’m just calling to ask you about the weekend. Susan’s invited me to a party in St Johnsbury on Saturday and I said I’d see if you wanted to go. It’s more of an evening on the town, apparently. Some friends of hers are going to be taking over a bar for the night, so I guess there must be a lot of them. But she said it’s like an annual thing. It sounds kind of fun.”

I could hear the high-pitched watery noise of the car’s wheels cutting through snow on the road. The whirr of the heater. The squeak in the seat she was going to get fixed but hadn’t.

“But I don’t know if you fancy doing that after driving up all this way, even if you’re not going back on Sunday. I don’t think you’ve ever met any of the people who are going, though I know I’ve mentioned them to you before. Again, it’s up to you whether you want to or not.”

Her tone changed. She was smiling and I could hear it, almost see it. “Even though you do owe me for that bash for your police friend. Maybe I’ll make you repay me. Oh, and what do you want to eat when you’re here? I don’t have much in the house right now, but I can make a trip to the store after work on Friday, I thought I might make some kind of Thai thing in the evening, but I haven’t decided what, and I’m open to suggestions for the rest of your stay. Anyway, I’d better go because it’s just started snowing again and I need to keep my eyes on the road. I love you, honey and I’ll—”

Crack.

I could almost feel the bullet hit. The noise itself was enough to make me double up with pain, hugging myself tight as if I’d been kicked in the gut, dimly aware that tears were streaming down my face. My girlfriend, dead, the whole thing available to play over and over again. It hurt as much as when I got the call to tell me she’d been killed — worse, because this time I didn’t have the half-hope to cling to that it was a joke, or a dream, and that she was really OK.

If there was anything after that on the message, I didn’t hear it, just let it bleed out on the floor. I didn’t dare pick up the phone again in case I found out that Gemma didn’t die straight away, in case I heard her last shuddering, painful breaths. Eventually, when enough time had passed, I collected it from the floor and heard the distorted sound of the automated message looping.

“… three. If you would like to hear the message again, press one. If you would like to save the message, press two. To delete the message, press three. If you would like …”

My first instinct was to wipe it and never again have to face the agony of Gemma’s final moments. For a moment my thumb hovered over the ‘3’ button, but then I hit ‘1’ instead.

“Thank you. Your message will be saved for thirty days.”

I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t erase her last words on this earth. Maybe I’d have someone download them onto a computer so I’d have something lasting, something more concrete than memory. Maybe time would dull the hurt that came from knowing I could listen to her, but couldn’t talk back ever again.

Sleep, unlikely before, was going to be impossible after that, and I didn’t even try. I just sat in the armchair until daylight leaked weakly through the window behind me, then left.

State Police headquarters was in Waterbury, twenty-five miles or so from Burlington and about as non-touristy as Vermont got. A bunch of government agencies including the VSP were based out of the Waterbury Complex, a renamed section of what was once the State Hospital for the Insane. Trees gone brown and bare with the onset of winter dotted the asylum’s campus, surrounding each patch of snow-covered open ground. Past use gave it a walled-off, prison feeling, even though it was busy with admin workers. I wondered what it must have been like to be a patient here. I wondered if I was ever going to sleep again. If I’d ever want to.

When I swung out of the car, the cold hit me like I’d fallen into a river. I wedged my hands in my pockets and hurried to the doors. Inside the air smelled acrid, overly warmed by a heating system that recycled every cup of bitter coffee and every sour armpit. The woman at the front desk directed me down the hall and said I’d be meeting Detective Sergeant Karl Flint. I recognized the name as that of the cop I’d briefly spoken to about Adam Webb. I found his office at the end of a long, echoing corridor. He was somewhere around forty, pale and more or less clean-shaven, with close-cut dark hair and wide, watery brown eyes. He wore a dark grey suit and burgundy tie like he was born in them. He stood when I came in and we shook hands, but his bedside manner felt straight out of a textbook and I got the impression he didn’t use it much.

“Good morning,” he said. “I’m Detective Sergeant Flint.”

“Alex Rourke. We spoke on the phone a couple of days ago.”

“We did?” A blank look crossed his face.

“Adam Webb. Missing person.”

“Oh, yeah, right. Small world, isn’t it?” he said. “Mr Rourke, I know this is a tough time for you, but I need to ask you some questions that might help us figure out what happened to Dr Larson and why. We’ll record the conversation so we can refer to it later. OK?”

“Yeah, I know the drill.”

“Good.” He smiled. Uncapped a pen. “When did you last speak with Dr Larson?”

“Monday.”

“What did you talk about?”

I shrugged. “Nothing much. The usual, just about our days at work, things like that. Are you married, Detective Flint?”

“No.”

“Well, imagine what married couples talk about when they come home from work. That’s what we did.”

“OK. And that was the last occasion you spoke to her?”

“She called me yesterday, but my phone was engaged so she left a message on my voicemail. We didn’t talk.”

The chair creaked as he leaned forward. “What time was this, Mr Rourke?”

“Just gone five-thirty.” If he noticed a touch of hoarseness in my voice, it didn’t show. “Right up to the point she died.”

Flint’s hand hovered. “What did she say?”

“She was talking about the weekend — I was coming up to stay with her. Some stuff about a party in St Johnsbury, what she was going to be cooking. Nothing strange. Then she said it had started snowing again so she was going to hang up to concentrate on the road.” I paused. Breathed. “Then I heard her window splinter.”

“Did you hear a shot?”

I shook my head. “No, just the glass breaking.”

He leaned back in his chair. “And that was all? Do you still have the message?”

“No.” I wondered as I said it why I was lying. Keeping Gemma’s last moments private, maybe. It didn’t matter anyway; since there was nothing on the message that I thought would help the police, I wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it. “I erased it,” I said. “I didn’t want to hear it again.”

“God damn it,” Flint said, shaking his head. “There could have been something useful on it.”

“Like I said, I didn’t want to hear it again. She was driving along and then the bullet hit. That’s all.”

He paused for a moment. “Moving on. Did Gemma sound upset or agitated in any way when she spoke to you, not just on the last occasion but at any time recently?”

“No, she never said anything to me about being worried. I don’t know of anyone who might have wanted to kill her. She hadn’t had trouble with anyone lately, or ever, that I can remember. She wasn’t the sort. Is that what you were looking for?”

“No strange occurrences, at home or at work?”

I shook my head. “Everything was normal.”

“What about your relationship? Were there any problems there? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“I do, but I expected it. And no, our relationship was great.” My throat closed up again around the words. I wanted to make the guy understand how one day we were going to be married, maybe even have a family, but the thought of either of those things just brought the threat of angry tears. I just said, “We were happy.”

He nodded and dropped his pen on the desk. “That seems to be the picture we’re getting from everyone we’ve spoken to.”

“Have you got any leads, anything to go on?”

“inquiries are progressing.”

“Meaning no.”

“It’s very early days, Mr Rourke, and we’re still trying to develop leads.” He sighed. “She was found by a Lamoille County Sheriff’s Department cruiser, but they thought she’d gone off the road in the snow and it wasn’t treated as a crime scene until someone from the medical examiner’s office got there. We haven’t found any witnesses who could tell us what happened yet — that patch of Route 100 is pretty quiet. We’re trying to collect information, but until something comes up, since she had no enemies and nothing was taken, we’re currently looking at a motiveless crime or a freak hunting accident.”

“An accident? You’ve got to be goddamn kidding.”

“A rifle slug can carry a long way. If someone took a shot and missed… it’s possible.”

“Wouldn’t they have come forward? Have you found the bullet?”

“We’re out of season for most animals, so it may have been someone poaching, which is why they wouldn’t want to tell us what happened. And no, we haven’t found the bullet. The state of the ground where she went off the road made it hard to know where to look. That’s about all I can tell you, and even that’s too much. Let us do what we have to.” Flint leaned forward and rested his arms on the desk. “Look, Mr Rourke. I know it’s hard to accept, but shit does happen, and it sometimes happens for no good reason. You’ve got to leave it to us to figure out the truth. We’ll get there in the end.”

“Sure. Thanks.”

I didn’t feel very thankful, trudging back out to the parking lot. And I still hadn’t heard anything else about what the VSP had — or hadn’t — found by the time we buried Gemma in a cemetery near Bangor in northern Maine three days later.

6.

A cold, hard morning. A blanket of ice like shattered glass covered the ground, broken here and there by frozen tufts of straggly grass. It snapped and crunched beneath my feet as I moved to the front of the small crowd of mourners gathered by the side of a dark casket strewn with red and white flowers.

The sky was a brilliant pale blue, with hardly a wisp of cloud to be seen. The sun weak, bright but distant. A clean, icy breeze blew in a constant stream across the top of the low hill on which we stood, turning pale faces paler still, clenched hands whitish-purple. Gemma’s family were all there as well as several of her closer friends. Some I knew, some I didn’t. Her mom and dad, both nearly sixty, crying softly as the white-robed priest conducted the burial service. His voice was low and nasal, but I wasn’t listening. Too busy thinking about Gemma, all we had together and all that could have been. Trying my best to burn her face, smile and laughter into my memory, not to let them dance away from me.

The reverend finished speaking as the coffin vanished slowly into the earth. The wind almost carried away his final syllables; ‘dust to dust’ was no more than a whisper. I swallowed hard and closed my eyes.

Footsteps crunched through the ice, people filtering away. Most said a few words to Gemma’s parents, then made their way slowly back towards the cars. A couple, including her elder sister Alice, did the same for me too. Her brother and one or two others stayed for a while at her graveside, silent.

I walked away, feeling hollow. There was a figure standing fifty yards away among the tombstones. Bethany was waiting near the bottom of the hill, dressed all in black with a white flower pinned to her lapel by a silver brooch shaped like wings. She was looking uncertainly up towards Gemma’s resting place.

“I didn’t know whether to come or not,” she said as I reached her. Her eyes were raw and her voice trembled a little as she spoke. “I wasn’t invited, not as such, but I heard where it was and so I thought…”

“I think her parents preferred to keep it small, but I’m sure Gemma would’ve liked it that you wanted to be here.” My eyes itched, but rubbing at them only made it worse.

“Are you all right, Alex? I mean, are you handling this OK? You look terrible.”

My skin felt as well as, I knew, looked like it was ready to fall off my bones. “I just haven’t been sleeping well,” I said. “Five, six hours maybe, maybe less, since we met at the hospital.”

“You should see a doctor. That can’t be good for you.”

I smiled humorlessly. “I’ll live. How are you doing?”

“OK, I guess. Gemma was one of the best friends I had in Vermont. It doesn’t seem fair.”

“These things rarely do.”

“Have the police come up with anything so far?”

“They haven’t called me, so I don’t know. I guess not. They thought there was a chance it might have been a freak accident anyway.”

She frowned past me, up the hill. “Don’t you wish you knew?”

“Sure. But I just have to wait it out. I’ve got to go up to her house, sort our things out and get them ready for her lawyer. No one wants someone in my state putting their nose where it’s not wanted. Anyway, I’m not much use for anything right now…” The sentence slipped away from me. I glanced down at the grave next to us, wondered if its occupant wouldn’t mind if we swapped places. Right then, the idea didn’t seem so bad.

The carpet of ice behind me crackled. Anna and Murray Larson, Gemma’s mom and dad, were standing there. Murray was a stocky, tough man who now looked utterly wilted and unsure. He fixed me with watery eyes and said, “Hello, Alex.”

“Mr Larson.”

“I don’t know how you’re doing right now, or what’s going on in your head, but I want you to know that my daughter meant everything to me.” Murray’s voice cracked as the words jammed in his throat. “Damn you for getting her killed.”

“What?” I couldn’t believe I’d heard him right. We’d only met a few times, but I’d always thought Gemma’s parents liked me well enough.

“This is your fault. She wouldn’t have been there if you hadn’t wanted her to move down south. She was happy in Houlton. Why couldn’t you have let her be?”

I said nothing and just stood, looking at him. I wanted to defend myself but didn’t. Gemma’s father was angry, but I knew he was grieving for his daughter the same as I was. You don’t start an argument in that situation.

“God help you if I find out she died because of something you did,” he said before clasping his wife tighter and moving away. Anna glanced briefly at me, a flat gaze devoid of emotion, then buried her face in his shoulder.

I watched them go, still not moving. Wondering then if maybe there was something in Bethany’s argument. If maybe I could find out a little more about why she’d died and the hell with the cops. Bring some justice for the woman buried on top of the hill and some peace for an old man feeling the pain of outliving his daughter. Maybe. I owed her that, and more, even if it wouldn’t in all probability get me anywhere. And in trying to do something I could escape the reality of being something I didn’t want: alone.

I looked around for Bethany, but she was gone, slipped away and out of sight without a sound, leaving me to myself among the frozen graves.

7.

I didn’t go back to Boston after the funeral. Instead I followed US-2 west, out of Maine, across the White Mountains of New Hampshire and into Vermont. From St Johnsbury I switched to smaller local routes all the way to the isolated town of Bleakwater Ridge, Gemma’s home for the past six months. Miles of hill country, evergreen-covered ridge lines marching off into the distance. The trees that blanketed the slopes were nothing but sombre black shapes beneath their dappled coat of snow. The horizon ahead slowly seemed to rise to meet me; the advancing wall of the Green Mountains steadily cut off the sky, lining it with stone. By the time I drew close to town in the deepening dusk, the jumbled peaks and sawtooth foothills were vague, looming shadows climbing up behind the highway like breakers about to pour down into the forest and the cluster of buildings huddled within.

I crested the top of one slope as the highway looped to the right and my headlights flashed across something up in the trees by the road. It could just have been a patch of shadow, something half-seen and misinterpreted by my brain, but my breath stuck in my throat and it was enough to make me tighten my grip on the wheel.

It looked like the corpse of a large black dog, maybe a German shepherd. Suspended somehow, hung or nailed to the trunk, head upwards. Its back legs hung limply down towards my car. The lights sparkled off something shiny and wet on its coat. I glanced back once or twice in case I saw I again, but I didn’t stop. Either it was someone else’s problem, or it wasn’t what I’d thought.

When the town appeared up ahead it almost took me by surprise, the same as it ever had. Glimmers of yellow, cream, and orange light burst like stars through the unseen foliage by the roadside and then suddenly the trees broke and I was passing houses which rambled up and over the rocky fold that gave Bleakwater Ridge its name. The buildings were old-looking and packed tightly together, with whitewashed wooden siding and pale roofs, living ghosts of an earlier age. With their small yards and closeness to the road it was impossible to tell just how far the town spread away from its sole major artery. The uphill climb was only a few hundred yards and the couple of side streets didn’t give much away; the roofs of the houses lining each junction masked the view to either side until I crossed. A brief sense of space, some lights in the darkness, then they were gone again.

At the top of the ridge I made a right on to West Road. The intersection with Main was the focal point of the settlement: a barn-like town meeting house, a tiny run-down church, a general store with a couple of other businesses to either side, and the Owl’s Head Inn, its only bar. Fifty yards down West, I pulled on to the driveway of Gemma’s darkened home and killed the engine.

“How’d you afford a place like this?” I asked, climbing out of the car as Gemma trotted down the steps to meet me. My eyes took in the two stories of white boards, the high sash windows, the deck to the side and rear, the upturned V-shape of the dormer roof where it jutted out above the attic room casement.

“No one much wants to live this far from the big towns or the main vacation spots,” she said as she threw her arms around me. “Besides, it’s hardly in pristine shape.”

Looking again, I could see spots where the siding had warped, twisting and splitting around knots just visible beneath paint which was peeling and blackened in places. The window frames showed their age with minute cracks laced along the grain of the wood. The front door’s rusty hinges creaked as it swung shut in the breeze.

For all that, the place was beautiful. From where we stood on the driveway I could just make out the grey sheen of Silverdale Lake through the trees and houses to the east. The ridge ran steadily downhill all the way to its shore and we were in a good spot to enjoy the view. In the opposite direction the forested, notched face of Windover Mountain punched up into the sky behind the town like a vast ancient rampart, sheer and indomitable. There was more birdsong than traffic noise, and the air that rustled through the leaves was clean and pure.

“You doctors get all the good things in life.”

“Come on,” Gemma said. “I’ll show you around.”

I clambered out of the car and fetched my bag from the trunk. The street around me was frozen and silent, though not entirely dark. Light shone through the windows of a couple of the houses further down the road, and there was perhaps a hint of movement behind the curtains. I turned away from them and crunched through the undisturbed snow up to the porch, hunting in my pocket for the keys.

Inside, the house was cold. I flicked the lights on in the hall and dropped my bag at the foot of the stairs, then went back outside to retrieve the handful of mail that had built up over the past few days. Junk, most of it. A couple of personal letters for Gemma I didn’t open but left propped up by the mirror, like she might come home to get them.

The living room was much the same as last time I was here. The burgundy felt couch starting to wear thin in patches, the not-quite-matching armchair, the clutter on the coffee table. At the far end of the room near the fireplace was the antique rocking chair we’d come across when we went to a fair in Burlington. On the mantel was an LCD alarm clock intended for travelers. Next to it was a photo in a cheap wooden frame of the two of us together; apart from that and a few lighter patches on the pale yellow walls to show where the previous owner’s pictures had once hung, the room was undecorated.

The cavernous kitchen beyond was a little homelier, though that didn’t stop my footsteps ringing hollowly from the tiled floor. The table in the center was spread with a blue and white cloth, half a dozen cookery books sat on top of the fridge and there were a variety of utensils stacked along the worktop. A couple of dishcloths hung from cupboard doors, splashes of color against the wood, and there was a bunch of wilted flowers - the ones I’d given her that final time - in a vase on top of the microwave. I skimmed the notes stuck to the wall by the phone, but nothing grabbed my attention. I glanced through the back windows at the deck outside, then checked the fridge and cupboards. Although I figured I should be OK for breakfast, there wasn’t much food in the house. I hoped the bar on Main served meals.

I collected my bag and headed up the groaning stairs. Gemma’s bedroom looked like she’d just left. The covers were crumpled, unmade, and the pillow still retained the dent left by her head. There was a shirt and a sweater that never made it to the laundry hamper lying on the floor, a scattered collection of jewelry and the small amount of makeup she used on the table by the mirror. There was a half-read paperback on the floor next to the bed. I couldn’t help but glance down the landing to the smaller spare room — the study — that I knew housed her computer and some junk she’d never gotten round to unpacking, and the bathroom at the far end, just to make sure she wasn’t still here. Dissonance between memory and reality; it all felt deeply wrong. I dropped my bag just inside the bedroom and made my way downstairs again, then out into the cold.

My breath steamed in the stiff breeze that blew down off the mountains, rubbing my face raw. It thrummed and whistled among the wires that suspended the stoplights over Main, making them shudder and dance. The Devil’s eye-glow of the red light preventing traffic from crossing the larger highway glowered at me as I hurried over the junction towards the Owl’s Head. A small, unlit sign beneath its name said: ‘Bar — Grill — Rooms’.

I walked into a roiling cloud of stale warm air and the low murmur of conversation. Somewhere in the background a jukebox was playing Dire Straits’ ‘Brothers in Arms’, because nothing said Saturday night in this part of the world like wanting to kill yourself. Either the bar hadn’t changed much since Revolutionary times or the owners had gotten a great deal on dark aged oak in bulk. Black wooded tables, ceiling, counter, doors and windows. The carpet was a red so deep it might just as well have been black too. Even the walls were dark green. I’d been in here a couple of times with Gemma but I didn’t remember it being quite so funereal.

There were no more than thirty people inside, and I wasn’t surprised to see that none looked like tourists. Not that the locals were grizzled mountain types out of some cheap TV movie; as far as I knew maybe half the people in town were white collar workers unable, like Gemma, to afford anywhere closer to their jobs. The rest were either farmers or retirees. More than one pair of eyes tracked me to the counter, though the music didn’t die and the conversation didn’t stop. A couple in their forties were tending bar and waiting tables. The woman intercepted me.

“What can I get you?” she said, not bothering to hide the fact that she was trying to guess what I was doing in town.

“A Bud, thanks. Is the kitchen still open?”

She checked her watch. “Yeah, just about. Best not ask for anything fancy, though.”

“A burger, fries maybe. Whatever’s big and won’t be too much hassle this time of night.”

“No problem.” She scribbled down an order on a notepad and the old guy took it from her and vanished out back.

I sat at the counter, nursing my beer and absentmindedly listening to such snatches of conversation as I could make out. Normal nothing talk for the most part — complaints about work, road repairs, hockey games. Husbands bitching about their wives, wives bitching about their husbands. The closest I had to a pack of suspicious types in long coats lurking in the shadows was a pair of old timers at one of the tables, talking in voices too quiet for me to catch. One of them eyeballed me periodically; I watched him in the polished surface of the beer tap in front of me.

This continued while I worked through my dinner and another beer. The Owl’s Head filled up a little, but not enough to come close to crowded. Eventually, on one of his occasional trips to the counter, one of the old gossips said, loud enough to catch my attention, “Cold evening we’re having. You from away?”

“Yeah. More or less.”

He nodded like that was expected. “We do get folk passing through. On your way out again tonight?”

I looked across at the old man. His question was a typical ‘get rid of the unwanted outsider’ type, but his tone made it seem less of a threat and more as though he suspected he already knew my answer. Like he already knew who I was and what my business was here.

The guy himself was unassuming, not even looking at me but instead trying to catch the barmaid’s eye. He must have been in his late sixties at least, with a whitish-grey beard and close-cropped white hair thinned almost to baldness on top. Dressed for the cold.

“No, I’m not,” I said. “I’m probably going to be around for a while.”

“The hiking or somesuch? Same again, Bella.”

“I’m here because of my girlfriend.”

“She live here? If you don’t mind me prying.”

I drained the bottle and gestured for another. “Not any more. She was killed last week just north of town.”

“I see.” Expectation, hope maybe, flared in his eyes. I guessed a theory of his had just been confirmed. He held up a hand to stop me paying for my drink. “Here, I’ll get that. Fair exchange for putting up with an old man’s questions.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. So are you just sorting out everything that needs sorting out, or is there something else on your mind?”

“Some of both. I thought maybe I could find out why she died, and who killed her.”

“So you’re a cop.”

“No, not these days. Do you know anything about what happened?”

“Only what I heard.” He picked up his beers and nodded his head in the direction of his drinking buddy, who was still sitting at their table. I followed him over and found a vacant chair while he placed one glass in front of his companion and took a slow draw from the other. “Ed Markham,” he said. “And this here’s Charlie Kanin.”

Charlie was almost identical to Ed, except that his beard was much shorter and he was completely bald. Otherwise they could be brothers.

“Alex Rourke,” I said.

“Mr Rourke’s looking for whoever killed his lady friend, the doctor.”

Charlie nodded. “That sort of thing shouldn’t happen, not to decent people.”

“I talked to Sylvia Ehrlich, one of the sheriff’s deputies, after it happened,” Ed said. “She didn’t say much, just that there was a woman they found dead in her car, and that when the doc checked her, they saw she’d been shot. Then it was a murder case, so they had to turn everything over to the State Police.”

“Bad business,” Charlie said.

Then it was Ed’s turn to nod. “We all only found out who it was a couple of days ago. You talked to the police?”

“Yes and no. The State Police took a statement from me. I haven’t seen anyone from the local sheriff’s department. I guess it’s not their case now anyway.”

“Are you going to?”

“I’m just sorting out Gemma’s things. Getting them in order.”

“Sure,” Ed said, and I guessed he knew damn well that if I really thought that then I was kidding myself.

The conversation died away after that, although I stayed sitting there while Ed and Charlie chatted about people I’d never heard of. I gave it some time, then said goodnight to the pair of them and made for the door.

Outside, snow was falling again. Tiny specks of ice caught in the breeze spiraled into vortices where they passed trees and buildings, pricking my skin like frozen grains of salt and collecting in my hair. I pulled up my collar and walked back to Gemma’s house as fast as the slippery footing allowed. The old building creaked faintly, stiff beams flexing and groaning. The breeze whistled and piped through a stray knothole or gap somewhere in one of the corners of the roof. It sounded like a warped lament playing far away. I turned the key in the lock, briefly checked behind me, then stepped inside.

The house had warmed up a little while I was out, so I assumed the heating system was still working. I wiped cold water out of my eyes, dropped my jacket over the back of the couch and made a cup of coffee.

There was something about the building that made it hard to settle for any length of time. I tried watching TV, but every few minutes I caught myself looking over my shoulder at the rest of the room, scanning the corners, the space behind the door. I got a glass of water. Took a piss. Thought I heard the window rattling in the hall and went to check — it wasn’t, and in fact the snow was stopping and the sky looked to be clearing a little. Smoked a cigarette. Got a fresh pack from my jacket. Changed chairs. Changed back again. I didn’t know whether it was the unaccustomed emptiness of the place, something about the journey up here, or the funeral that morning, but I was jumpy. My eyes picked up every shifting shadow, every little noise.

After an hour or so of this, I decided I might as well unpack my things and try to sleep. I went upstairs and along the landing to the bedroom door, then paused. The room beyond was dark. The bed was a vague silhouette against the far wall. The only illumination was the faint glow from downstairs and the even fainter silver sheen coming through the windows. The room still carried Gemma’s scent, and in the gloom it was possible to believe she was asleep in the bed, breathing just too softly to hear. It was like stepping into a memory of one of those nights when I’d stayed up late to watch a movie and had to creep into the bedroom in the dark, trying not to wake her. If I crossed the threshold, passed into this dreamlike bubble of the past, could I stay there? Could I slip under the covers, warmed by her body, and feel her skin gently brush mine?

The answer to both questions was no and I knew it. Still, just imagining the possibility was comforting in a strange way, as though Gemma was still alive in another world, another time, and maybe I’d be able to look through and see her now and then. I’d have liked that.

I sighed heavily, then broke the bubble by walking into the room. As I bent to pick up my bag, I caught a glimmer of movement outside the window. Peering through the frost-speckled pane, I saw that the snow had stopped entirely. The moon was up, although strips of cloud torn by the wind repeatedly scudded across it, making the light rise and fall like the sky was breathing. Past the remaining houses on West Road, over the trees at the base of the ridge, the frozen surface of Silverdale Lake glittered like the few stars visible up above, twinkling through the screen of twigs and branches that surrounded it. As I gazed at the almost hypnotic sheen on the ice, the moon briefly emerged fully from the clouds and I could see a handful of jumbled shapes in the woods on the far side of the lake.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing through the open window. “Another town?”

Gemma came to stand next to me and followed my outstretched arm, peering at the buildings peeking out from beneath the distant leafy canopy. She shook her head. “North Bleakwater, according to the realtor. He said it’s been abandoned for years, something about a flood in the Twenties. The woman who lives next door called it Echo Springs.”

“Real-life ghost town, huh? Have you been to take a look yet?”

“I went for a walk around the lake on Wednesday evening. There’s a dirt trail that runs there from the highway, but it’s muddy and overgrown, like the buildings. There’s only a few that still have more than a couple of walls. Give it another twenty years and it’ll probably be nothing but trees and a handful of stones. Interesting, though.”

“So I should have brought a spare pair of shoes if I wanted a romantic walk in the woods? That’ll teach me.”

“We’ll just have to see what we can do here to make up for that.”

I turned away from the window. Grabbed a blanket from the closet and left the room, careful to shut the door behind me. I couldn’t spend the night in there, not any more. It just didn’t feel right.

I lay on the couch, still half-dressed, and tried to sleep with the blanket wrapped as tightly around me as possible. It wasn’t easy. With my eyes closed, stray noises sounded louder and harder to place. A floorboard that shrieked as the house swayed and settled, a drip, drip of water trickling down somewhere outside the room. Every new interruption tripped a spike of adrenaline and I couldn’t relax long enough to fall asleep. Every time I got close, something else shifted in the dark and bang I was wide awake again.

I’d suffered from insomnia, on and off, for years. It was frequent and serious enough that I had an emergency supply of sleeping pills on prescription. They usually worked, but I’d had some bad experiences with them in the past and was less inclined to rely on them than in the early days.

I opened my eyes. The clock on the mantel read 02:47. I clambered out of my nest and stumbled to the stereo. Switched the radio on and hunted for a station still transmitting at this late — early — hour.

“… SEEN THE SHADOW ON THE MOON…”

Volume too high. I cranked it down hurriedly and retreated. Didn’t know the song or the singer, but it was loud enough to drown out the sounds of the house, and quiet enough, maybe, to sleep too.

I dropped back on to the couch and prayed for the music to carry me away.

8.

I woke, leaden-eyed, to the smell of stale wool clogging my nostrils, dim grayness swimming past the edges of the drapes, and the clock telling me it wasn’t even seven o’clock. Everything ached. I thought about trying to go back to sleep but it didn’t seem worth it, so I made coffee instead.

Through the kitchen window, the back yard was a featureless mass of white sloping sharply down away from the deck. The sun had yet to break over the horizon to the left, though the sky was turning a kind of inky blue like deep ocean water. Patchy cloud, dark in the half-light, lurked in clumps, the remains of yesterday’s snow flurries.

Thirty minutes later, I was out. The street was deserted this early on a frozen Sunday morning, and the icy crust was broken only by animal tracks and a couple of slushy tire marks in the road. Even the church still looked unoccupied.

I followed Main north, downhill. This side of town was the mirror image of the other. Towards the bottom of the slope, though, things were different. Past a certain point the houses went from post-Reconstruction clapboard to rust-brown weathered brick; newer, but I guessed still well over fifty years old. The dark band of homes was centered around the quick, shallow flow of the Bleakwater River and the bridge that carried Route 100 across it. The smooth charcoal-colored stones that formed the bed of this glorified creek made the water seem black and poisoned, which I assumed was what had given the river its name. From the bridge I could see up to the forest covering the lower slopes of Windover Mountain where the sombre, shadowy river had its headwaters, then down to where it vanished between the mist-shrouded trees that surrounded the lake. Standing on the bridge, watching the stream pouring down the hill, I felt a chill pass through me as though last night’s breeze had returned. My clothes suddenly seemed unable to hold any heat and I started shivering. With the cold came the feeling — the absolute certainty — that someone was close by, maybe in the bushes by the river or in one of the houses nearest the bridge, and they were staring at me. An unseen pair of eyes burning through me, baleful and laced with hatred. I remembered the corpse of the dog I’d seen — half-seen — the night before and shuddered.

I hurried off the lonely bridge and up the road. The cold and the sense of evil fell away as I passed the last two rows of houses, the only ones built on the north bank of the river, and left Bleakwater Ridge behind. The hike up the highway took me almost an hour. Traffic was sparse; only a few vehicles passed me as I hugged the shoulder, trying not to get caught in the dirty ice-water slop kicked up by their tires. A couple of the cars slowed as they passed, maybe wondering if I was a motorist who’d broken down or a stray hitchhiker, because I sure as hell didn’t look like a tourist. None of them stopped.

A couple of miles outside town the road took a sharp right before plunging down into a particularly long and deep furrow between ridges. The trees on either side were tough, ragged evergreens. Just before I reached the bottom I came across a gap torn in the wiry undergrowth to the right, running away downhill. The shredded ends of twigs, branches, and old, dead bushes looked fresh and the gap itself was vehicle-width. It could have been the site of nothing more than an accident caused by the ice, but it wasn’t.

This was where Gemma had died.

Before I followed the trail carved by her car as it rolled off the road, I photographed the gap left in the trees and the roadside around it. Then I walked out into the middle of the highway and took pictures of the view up, down and around the spot where she’d been shot. Barring the long-distance hunting-accident theory, the bullet had to have traveled in a more or less flat arc from the shooter’s position, so I knew the place he’d fired from was visible from the road. I was almost done when a horn blared behind me and I had to scurry out of the road to avoid a close encounter with a red pickup. The driver took a moment to hurl insults at me, then sped up and got on with his day while I headed down into the trees and got on with mine.

The air under the canopy seemed colder than that outside. The ice-coated needles shielded the space beneath from the weak heat of the January sun. The shallow ruts left by Gemma’s car ran for maybe thirty feet down the slope, a drop of eight or nine from road level, before coming to an end in front of a solid-looking pine. They were hard to follow with the other markings left by the cops and medics, not to mention those made when the car was winched back out of the woods. The bark of the tree was mashed and battered a couple of feet off the ground, though not too seriously, so I guessed the car wasn’t traveling very fast by this point. There were chips of dark blue paint in the mangled bark, the same color as Gemma’s Malibu.

I was examining the ground around the base of the tree, digging into the frost and figuring out what space, exactly, the car had occupied, when I heard a woman’s voice behind me, up the hill.

“Are you OK down there, sir?” she called out. “Is there something I can help you with?”

I knew without looking that the voice belonged to a cop. And she didn’t sound particularly pleased to see me. I guess she had me pegged as either a souvenir hunter with a taste for death or a journalist running a story behind the police’s back. I turned around. Framed in the gap at the top of the slope was a woman somewhere in her mid to late twenties wearing the dark uniform and puffy winter jacket of the Lamoille County Sheriff’s Department.

Up to the highway, to where the she stood by her cruiser. Her face was flushed pink by the cold now she was out of the heated interior of the red-and-white Impala by the roadside. “I’m fine, thanks,” I said when I reached her. “Can I help you?”

“We had a report that there was someone wandering the highway in this area,” she said. Her tone suggested she wasn’t sure how to phrase the ‘what the hell are you doing here?’ question occupying her mind. “Are you out here hiking, sir? Are you living or staying somewhere local?”

I wondered who’d reported me to the LCSD. “Was the guy who gave you the call driving a red pickup?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“I was taking a photo from the road over there and was late seeing him coming. That’s all. I’m not hiking and I am staying somewhere local.”

The officer nodded. I knew I looked pretty ragged and this probably wasn’t helping my case. “And what exactly are you doing out here, sir?” she said.

I glanced behind me at the trees, then over at the road. I answered like I was speaking to myself. Couldn’t help it. “This is where she died.”

“That’s a police matter, sir.” Emphasis on the ‘sir’ in that way that meant the next stage in our conversation would be a threat to arrest. “I’d appreciate it if you left it for the authorities to handle and don’t go disturbing things. Let us do our jobs and let the victim rest in peace.”

“My name’s Alex Rourke. She was my girlfriend.”

That threw her. Her expression changed, hard-nosed authority fading to the soft, dead-eyed smile of pity reserved for overwrought relatives. I’d seen it plenty of times already. When she spoke, though, there was real warmth and compassion in her voice. “Look,” she said, “I’m sorry for what happened to her, I really am, and I do know what you’re going through isn’t easy. But you’ve got to let the professionals work through this.”

“What makes you think I’m not here just to pay my respects?”

“People who do that don’t normally take photos,” she said. “And I saw you digging around down there. A crime scene team from the State Police already went over the ground where we found her. If there was anything there to find, they’d have got it already. That’s their job.”

“I used to be an FBI agent. I was trained for that sort of thing as well, and I’ve done it plenty of times. I know you’re giving me the ‘distraught loved ones getting in the way’ speech, and I understand why. But I’m not some stricken accountant who’s watched too much CSI. I just want to understand what happened.”

She smiled and shook her head. “Maybe so, but if you start hunting around on your own you’re liable to end up being arrested for interfering with an investigation.”

“I spoke to Detective Flint. The State Police think it was either a hunting accident or that there was some wacko wandering out here with a rifle and she was just the first person he saw. Both of those are a crock. Who hunts at night around here, this time of year? Why has no one noticed there’s a lunatic living in town? I’m not interfering because I don’t believe there’s much to interfere with.”

I looked back at the woods, got my calm back. “Besides,” I said, “the scene’s been released. I’m not breaking the law coming out here. You said ‘where we found her’. I spoke to a guy called Ed Markham in the bar last night and he said he knew what had happened to Gemma because he’d talked to Sylvia… Ehrlich in the Sheriff’s Department.”

“That’s me.” She looked surprised.

“You found her?”

“I was on patrol shift that evening. I saw that someone had plowed into the trees.”

“And you went down to check out the car.”

Ehrlich nodded. “It looked like she’d gone off the road in the ice. You could see where the car rolled into the woods. It looked bad, and… when I checked for a pulse there was nothing. Wayne — Officer Cevik, sorry — arrived a couple of minutes after I called it in. He’d just finished with a breakdown south of Bleakwater. We waited for the ME and the ambulance to show up. We only realized what had actually happened after they came.”

“And they saw she’d been shot.”

“Mr Rourke, I don’t think I should be going into details with you. I probably said more than I should already.”

“I’m just trying to get a clear picture of how the woman I loved died, and if you can’t help me then I’m going to have to go on guessing and imagining and never knowing for sure. Let me tell you what I know so far, and you can fill in anything you feel happy to.”

She didn’t look convinced. I carried on anyway. “It had just started snowing again. She was somewhere right about here on the highway, probably not going very fast because of the weather, when she was shot through the windshield. The bullet hit her in the throat. The car swerved off the road and into the trees. If it had gone off the other side, it’d have rolled to a stop straight away. But it went downhill, so it still had a little speed when it hit the tree. Not much, or there’d be more damage to the bark. So I’m guessing the car wasn’t too badly smashed when you found it. Maybe you were surprised that the impact seemed to have killed her.”

Ehrlich frowned, confused. “How do you know it had started snowing?”

“She was leaving a message on my voicemail when she died. I got it later. She told me.”

“Oh boy, that must’ve been so awful,” she said and it sounded like she meant it. “You’ve got more guts than me to go through this after hearing… well, after hearing it all.”

I tried a smile. Didn’t know if it worked. “So how did it look when you found her?”

“The windshield was a mess, the front end was all out of shape and the radiator had ruptured,” she said. “It was still steaming. The back window was smashed and there were still bits of glass on top of the trunk. It looked like it had hit hard enough to hurt.”

“And Gemma?”

“You sure you want to hear it?”

“Yeah.” I swallowed hard.

“She was face down over the wheel. The airbag had fired. I could see blood on the front of her coat, but nothing else. The driver’s side door had popped open a fraction from the impact, but the glass was intact. I opened the door so I could lean in and find out if she was alive or not. Then I went back up to the road.”

“Was there any sign that anyone else had been near the car — footprints, things like that?” I asked, unwilling to dwell long on the image of Gemma slumped dead in the wreckage.

“Did you hear something on the message?”

“No,” I said, thinking that she had a point. If I could stomach it, maybe there’d be more on the recording after the shooting. “Wondering was all. How about up on the highway?”

She thought for a while before deciding to answer that, and I figured we’d reached the line of what she’d consider sharing. “I don’t remember seeing any tracks in the snow, but it was dark and I was looking at a car wreck, not a murder scene. I think the State Police examined the road when they took over, but I’m not sure. By that time, there’d been me, Wayne, the doctor and a couple of paramedics there.”

The radio in the Impala crackled into life. Ehrlich leaned into the car and had a conversation with the dispatcher. Then she turned back to me and said, “That’s as much as I can say, Mr Rourke. And now duty calls. Gotta go.”

“No problem. I appreciate you helping me.”

“Have you got a number I can reach you at if we get any further calls about men poking around in the woods?”

“Sure.” I gave her my cell and she climbed into the cruiser. “If I come across anything I’ll call your department.”

She nodded, then said, “Just remember what I said. This is a State show and they’re not going to go easy if you get in the way. I can sympathize, maybe more than I should, but don’t expect the same from them. If I were you, and don’t think bad of me for suggesting this, I’d find another way to deal with your grief.”

“No offense taken.”

“Take care, Mr Rourke. Be safe.”

Once the cruiser had vanished down the road I looked up beyond the blacktop to the wooded mountain spur to the south. If I’d had to choose a spot to shoot someone driving through the dip where Gemma died, that was it. Plenty of cover, good view straight down the road because of the way it jinked between ridges. Not far from the road the slope steepened considerably, with jumbled boulders interspersed through the forest. I tried to imagine a line between the rocks and the spot Gemma’s car would’ve been in before it swerved off the road. I wondered why the cops hadn’t been able to find the bullet; it should’ve been in the car, in the road surface, or else fallen out somewhere between one and the other.

I climbed the frozen slope, looking for the killing spot among the rocks. The woods thinned out over the difficult ground, and this in turn had opened up the space beneath for thorns and tough, scrubby weeds. I wasn’t much of a woodsman but even I could see that someone had been this way before. Here and there were broken and crushed stems leading in a coherent trail uphill. They weren’t close enough together to form a continuous set of tracks — the woods were still too packed for the wiry plant growth to have spread far — but what there was had been perfectly frozen in place, like the land itself wanted me to find it.

Forty feet or so above the level of the highway, I came to a weathered outcrop of rock which looked out along the road. I brushed away some of the snow that coated the stones and the dirt of the forest around them, hoping for something that would confirm my theory. There were scrapes in the lichen on the rocks, though maybe I’d caused them myself. Wedged between a couple of stones a few feet away, though, was a plastic wrapper from a disposable chemical hand-warmer. It didn’t look like it had been there longer than a few days. Nothing else, but at least this showed for a fact that someone had been here, and it looked like they’d maybe been waiting a while.

For the right car. The right shot. The kill.

9.

“What do you want?” The man’s voice was guarded if not actively unfriendly. I guessed I didn’t look much like a salesman or a religious nut.

“I’m calling about the woman who lived across the street. Did you notice anything strange in her behavior, odd people hanging around the neighborhood? Anything at all that was out of the ordinary over the past couple of weeks.”

The guy regarded me suspiciously, an unspoken ‘No, but I sure am now’ clearly running through his head. He was middle-aged and a little pudgy. There was a newish-looking SUV on the driveway. Classical music was playing in the house behind him. “I already spoke to the police when they called by,” he said. “Who the hell are you?”

“My name’s Alex Rourke. I’m a private detective and I am — was — the woman’s boyfriend.”

He didn’t tell me to get lost straight away, but I had the impression was trying to figure out a way of politely bidding me goodbye without seeming insensitive. In the end he just said, “I didn’t see anything, like I told them.”

“Nothing at all? You didn’t see anyone you don’t know in the street, no one called on her?”

“Not that I saw, not in the last couple of days before…”

“Did you see anyone before then?”

He folded his arms. “Last time I saw anyone call on her must’ve been a week or so before it happened. I was cleaning out my car. She spoke to some guy on the porch. It looked like she knew him. He gave her a folder, which is what made me notice, I suppose. Official-looking. Apart from that, the last person I remember seeing there was you, or at least someone with the same car as you. If you’re looking for any more than that then I’m sorry, I can’t help you.”

In an afternoon spent canvassing the neighbors, this was the first useful information I’d had. “What did the man she spoke to look like?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Regular guy. Middle-aged. Wore a tie and a long coat, one of those expensive wool ones. Might have had a suit as well. His car was silver, new-looking. I don’t remember the make. That’s all I know.”

The front door closed an inch or so as he finished answering. I figured my time was up so I thanked him and left. It sounded like the visitor was maybe a colleague of Gemma’s, and since she hadn’t mentioned it last time I’d seen her I suspected it wasn’t anything important, but at least it was something. Maybe there’d been something going on with her job she hadn’t told me.

Back in the house, the first thing I did was check Gemma’s mail and the unopened personal letters I’d left alone when I arrived. One had a handwritten address, the other was printed and was just a bill. The written letter was a couple of pages of tight, neat script folded around a photograph. From her parents, letting her know how their vacation in San Francisco was going. It was postmarked the previous Wednesday. Gemma was already dead by the time it was sent.

The notes by the phone in the kitchen didn’t amount to much. Aside from a couple of scribbled phone numbers with ‘Bob K’, ‘Celia’ and other cryptic names next to them, there were times and a couple of numbers for the St Johnsbury party and two responses — both negative — to inquiries she’d made for me about Adam Webb: ‘Brattleboro - don’t recognize’ and ‘Chief - not as far as she knows’.

There was nothing much more on her computer upstairs at first glance. Notes from work she was typing up, some email correspondence with a couple of other pathologists that mostly went clean over my head. Two more responses from other regional medical examiners saying they’d not seen anyone resembling Webb. A pair of messages from her sister Alice. The first asked if Gemma and me were planning on taking a vacation this year. The second had arrived on Tuesday evening at about the time I was driving up the interstate to see her body.

Gem,

I tried to call you earlier but I guess you must be out. You doctors, always partying! Let me know what you and Alex decide about doing for Mom’s birthday. I know Dad wants everyone together for the big six-oh. Maybe Al will have popped the question by then - you never know! Have you got any time off next month? Talk soon sis.

- Alice

I reread the last couple of sentences, then closed her mail and moved on, keeping my mind carefully blank. I didn’t want to let slip a fresh heap of emotional baggage about a future we’d never have. An icon on her desktop caught my eye and spared me from falling into melancholy again. ‘OCME Gateway Services’. Remote login to the OCME intranet. An intranet, if her user account hadn’t been deleted, on which I could access the report on her own murder, probably crime scene stuff too if it was linked to the VSP’s forensics service. It took less than a minute to find her username and password details on a notepad full of similar reminders in the desk drawer.

I looked at it. Looked at the icon. I was well aware that tech support, especially in government bodies, could be very slow to clear out old accounts unless someone had been fired and needed wiping from a given system ASAP.

If it worked — a big if, still — there’d be access logs, I knew. Records. Maybe no one would check them, not unless they had reason to. But if they did, and I’d gone looking for information, it wouldn’t take a genius to figure out who had used her login and then I’d be on felony charges for accessing data I had no business reading with zero chance of a successful defense.

I looked at the password. Looked at the icon.

Switched the screen off and walked away. For the time being. Told myself I didn’t need to see the official report on her death. I wanted to know what might have been going on at work, that was all, and maybe the file folder the guy had left for her was still here somewhere.

So I went through the rest of the house, checking the drawers, closets and even the trash. I made the climb up into the attic room to see if Gemma had moved any of her things into what used to be empty space. She hadn’t. No cardboard file. Nothing from work except on the computer that I wasn’t going to touch. Temptation was gnawing at me and it was growing dark early outside as the mountains to the west shut out the sun.

By eight I was in the bar again. The Sunday night crowd was thin, down a dozen or so heads on yesterday. Ed and Charlie were in again when I arrived, sitting at the same table, and I joined them.

After navigating small talk for a while, Ed said, “I hear you’ve been out asking folk about what happened. How’s it going?”

“So far, so nothing. I met Officer Ehrlich and she told me a bit about what she found, but not much. How did you know I’ve been talking to people?”

“She’s a good girl, Sylvia. May Tyler saw you calling at houses on West. I guess no one could help you, huh?”

I shook my head. “I take it you guys haven’t seen anyone unusual around town? You seem pretty keyed-in to everything that goes on.”

Charlie’s eyes flicked towards Ed and he said, “No one like you’d be after. There’s not many out-of-towners stop here.”

“We’ll keep our eyes open, though,” Ed said. Like last night, his tone hinted at something deeper going on.

When Ed left to take a leak a while after, Charlie leaned towards me and dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “You can trust us to keep our eyes open,” he said. “We’re in here every night. Ed, well…”

I tried not to look like I thought he was crazy. “Yeah? You get a lot of trouble in town?”

“No. Look, I dunno if he’d want me telling you this, but Ed lost his granddaughter Stephanie two years ago. She’d come to visit him on vacation, like she used to for a couple of weeks every summer since she left high school. Real keen walker, Steph. She went hiking north one day, said she might trail camp overnight, never came back. Sheriff’s Department tried to find her when Ed called them. Then the staties made a big song and a dance about trying to find her on the Long Trail, except she wasn’t there and eventually they gave up too.”

“Ed thinks she was killed by someone she met round here.”

“We come in most nights looking—” Then Ed was coming back and Charlie clammed right up. That more or less killed the conversation and once I’d finished eating I left, claiming I needed to sleep but knowing I probably wouldn’t.

Snow was falling, chalk dust blowing down from the mountains, and I hurried back. The town was still deserted. The ancient stoplights at the intersection with West shone like the pitiful strobes at a ‘70s high school disco, but they did so to an empty dance floor. I was alone as I crossed and vanished into the shadows.

Even with a little time to grow used to its emptiness, the house was no easier to settle in than the night before. I stretched out on the couch in front of a movie and fatigue dropped on me like a cliff. Not tiredness, not sleepiness; I was just bone-weary. By the time I was halfway through the film, my raw, itchy eyes had started picking up blurred spots of dark, shadowy movement at the edge of vision. Once I decided I’d had enough of this I crawled off the sofa and went on a tour of the house, checking all the doors and windows, trying to be sure everything was locked down for the night.

The building was fairly warm; despite drafts blowing through some of the chinks in its armor, the heating system was a good, sturdy one. My first thought when I walked along the landing to Gemma’s bedroom was therefore that the window inside must have blown open. The air immediately in front of her door was icy, and as soon as I hit it my breath turned to fine spiderwebs of steam. When I touched the handle the metal was ice cold and numbed my fingers. When I went in and flicked on the light, I expected to see the casement wide open and snow dancing on the bedcovers, but the window was firmly shut and locked and the air within was just the same as the rest of the house beyond that cold spot.

I ran my eyes around the uncomfortably empty room but nothing seemed out of place. Puzzled, I turned off the light and closed the door behind me. Passed back through the narrow band of cold and finished checking the last two rooms on this floor, still no closer to knowing where the mystery draft came from.

The last place I looked was the attic. Its bare floorboards seemed solid enough, and there wasn’t much wrong with the windows. Up here I could hear the rattling and scraping of wood on wood. The breeze was tugging at the bare branches of the trees that massed by the lakeshore. Their gnarled limbs twisted and swayed, stark black shadows against the ice beyond, like fevered dancers at a religious ceremony. I watched for a while before breaking away and retreating towards the glow rising from the landing, afraid for a moment that the country would take me like it had taken Gemma and like it had taken Stephanie Markham and swallow me up in darkness forever.

10.

Newport would’ve been nothing more than a small town in most other places. In the rolling piedmont of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, though, it was as close to urban as you could get. The city was neat and well kept, although as far as I knew there wasn’t much in particular to visit it for. Sure, the lake was nice when it wasn’t frozen — tree-lined and hilly all the way across the border into Quebec — but pretty lakes were hardly rare in New England. Now the town looked almost monochrome — black highway, spindly leafless trees, white snow; even the red-brown of most of the buildings was dark from a distance.

I found the hospital without any difficulty and parked in the lot outside. I had no official reason for calling on the mortuary and no badge or authority to back me up. I waited until I saw an old woman heading for the entrance, then tagged along a few yards behind. Let her negotiate the doors first, dogging her footsteps, then strode purposefully in the direction indicated by the ‘elevators’ signs while she occupied the receptionist. No one gave me a second glance as I pushed the button for the first floor, which the information board suggested was where most of the lab and diagnostic departments were housed, and vanished behind the sliding steel doors.

Upstairs, the problem was finding the mortuary. I wished I’d visited Gemma at work. I walked aimlessly along empty corridors for what seemed like hours — probably more like five minutes — when I started to hear a whirring hum that echoed and bounced from the walls. Rounding the next corner I came across a young guy in a blue uniform pushing some kind of combined floor polisher-cleaner system. “Mind how you go,” he half-yelled as I reached him. “Tiles might be a little slippery.”

“Thanks.” He didn’t look like he thought I was out of place so I said, “I’m trying to get to the morgue, but I’m kinda lost. Which way is it?”

“Morgue huh? Back the way you came, two turns to the right.” I thanked him and turned round when he added, “Figured it. You got the look.”

That stopped me. “What do you mean?”

“She was nice. I liked her. We talked sometimes.”

“Who? Gemma?”

The janitor nodded. “I see it.”

“What?”

“In your eyes, in your face. I liked her. It’s a real shame what happened, and now you’ve got the Angel of Death riding inside you. I can see it, looking out. She’s killing you, eating you up from the inside. It burns, and it’s burning you up. You’d best finish it before the Angel kills you. I see it.” He smiled and his eyes turned upward in fond recollection. “She was nice. I liked her.”

“Sure.” It was about all I could think of to say. Since I was brought up polite, I added, “Thanks.”

“I see it,” the guy called after me as I headed for the morgue. “Black wings, all around you, man. Darkness. Hounds to the hunters. Hounds to the hunters!”

Then I was gone.

The hospital’s pathology department was small but well-equipped. Two lab rooms and an office to one side and the big double doors into the morgue itself opposite. Two people looked up at me from their work in the office as I knocked softly on the door and stepped inside. A third desk was conspicuously free of personal effects, a clean blank slate. Gemma’s, I guessed. The first lab worker was a man somewhere deep into middle age, with thick glasses and a kind of studious puppy-dog look to him. The second was a woman around Gemma’s age, tall and thin without appearing hawkish. She spoke first. “What do you want?” she said with an exasperated sigh. “Visitors aren’t allowed down here.”

“My name’s Alex. I was Gemma’s boyfriend. And yeah, I know I’m not supposed to be here.”

Her expression changed immediately. I was getting used to that. “Come in,” she said. “She used to talk about you all the time. It must’ve been hell for you. We’ve had it hard but… I keep expecting to see her in the exam room or at her desk. I’m Ellen. Ellen Lynch.”

“We all miss her,” the guy added. “Clyde Turner.”

“Thanks. She talked about you both quite a lot too. Nice to meet you in person. But this isn’t exactly a social call. I’m just trying to find out what happened to her.”

Ellen nodded. “She said you were a detective or a cop, something like that.”

“Something like that. I know the police are on it, but I’m trying to understand too. A friend of hers in the OCME put me up to it, Bethany. You know her?”

“No, not here at the hospital.”

I shrugged. No matter. “You and Clyde worked with Gemma all the time, right? Were you here the day she died?”

“Sure, yeah.”

“Can you think of anything that might have made anyone want to kill her? Did she mention that she’d seen anyone strange at all, had she been in any arguments, anything like that? Doesn’t matter how small.”

“Not that I can think of,” Clyde said, glancing at Ellen. “She didn’t mention anything to me. Seemed normal. Nothing strange at all about the day she died.”

“Same here,” Ellen said. “She never had any trouble with anyone that I can think of. The closest she got to hassle at work was Frank — Dr Altmann from Physical Therapy — but that wasn’t trouble so much. Kinda sweet, in a way.”

“What do you mean?”

“He had a bit of a crush on her, I think - everyone knew it. He never did anything about it, though. I mean. Don’t think that. I just mean that if there was a party or some of the staff got together for a drink he’d always invite her — helping the new ME settle in — and, well, if he was passing he’d always find a reason to stop in and chat. He knew about you guys, so he never said anything he shouldn’t; he’s far too polite. But if she’d been single or you guys had split he’d have asked her out by now for sure.”

“Unrequited,” Clyde chipped in. “Gunther from Friends but without the creepy stalker vibe. He’s OK. She just had to be sure to always gently let him down.”

“Yeah,” Ellen said. “He’s nice. I probably shouldn’t even have mentioned it, but I was just trying to show how there’s been nothing bad at work. He was real hurt when he found out what happened. We went for a drink that evening, talked everything over.”

“Staking your own claim, El?” Clyde stopped and blinked at me, apology written all over his face. “Sorry, that was in poor taste.”

I shrugged. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I think I’ll go for coffee before I put my foot in it any more, just the same. I’ll keep an eye out for any of the management heading this way. They don’t often stop by, but they wouldn’t be happy to see you here.”

He slipped out into the corridor. I heard the distant whirr of the floor polisher briefly before the door shut again and cut it off. “Was Dr Altmann here the day Gemma died?” I said.

Ellen shook her head. “No. He had the first half of the week off work. You don’t really think he’d have anything to do with it, do you? That’d be crazy. I doubt he even knows how to fire a gun.”

“You’re probably right. I’ll talk to him. They used to talk a lot, maybe he knows something. What does he look like?”

“Forty, almost as tall as you. He’s got dark hair but it’s starting to show grey. It makes him look sort of distinguished. He drives a silver Audi.”

“Where does he live?”

“Barton. I can’t remember the address; I’ve only been there once, to a retirement party he threw for one of the doctors. I can find out if he’s working today and what time he’ll be free if you want.”

“Thanks. What about recent cases — was there anything Gemma worked on over the week or two before she died that might have had anything to do with what happened?”

“Like what? Death’s a tricky business. Everyone takes it differently.”

“Anything unusual, I guess. Someone killed Gemma for a reason, so maybe that reason was something to do with what she was working on.”

“This is northern Vermont, Alex. People die, but not many of them and not usually doing anything strange. Car wrecks, hit and runs, accidents, illnesses. The first shocking or surprising thing that’s happened since Gemma started here was her own death.”

A sad smile, then.

11.

Altmann’s shift didn’t finish until four thirty according to Ellen, so I drove to the lakeshore and killed time with a coffee and a sandwich before I had to go take up station by the hospital.

”It’s been ages since I’ve done this,” Gemma said. We were ambling along the boardwalk that ran out over the lakeside by the town’s single railroad track. Late spring sunshine sparkled from the water but a chilly breeze blew down from the north. I was nursing a cup of coffee and we were both wrapped up in our coats.

“What do you mean?”

“Gone for a walk along the waterfront like this. I think the last time, I must have been with my dad. My family used to drive down to a beach on Blue Hill Bay sometimes when I was little. We’d walk along by the sea, play around on the beaches. Most times we went you could see out as far as Mount Desert Island. Us kids would have ice cream or doughnuts and Mom and Dad would let us run off so they could have some time to themselves.”

“You should have said. We passed a doughnut place back on Main Street five minutes ago. It’s a bit cold for ice cream, though.”

“Ice cream is always good,” she said, grinning. “You should know that by now.”

It was nearly five o’clock by the time a guy matching Altmann’s description came out of the doors and hurried across the parking lot. He was wearing a long coat over a suit and was carrying a briefcase. He climbed into a silver Audi and I followed him out on to the street, keeping to a sensible distance as he headed for the interstate and the fifteen-mile drive south to his home. No deviations or stops en route. He kept to the speed limit and showed no sign that he’d noticed me. When we reached Barton I tailed him to a road of large houses with even larger, mostly empty, yards not far from the shore of Crystal Lake. I drove past, just a regular traveler, as he turned into his driveway. Then I found a place to park out of sight.

“Yes?” he said when he opened the front door to find me on his porch. He’d ditched the jacket and tie, but hadn’t finished getting changed for the evening. His voice was soft and quiet.

“Dr Frank Altmann? My name’s Alex Rourke. I’m a private detective. I just need a few minutes of your time.”

“I know the name from somewhere…”

“I was Gemma Larson’s boyfriend.”

He looked me over, then nodded a little nervously. Said, “Come in.”

Altmann’s home was spacious and looked like he’d always lived alone. The only family photos in here were of him and an older couple, presumably his parents. There were also a couple of framed pictures of groups of his hospital colleagues, including one that featured Gemma. He offered me a seat and I didn’t take it.

“Dr Altmann, you were friends with Gemma, right?” I said.

Mixed emotions crossed his face. “Yes. We met at a staff party not long after she joined the hospital. I don’t usually have much to do with the morgue, obviously, but I’ve known Ellen, one of the lab technicians, for some time. If we had our breaks at the same time, I’d sometimes have lunch with Gemma or Ellen. We got on well together.”

“You saw each other fairly regularly. Did she act strangely at all before she died? Worried about anything or anyone?”

“Not that I noticed.”

“When was the last time you saw Gemma?”

“The week before she died,” he said.

“Have you ever been to her house?”

“What the hell has that got to do with anything?”

I held up my hands. “I’m just trying to find out as much as I can about the time leading up to my girlfriend’s death, Dr Altmann. Someone was seen calling at her house a week before her murder. He drove a silver car and seemed to be a friend of hers. He left something with her. I need to know whether that was you or if there was someone else who’d visited her recently.”

“Yes, that was me,” he said, still looking less than happy. “Management were planning some procedural changes and I’d said I’d drop a copy of the proposals with her as I had to go to Burlington that day.”

“And you noticed nothing strange?”

“Again, no.”

“Are you married, Dr Altmann? Regular girlfriend, anything like that?”

His face flushed red. “What the hell does that have to do with you?”

“You said you were friends with Gemma. Did you ever want to take things further than that? You ever wish you were in a relationship with her?”

For a moment he paused, unmoving. His eyes narrowed slightly and he said, very coldly, “I want you to leave, Mr Rourke.”

“I’m just trying to figure out what happened, that’s all.”

“It strikes me that’s the job of the police. I’ll happily answer any questions they have because I cared for Gemma. She was a friend. You are neither a cop nor a friend. So get the hell off my property.”

I couldn’t help pushing further. A kick of bile at the back of my throat; anger, grief and jealousy fighting each other by turns. I wanted it to be Altmann who’d killed Gemma. And I wanted him to give himself away. “You cared for her. Did you fancy her, Dr Altmann? She was good looking, wasn’t she? I know that, you know that. Did you want to get her into bed? Did you want to screw her? Must’ve stung you that she didn’t return those feelings, huh?”

“Get the fuck out of here!” the doctor yelled. He took a step towards me, face red, hands clenching.

“You weren’t working on the day she died, right? Just so I have as complete a picture as possible, could you tell me where you were between, say, five and six that evening?”

Altmann rushed at me, fury in his eyes, yelling incoherently. His hands scrabbled for grip on my shoulders as he barged me backwards like we were playing football. He was strong, surprisingly so. I didn’t resist; the sensible part of me didn’t want to add assault to any potential charge of being a jerk on private property. I let him force me back all the way down the hall and hurl me away, out on to his porch. By the time I caught my balance he’d slammed the door shut.

Inside, I thought I heard him sobbing.

12.

The house was in darkness when I opened my eyes. I’d been sleeping, not much, but some. My breathing sounded loud and ragged in the near-silence. Even the wind outside had stopped rattling the boards. I lay wrapped up in the blanket and listened hard.

Creak.

A floorboard. it didn’t sound like normal building noise. There’d been weight behind that. Something — someone — walking around.

Creak.

From a slightly different position this time? It was hard to say. I swung my legs off the couch as quietly as I could. I was already pretty much dressed so I slipped into my shoes and grabbed my gun. I left the lights off and headed out into the hallway. It seemed to be empty.

I walked carefully up the stairs, edging along against the wall, pistol down at my side. My gaze was fixed on the landing. Nothing.

I cleared the last few steps. The air at the top of the stairs was cold, as bad as it had been outside Gemma’s door the previous night. If this was the same mystery draft as before, it had spread a couple of yards. I quickly checked the bathroom behind me for the intruder, then sidled back into the band of frozen air, eyes on the remaining two doors and the hatch leading up to the attic room. The cold was incredible, soaking through my clothes and beneath my skin, reminding me what it was like to be a kid trapped in the dark by imaginary shadows on the wall. Then, as my hand closed round the bedroom door knob, there was a thud from downstairs.

I hauled ass back to the ground floor, watching for movement all around and wondering what the hell was going on. The hallway was still empty. I crept along it fast then, into the kitchen. Melting snow shone darkly against the tiles. Footprints, leading from the back door, out to the hall.

Creak.

This time it was close enough to be almost ear-splitting. I jumped and snapped a look behind me in the second it took to realize that it was me who’d trodden on an old board this time.

I turned back and brought up my gun as a clatter came from the front room. A dark figure sprinted out in a blur and wrenched open the front door. Man or woman, big or small, I couldn’t tell a thing about them, just that they were dressed for night time and that they didn’t belong here. I didn’t bother yelling at them to stop. I just chased.

The intruder raced through the yard and on to the white-covered road. They had a head start on me and they were a little faster. I still didn’t shout anything and I didn’t even think about using the gun, not on a public street. I just ran, heart hammering at my ribs. Through a parking lot by the lakeside, into the trees. The ground changed from blacktop to snow-covered leaf litter, darkening as I left the town behind. Twigs flicked chunks of ice at me as I crashed through the trees, specks of cold that turned to water wherever they touched flesh. My face was covered by a webwork of drying rivulets like tear tracks.

Muscles burning, my throat blasted raw, I kept running. Pure adrenaline and the thought of someone else invading Gemma’s private space, touching her stuff, desecrating her presence. I was exhausted but I didn’t stop. I had no idea how far into the woods we were or where we were going. Every so often I caught a glimpse of the intruder in the darkness ahead, passed branches still swaying from where they’d pushed through. I hadn’t gained any ground on them, but I’d not lost much either and all I could think about was catching them.

The sensation of space around me as I hit a break in the trees, clearer ground. The running figure ahead was gone, disappeared. I realized what that meant, my mistake, and started to turn, but too slow. I heard feet crunch against the snow behind me and then something cracked into the back of my skull and I was falling.

Everything went white.

13.

When I came round I was lying in the snow, looking up at a huge, dark shape jutting out against the overcast night. The sky was a little lighter than before. The back of my head was numb from the ice, but still throbbed unpleasantly. My gun was there in my hand, untaken. Everything was silent and I seemed to be alone. When I rolled over and stood up, my legs felt awkward and rubbery and I was shivering fiercely. There was blood on the snow I’d lain in, but not too much. There was a swollen, split patch at the base of my skull, something that would probably have been hurting badly if I hadn’t been so cold because bright spots flashed in front of my eyes whenever I touched it. I felt light-headed and nauseous, and my eyes had a hard time focusing.

At first I thought that maybe I’d run in a circle and wound up back in town because there were buildings all around me. That idea died fast. The structures were tumbledown: two walls, three at most, in one case just a jumble of rubble with a perfectly-preserved stone chimney rising from it like a post-apocalyptic miniature of the Washington Monument. Brick for the most part, weathered and cracked. Thin, straggly trees had forced their way through the detritus as the forest slowly took it back. Even with a concussion and frostbite it didn’t take long to figure I was in North Bleakwater. There was a line of footprints weaving away from me: the intruder’s trail.

The tracks ran to the middle of the silent, overgrown town, where an expanse of coiled weeds opened out between buildings. Down its center, following the slope from east to west towards the lake, ran a gully maybe six feet wide crossed by a short stone bridge. Whatever water had once flowed through it was long gone. There were tire ruts running across the bridge and all the way through the town along what would probably have been its main street. The way the woods had spread over the remaining buildings, the road shouldn’t have been more than a footpath any more. People had obviously used it down the years even after the town failed. I walked over the bridge and took a closer look at the tracks.

Multiple sets, overlaying each other. Regular visits, I guessed. Looked like a couple of different tread marks, reasonably fresh. I presumed that at least one set belonged to the intruder’s vehicle as his footprints vanished beside them. He was long gone, driven off while I was unconscious. I pocketed my Colt.

Fifty yards from the bridge, an edifice of white clapboard loomed out of the woodland. Unlike most of the rest of North Bleakwater, this building and the couple of low stone structures on the other side of the street still seemed mostly intact. A rotten, mildew-riddled sign hanging over the main doors read: ‘Echo Springs Hotel’. Aside from its dilapidated state, the hotel looked like it had been abandoned while open for business. The slatted shutters were drawn back, and a fair amount of the glass in the window frames was still intact. The double front doors were chained and padlocked, however, and once I started moving around the T-shaped structure, the decades of ruin became obvious.

The wraparound deck that had once paraded along the head end of the hotel’s first floor had collapsed halfway along into a pile of rotten timbers. The paint on the walls was peeled and blasted by the elements. At the northern tip of the hotel’s head, a stubby five-story tower rose from the roof. Even at the gables the remainder was only three floors high. The small wrought-iron balconies beneath some of the upper windows of this blocky, lighthouse-like structure were mere shells, their flooring and many of their supports eaten away by rust. What I guessed was once a private lawn spread out at the back of the hotel. It was overrun by thin, straggly bushes and saplings from the forest that was slowly devouring the corpse of North Bleakwater.

Someone had been here recently, though not the person I’d been chasing; the prints were different. There was a narrow line of flattened grass and crushed snow running along the edge of the lawn, close to the hotel wall. It was too dark to see how many people had been this way. It could’ve been nothing, tourists or kids from town, hiking round the lake so they can check out the ghost town. I went to see where they led anyway.

The trail of trampled foliage ran for forty yards or so. The weeds growing in what used to be the hotel’s gardens were high, even bowed down with the snow. Without looking straight down the gap they’d made you’d never have known anyone had been this way. I walked along the edge of the snow-blurred patch of indistinct plants, trees and God knew what else. Kept catching glimpses of what looked like blurred dark movement from the corners of my eyes, probably nothing more than deeper shadows or folds in the icy blanket that covered the area, seeming to shift as I trudged along. The old hotel smelled of damp and decay. After passing a half dozen high Victorian windows, all darkened, the tracks stopped at the building’s old back doors. These had once been glass set in wooden frames, now boarded over. There was no lock on them.

As my fingers touched the cracked wooden surface, I heard a whispering, hissing noise. The treeline that bordered the hotel lawn came alive. Shadows slipped from the darkness between the boughs to the periphery of the lighter open ground before fading back to the trees. They were hard to make out, but they were a variety of shapes and sizes, some as big as people, others smaller like kids or animals. The black shapes writhed slickly on the edge of the clearing, keeping up a low, sibilant murmur, and they seemed totally, utterly real in that moment.

I didn’t run. I slowly took my hand off the door, then backed carefully away to the road with my teeth gritted and heart racing. The primal part of my head feared the things and the rational, sane part said that having hallucinations after a head injury was a bad sign and that if my battered brain wanted to start playing shadow puppets with the scenery, nothing I saw could be relied upon and it was time to head home before I froze to death or passed out.

I wasn’t sure of the way I’d come, but the tire marks had to lead to the road, so that was the way I went. The hissing from the trees dogged me some way, but I kept my eyes on the path and the noise had stopped by the time I reached the frozen blacktop of Route 100. I vaguely recognized the spot from my hike out to the site of Gemma’s murder. I hadn’t paid any attention to the narrow trail then. I was less than a mile from home.

Adrenaline had turned sour and my head was pounding by the time I crossed the Bleakwater River and the silent town above it. I saw no one and no one saw me. When I reached Gemma’s I searched the entire house as best I could, trying to figure out what the intruder had been after, whether they’d taken anything. Not a clue. They’d broken in through the door to the kitchen and I could still see the tracks they’d left in the back yard. One set, cutting through the snow. Once I was done I threw up, took some tylenol, then bedded down on the couch with an icepack for company on the short march to dawn.

14.

Tourist Goes Missing

LAMOILLE COUNTY

Authorities are searching for a tourist reported missing while hiking in the area between Belvidere and Windover mountains. According to a statement from Lamoille County Sheriff’s Department, Stephanie Markham, 20, was last seen three days ago heading north on Route 100 near the town of Bleakwater Ridge, where she was staying with relatives. Anyone who may have seen Markham, described as having short brown hair, 5’ 4” and weighing 100lbs, should contact the LCSD.

Morning at Fletcher Free Library in Burlington. After a first-thing visit to the hospital to get my head checked out — skull intact, brain shaken but reasonably intact, painkillers prescribed and duly taken — I was running through archived copies of the Burlington Free Press from two years ago. The stories I was interested in started small, becoming larger and more important as time passed. Each concerned the fate of Ed Markham’s granddaughter. I still hadn’t followed up the idea Ehrlich had planted with me and listened to Gemma’s last voicemail again. I hadn’t felt up to it. Maybe, I thought, in the evening.

Hunt Continues For Missing Hiker

LAMOILLE COUNTY

Police and civilian volunteers are still searching for missing hiker Stephanie Markham, 20, in northern Lamoille County. The search, led by officers of the Lamoille County Sheriff’s Department, has so far found no sign of the woman. LCSD spokesman Sergeant Ken Radford said: ‘As yet we have been unable to find any trace of Stephanie Markham on the listed trails in the area she was known to be heading for. We will be widening our search area with the assistance of Orleans County Sheriff’s Department and volunteers, and we have every hope of finding her. Stephanie was an experienced hiker and knew the area well.’ Searchers were yesterday concentrating on trails near Broken Gap, the site of a number of accidents in the past. Stephanie is described as 5’ 4”, 100lbs, with short brown hair. When last seen she was wearing a red shirt and jeans, and was carrying a dark blue backpack.

The next story carried a photo of Stephanie, a picture taken with what looked like college friends. It was grainy, but enough to put a slim, pretty face to the name. She seemed happy, grinning broadly for the camera. By the time the story ran it had been five days since anyone had seen her alive.

State Police To Help Hunt For Markham
by Elijah Charman

The State Police have taken over the search for missing hiker Stephanie Markham, last seen near the town of Bleakwater Ridge in Lamoille County. Three days of searching by police and volunteers in Lamoille and neighboring Orleans counties have failed to find any trace of the missing 20-year-old. Detective Sergeant Karl Flint, in charge of the State Police effort, said Stephanie was still being treated as missing, and the possibility of her being abducted or murdered would not be considered while there was still hope of finding her alive.

‘I will not speculate on other possible scenarios at the present time,’ he said. ‘We owe it to her and her family to keep up the search. If she has been in an accident, if she is lying somewhere, unable to move, she would not want us to abandon the hunt or be distracted by wild guesses as to what may have happened. As far as I am concerned, Stephanie Markham is still alive, and she’s out there somewhere in need of our help.’

Detective Flint went on to thank the Lamoille and Orleans county sheriff’s departments for their work, and said that since their search of the lowland countryside and mountain trails in the area she was last seen have proved fruitless, the State Police effort would be concentrated further afield.

Sources in the VSP suggest that police search teams are working on the theory that Stephanie may have tried to reach the Long Trail where it passes west of Belvidere Mountain, but became lost or had an accident. They will also be checking the areas around the trail for several miles north and south.

Stephanie had been staying in the town of Bleakwater Ridge with her grandfather, local resident Edward Markham. Mr Markham was unavailable for comment yesterday, but friends said they were helping him cope with his granddaughter’s disappearance and that they were praying for her safe return.

I wondered whether anyone else had noticed Flint’s self-contradiction. He hadn’t wanted to follow ‘wild guesses’ about her whereabouts, but jumped straight on the Long Trail theory. Maybe the State Police had had access to information not in the press report, and that’s what had sent them haring all over the mountains.

Four days after the last article, there was one final piece on the story, further from the front page than before.

VSP Launch Flyer Campaign For Missing Hiker
by Elijah Charman

The State Police are printing flyers of missing hiker Stephanie Markham in the hope of turning up fresh information. Search teams have found no trace of the 20-year-old despite scouring the area in which she was last seen.

Detective Sergeant Karl Flint said: ‘We’ll be distributing flyers with Stephanie’s photo and description all over the northern half of the state in the hope of jogging people’s memories. We’re hoping someone saw her after she left the town of Bleakwater Ridge and maybe they can shed light on her whereabouts.’

The VSP had been concentrating on a section of the Long Trail until yesterday morning, when the hunt was scaled down. Officials would not comment on the chances of finding Stephanie alive.

I copied down the phone number of the paper’s editorial department and hoped that Elijah Charman still worked there. If anyone knew any details that weren’t in the stories, it’d be him. Or Flint, but I didn’t rate my chances of getting information out of him.

As luck had it, Elijah Charman not only still worked at the Press, he was also in town and free to meet me for coffee. I was on my third double espresso and starting to get a little buzzed when the journalist bustled in, round and swaddled in bright winter clothing like a beach ball topped with a pudgy bald head beneath a woolen hat. He shed several layers and eventually sat opposite. I asked him what he wanted to drink.

“Large chocolate with vanilla,” he said, then sneezed. “Sorry, think I’m going down with a touch of flu.”

I placed the order. Said, “Right time of year for it.”

“So you’re interested in Stephanie Markham, Mr Rourke. What’s a private detective from Boston want with a two-year-old missing persons case? I wouldn’t have thought your agency did much work up here.”

“I’m a friend of Ed Markham,” I told him. It was a slight exaggeration, but not an outright lie. “Someone told me what happened to his granddaughter and I thought there was a chance it was connected to a case I’m working on, so I’m checking it out.”

Elijah’s chocolate arrived. “You’re lucky I don’t often trash my notes. Without them to push my memory, I wouldn’t have much to say that you wouldn’t already have read. Not that there’s a lot worth adding, I should warn you.”

“So warned.”

He pulled a wad of folded paper out of his coat and started skimming over the ballpoint scribbles that covered the pages. “Let’s see… I don’t think there was anything much on the actual disappearance that wasn’t in the paper. The last person to see Stephanie alive was a woman called Brenda Ingledow; all she could really give us for a quote was, ‘Yup, I saw a young woman walk up the highway past my house about ten in the morning,’ so we left her out of the story. I got her name from an officer at the Sheriff’s Department. No one around town knew Stephanie. There were some who knew the grandfather, though, and that she was staying with him for a couple of weeks.” He flicked forward, running his finger quickly over the near-illegible text as he took an absentminded sip of his drink. “Everyone I spoke to reckoned the police had done a fair job of checking all the local trails. There were quite a few of them thought she might have fallen from some place called Broken Gap. I’ve no idea where it is, but it seemed to be about the only place people routinely have accidents and such in the area.”

“One of the stories said the LCSD checked it out.”

Elijah nodded and momentarily brought his wandering finger to a halt, tapping on one section of notes. “That’s right,” he said. “They didn’t find anything. I got the impression at the time it was pretty much guesswork, looking for her there.”

“What happened once the State Police took over?”

“About the same, really. They made a big speech about doing things right, then took off on a wild goose chase up in the mountains. By the time they’d finished with that, she’d been gone for a week and almost no one was expecting to see her alive again. Not unless she’d gone somewhere else on her own, run away, but that didn’t seem likely. So they packed up the search.”

So I hadn’t been the only one to notice the contradiction between Flint’s words and his actions. “I’m surprised there wasn’t any criticism of the search effort at the time,” I said.

“I was planning to write some, but my editor said he didn’t want it, not while the cops had more important things to deal with, so I left it. Then, by the time they’d given up and forgotten her, I’m afraid she just wasn’t news any more.” I gestured for another double espresso and Elijah raised his eyebrows. “You want to go easy on that stuff, man. Looks like you’re missing enough sleep as it is.”

“Is it that obvious?”

“You don’t just have bags under your eyes, you’ve got a whole set of matched luggage and a trolley to carry it around on.”

“You wouldn’t believe some of the nights I’ve had. Did the police ever say why they thought Stephanie might have gone up to the Long Trail?”

“I spoke to a woman called—” the finger skipped to a different piece of paper “—Detective Saric. She said they’d had a call from someone who thought they might have seen a girl like her heading up that way, and that the description was a fair match. I guess that was as good a lead as they’d got.”

“She was one of the cops in charge?”

“There were two detectives running the show, but most of the work was done by state troopers. The other detective, Flint, told me off the record that the search was mostly public relations. Looking for one person in an area that big and that empty without any clue where to go was impossible, but they had to make it look good for the cameras.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.” Elijah drained the rest of his chocolate and smacked his lips. Then he brought a second bundle of paper out of his pocket and looked at me. “You said you thought Stephanie Markham might be related to a case of yours?”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t suppose you can tell me what case it is you’re talking about?”

“Sorry.”

“No matter. It’s just that I’ve brought along some other stuff I gathered at the time Stephanie went missing. About a year before, there was a couple from Minnesota on a hiking holiday in foliage season. Last time anyone heard from them, they were just leaving Jay Peak State Forest, heading south to Hazen’s Notch and beyond.”

He slid across a couple of photocopied photos. It was barely possible to make out their faces such was the quality of the pictures.

“Will and Althea Haley,” he said. “At the time, there wasn’t much publicity — nothing like Stephanie Markham; pretty white girl syndrome — and it was a couple of weeks before anyone wondered where they’d got to; a car rental place in Waterbury called their family when they didn’t pick up their Volvo. The only reason anyone knew where they’d last been was because they’d phoned Haley’s sister to tell her. State Police posted them as missing, but that was about it. I think the cops back in Minnesota had a look to see if there was any reason they might want to disappear; I don’t know what became of that.”

I thumbed through the sparse information Elijah had collected on the missing couple. “Why didn’t this get brought up when Stephanie vanished?”

“Technically, they went missing in Orleans County, maybe Franklin, but as far as the way the statistics and everything is organized, definitely not from the same area as Stephanie. I thought of writing a piece on them, linking the two together, but I couldn’t get nearly enough information to make it worthwhile. You’re welcome to keep these copies of what I got, if you’re interested.”

“Sure, sure. Thanks, I appreciate the help.”

“No problem.” Elijah waved a hand dismissively. “If you want to know any more about all this, you’d be best off talking to the State Police.”

“I’m planning to. Do you remember who it was who was technically in charge of the Haley case?”

He shook his head and pulled his hat back on. “Afraid not. If there’s anything still posted about them anywhere, it might say who to contact.”

“Maybe so.” Then something stirred in my head and I didn’t know if it was to do with Gemma or some vestige of professionalism connected to finding Adam Webb. “One last thing,” I said. “You know Burlington much better than I do. Where would I go if I was looking for a cheap bar where I might find out if anyone’s offering casual work, or maybe to meet a couple of small-time criminals? Or if I wanted somewhere cheap and anonymous to call home for a while, where would be the best bet?”

He thought for a long moment, then said, “You might try the Mountain Bar on Patrick. Or there’s the Hart, and Cavanagh’s. There’ll all pretty rough places. As for accommodation, there’s not much to choose from. Maybe some of the newer developments in South Burlington, but most of those still wouldn’t be cheap. There’s a couple of low-rent apartment blocks and boarding houses that advertise in the classifieds. The kind of places where you can get a room for thirty bucks a week so long as you don’t mind sharing a bathroom with everyone else on your floor and a bedroom with every form of parasite known to man.”

“Classy.”

“I can’t remember where they are exactly, but they shouldn’t be hard to find. I don’t know much about cheap motels. I guess you could try asking around the train station in Essex Junction — there must be plenty of people get into town and need somewhere to stay for a while.”

“Thanks, I might do that.”

“Another story?”

“Maybe. Or another missing person,” I said. “Or maybe one day I’ll need a way to disappear myself.”

“I’d have thought that would be easier in Boston.”

“You’d think. But wherever you go, people never seem to have a hard time just up and vanishing into the blue if they try hard enough.”

“Yeah,” he said, “but most of those either turn out to be buried in a ditch or else they’ve thrown themselves off a bridge, Mr Rourke. Try not to end up either way if you can.”

“No promises,” I said.

15.

I should’ve listened to that voicemail again. I still hadn’t listened to that voicemail again. I ate a lonely dinner in Gemma’s front room and did my best to ignore both my cell phone and the sense of horror I felt whenever I thought about replaying Gemma’s death.

I wanted to catch her killer.

I didn’t want to hear her die again.

By eight thirty I was in the bar. The place was pretty much empty. If Bleakwater Ridge had any serious drinkers, the cold was keeping them at home tonight. Ed Markham was in, as always, but he was alone. Charlie had either left early or else he hadn’t made it out at all.

“Hi, Ed,” I said, sitting opposite with a bottle of something I didn’t really want but might as well have.

“Evening, Alex. You look like you’ve been burning the candle.”

“Kind of. I’m not getting much sleep right now.”

“Understandable, and especially in winter. The old houses around here can get pretty drafty. You’ll get used to it after a while, then you’ll sleep like a baby.”

I didn’t share his optimism and wasn’t planning on being here that long anyway. “On the subject of old buildings, do you know much about North Bleakwater?”

Ed thought for a moment. “You mean Echo Springs? That’s what the people who lived there called it, back when. My dad could remember when they were still trying to make it work as a town, even if it was already starting to empty. By my day, it was totally abandoned. In better repair back then, of course. There was some talk, back in the Sixties I think, of turning it into a campground. But the state’s full of them already and no one had the money.”

“What happened to the town?”

“Science and weather, you could say. From what my dad told me, and my grandpa when he was still around, it started just as a hotel by the spring at the other end of the lake. Rich folk from New York, Boston, big towns all over, used to come up here and a half dozen other places to ‘take the waters’. We’re talking back around the Civil War, now. They’d stay at the hotel and knock back spring water like it was going out of fashion, then go home telling everyone how great they felt. Echo Springs was never a big draw, I think, but it did well enough that people started putting up other buildings around the hotel until it was practically a new town.

“Then the water craze died out. People realized there was more to curing disease than just drinking. So science killed the hotel, and the rest of the town started to follow. But they still had the springs and Echo Stream, so they tried becoming a mill and factory town. Nothing big, but enough to keep people in work. Things looked like they were going OK — my dad was even thinking of switching jobs to work there when he was young — when there was the Great Flood of ’27.”

“The town was flooded?”

Ed shrugs. “Partly. It’s on the lowland, not up on a ridge like we are. But the main damage the rains did was cause a landslide that buried the springs and totally changed the course of Echo Stream, so the new mill businesses had nowhere to take their water from. With the Depression soon after, no one was in much mood to try rebuilding again, and people moved back here, or went south looking for better times. What’s your interest?”

I dodged the question so I wouldn’t have to explain what I’d been doing in the old town in the middle of the night. “Do people often go out there? I guess any tourists passing through would want to check it out.”

“I guess. Not that we get many. You walk round the lake, you walk through it. Have you seen someone then?”

I shook my head. “Tire tracks. I just wondered if people regularly drove out there. Curiosity, that’s all.”

Ed’s eyes twinkled in a way that suggested he didn’t believe me. “Not that I know of. Maybe the occasional guy going fishing at that end of the lake, but not in winter; it’s near hard-frozen now. School trips in spring; I doubt there’s anyone grown up here who hasn’t been taken out to the ruins to learn the history of the area. You reckon the tracks you saw could’ve been anything to do with your girlfriend’s murder?”

I started to see how deep the old man’s obsessive thirst to find his granddaughter’s killer ran. Coming in here, night after night for two years, hunched over a lonely beer, constantly searching for whoever took Stephanie. No forgiveness. No desire to forget and move on. I’d have cracked under the strain long before and gone mad or eaten a bullet, like I was cracking already. I said, “Did your granddaughter ever go to visit North Bleakwater?”

Ed’s eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”

“I heard what happened. I read the news reports.”

“Did you now.” His voice got real frosty. “And what made you want to do a thing like that?”

“Whatever happened to her happened in the same area as Gemma’s murder. No obvious motive in either. Maybe it’s the same person, or maybe they both stumbled on the same thing.”

Ed slammed his hands on the tabletop, like he was going to throw himself at me. “You don’t start poking into business which isn’t yours, Alex. You’ve got no right. You haven’t had to ask yourself what happened to a girl you’d known from a baby, when she’d come just to visit you and it was you should’ve been watching over her. That’s my pain, not yours.”

“You poked into mine, Ed. And I know it’s not the same, but we still both lost someone we loved.”

“It’s not the same! You never had to face the worrying, the wondering what had happened, where she was, why she couldn’t be found. You didn’t have to go through weeks not knowing, watching the cops lose interest. You didn’t have your own kids calling you up to find out what the hell had happened to their little girl while she was in your care. Don’t you dare go making comparisons you can’t understand!” He stood, face burning with anger, and snatched his coat from the back of the chair. “At least you got to bury your girlfriend. You got to say goodbye. You don’t have the right to involve yourself in my hurt till I’ve been able to do the same!”

Then he was gone and cold air spilled into the bar behind him.

16.

“Hi, honey, it’s me. Um, I thought I’d ring to ask you about the weekend. Susan’s invited—” I hit ‘call’ to disconnect and took another gulp from the generous glass of vodka on the coffee table. I wasn’t a drinker — more than once I’d wondered if I had been, maybe I’d handle stress better — and the stuff, all I’d been able to find in the house, wasn’t doing much for me, but this was the third attempt I’d made to replay the message and I figured I needed all the reinforcement I could get for what I had to listen to.

For what I had to relive.

Again.

This time I made it through all of Gemma’s final words, trying to keep my mind blank and not start dwelling on what might have been. Then there was the crack as the windshield went and I lost my nerve again.

I went upstairs to rinse my face with cold water. The whole landing and half the stairs up to it were now immersed in frozen air. Whatever was causing it was getting worse. The steam as I exhaled twisted and swirled into half-glimpsed patterns and shapes which looked almost recognizable.

“… it’s just started snowing again and I’d better keep my eyes on the road. I love you, honey, and I’ll—”

Crack.

I closed my eyes and downed the rest of the glass, but I kept listening this time.

A creak, maybe the seatbelt, and the pitch of the engine started dropping. Gemma’s foot must have been off the gas. I tried not to imagine her slumping over the wheel.

Slushy crunching as the tires left the ruts made by other traffic along the highway. The high-pitched rattle and scraping as the car rolled through the bushes by the roadside. A few seconds of muffled bumps and crackling as it headed down the slope. It didn’t sound as though it was traveling too fast. The thump as the car struck the tree and the airbag fired. Deflation. Another faint seatbelt creak. I hoped it was just settling after the impact. I hoped Gemma died outright, and realized how messed-up it was that I was wishing that.

I poured another hefty shot of vodka.

The engine’s idling hum continued for a while, a couple of minutes at least. One faint swish of traffic passing by on the road, but there were no other sounds, no further vehicles. I knew that the car was far enough downhill that I wouldn’t necessarily be able to hear any more over the phone anyway.

A couple of twigs snapped. Close by — they’d have to be, to be heard over the engine. Clunk. The door, opening. A few seconds later, the motor died and I heard the jangling as someone took their hand away from the keys in the ignition.

Breathing, slightly hard, huffy. Then, very faint, “Uh-huh. Good.”

A man’s voice. Not particularly deep. I couldn’t make out the accent for sure, although it didn’t sound like native New England. Fabric swishing, barely audible. Not smooth, like nylon, but maybe wool or a fleece jacket. A faint metallic noise, snick. Then more fabric noises and a dim scraping. The man grunted. The same metallic noise again.

A rustling sound followed a few seconds later by a couple of spongy thuds, then the squeak of protesting material. It came to me: seat stuffing. He was using a pocket knife or something like it to make or enlarge a bullet hole in the back of Gemma’s seat. He’d pried the bullet out with his knife and was playing with the hole to make sure it looked as though the round had passed through the car. Through her, through the head rest, and eventually through, I figured, the rear windshield.

Some more silence, broken briefly by the rise-fall tone of a car passing on the road above, then the second clunk of another door opening. It was fainter than the first so I guessed it was the one at the back.

Chink, chink, crunch, crunch. The rear windshield, being smashed by whatever implement the guy used on the seat. Illusion complete.

Clunk. The back door closed. More noises from outside the car. Skittering? Sweeping? The guy was doing a hurried job of hiding the tracks he’d left in the snow. It didn’t sound like he was taking long over it — the noise quickly faded — but with the falling snow what he did must have been enough not to give away his presence at the scene when the cops arrived.

Another car passed on the highway. I wished just one of them had seen the break in the undergrowth and stopped to investigate. But they hadn’t. By the time this one was gone, the sounds of the killer making his exit had faded completely and everything was silent again. It stayed quiet until the recording reached its automatic time limit and cut out.

I breathed out hard as I put the phone down.

Despite the whirl of questions and ‘what ifs’ stampeding through my head, I didn’t feel any fresh hurt from Gemma’s death, only a sense of relief that she’d died instantly. I understood a little of what Ed meant about how bad it is to wonder what happened but never actually to know. No surprise the need for justice or revenge, whichever it was he wanted, was eating away at him.

Gemma’s murderer had been waiting specifically for her, of that I was positive. He’d picked a spot to shoot from and made sure he could get down to her car quickly. There’d been no audible shot, which suggested the gun had been small caliber or else silenced — probably why the round hadn’t gone far after it hit — and he’d only needed to fire once, even though it was growing dark and she was a moving target. He’d known to search for the bullet and take it away, and he’d done a fair job of making it look like it went clean through. He’d shut off the engine to make the car harder to spot and tidied up before he’d left. He’d come and gone on foot, which meant he’d either had a vehicle stashed nearby, or he’d been willing to hike miles in the snow and the dark. In any case, he’d been familiar with the area.

And someone had told him she was coming.

17.

When I crawled off the couch next morning there was light coming in through the windows, but that didn’t mean anything much. The clock on the mantel was flickering as if the batteries were low. I tried to work out how many days had passed since I got here, but I couldn’t get the same answer twice.

Outside, the town looked dead, deserted. Glancing both ways down West Road I saw maybe one or two cars still in people’s driveways, but no more than that, and no one on the street. Everyone else must have already left for work. I checked my jacket twice, once for the keys, once more for the gun.

I’d started to understand the whole thing a little better since hearing the recording again. The preparation the killer must have done to get both the time and place right and to make a clean escape afterwards. The fact that he’d known where she was driving from and where she was heading. He’d known what car she was in and must have had some inkling of when she’d pass his position.

Altmann would’ve known all of that. He’d been to the house before and he could have checked her shift schedule. Anyone else working at the hospital could also have known, as might, perhaps, any regular work contacts outside the hospital. Her neighbors might also have known enough to make them possibilities, though the ones I’d spoken to didn’t seem to know a damn thing. The voice I’d heard on the recording didn’t sound like Dr Altmann, although I only had one word to go on and that was at some distance from the phone. What bothered me most, though, was still motive: why did the guy kill Gemma?

I had no idea of the exact route I’d taken to North Bleakwater in the dark, so I just followed the road down to the lakeshore and then cut around the edge of the frozen water, tracking the shoreline for a half hour or so until I saw the first broken shells of buildings looming through the snow-shrouded trees.

Maybe the murderer had been a pro working to hire, in which case the information needed to ambush Gemma would’ve come from his employer and all bets were off in terms of alibis and voices. Motive, then, was still an issue though;if anything an even bigger one. Maybe he’d been a nut who saw himself as an assassin. A local backwoods psycho would have a familiarity with the area, but what about the shooting skill? And why was Gemma the only shooting victim in the area for years if the guy was pathological?

Unless Gemma wasn’t his only recent victim. Stephanie Markham had last been seen heading up the same stretch of road. Maybe there was someone out in the woods who regarded it as his territory, and death to trespassers. But even that didn’t sit right; why shoot her driving through it and leave all the other traffic on the same road at the same time alone?

Nevertheless, the killer couldn’t have hiked miles to the scene. So he’d either hidden his vehicle nearby, or else he lived in town. And where better to hide your car than the overgrown, barely-used trail that led to North Bleakwater? It joined the highway maybe a half mile south of where Gemma died. Whoever had broken into the house the other night had hidden their car in the town itself. If the intruder was connected to the murder, maybe even the guy who’d done it, then presumably they’d have been happy to use the same place. If the killer had paid regular visits for long enough, maybe Stephanie Markham had encountered him on a detour from her hike, off looking at the old ruins, and saw something she shouldn’t have. Even the Haleys — they were tourists, just the sorts to make the trip to a genuine ghost town.

Fitting Gemma into the equation was still the hardest part, but I had time to work on that if I found anything here.

I passed the L-shaped remains of a small factory of some sort. Two rows of high, narrow windows in the brickwork, post holes to suggest where one story had ended and another had begun. The interior was a mess of stonework and wood broken here and there by stunted black trees and a couple of remaining iron workbenches, all covered in a layer of snow. A crumbling edifice of cracked grey stone that might once have been a kiln or large oven of some sort, now just a shapeless mass, leaning against the collapsed remains of the building that had housed it. The space beneath the bivouacked ruins was dark, a treacherous maze of crawlspaces half-filled with dirt and ice. I could see the town’s overgrown former main street running into the trees to the southeast, away from the lakeside and bound for nowhere.

Past the newer industrial additions to North Bleakwater, I came once more to the bridge over the dried-up bed of Echo Stream, the open space around it, and the hotel on the far side. The decaying structure had lost some, but not all, of the majesty it possessed after dark. In the grey light of day the signs of neglect were far more obvious — dark patches of damp-riddled wood, runnels of brown-red from metal fittings, holes where bugs had made a meal of the boards.

A lone figure in a puffy red winter coat and an insulated hunting hat was sitting on a pile of old timber outside the building. He saw me coming and said, “Morning, Alex.”

“How’s it going, Ed?”

“OK,” he said. “It’s going OK. I guess I should apologize for last night. I didn’t have any call to go flying off the handle like I did.”

“That’s all right, I understand. Why are you out here?”

“What you were talking about last night got me thinking, I guess. So when I woke up this morning, I thought I might head out to the old town and see what I could see. You know, maybe jog a memory or something. How about you?”

“I’m checking out the hotel. Someone’s been here and I thought I’d find out what they were looking for. It might be nothing. You’re welcome to come along.”

He nodded and climbed stiffly to his feet. Said, “Sure.”

The trail of crushed foliage at the back of the hotel was just as clear as last time I was here. I looked at the hard-packed ice. “What do you reckon?” Ed said.

“Hiking boots, I think. The older marks aren’t too clear with the fresh snowfall, but from the tread that’s what I’d say they were.”

“That doesn’t narrow things down any, not in this area at this time of year.”

There were at least two sets, one smaller and narrower, that might have been made at the same time — a couple of people walking side by side. There were also other prints of a different sort, ordinary shoes, but there wasn’t a lot I could tell from them. A man’s, probably, about the same size or a little larger than mine. There might even have been two sets of these too, overlapping. All four print groups came and went the same way. If there was a backwoods territorial psycho out here, he must have had a bunch of friends.

I was expecting a squeal of rusty hinges when I pushed the back door inwards, but all I got was a faint grating as the wood scuffled against the floor. The air was a little musty but not wholly stale; the gaps between boards and the occasional missing window had seen to that. I felt like I’d dived down to the wreck of the Titanic and gone for a walk inside. There was the same sense of opulence gone rotten over the years, the same eerily empty feeling being inside a monument to the past.

Ed whistled. “Would you look at all that.”

“They must have closed this place without selling everything off first. Just shut it down, let it rot.”

We were looking into what had obviously been the hotel’s dining room. Most of its original fittings were still here. A dozen tables or so, half of them overturned or leaning against the walls, another two or three little more than sodden firewood. Mildew-eaten carpet that must once have been a deep red was now black with damp. The wallpaper around the room had bubbled and burst with decay, drooping in strips like jungle fronds. There were a handful of paintings still in the crumbling remains of their frames. Years of rain and snowmelt had all but cleaned the canvases and paint ran in colored smears down the walls beneath them. A pair of baroque brass chandeliers lay in verdigris-clad heaps in the middle of the wreck. In the far corner of the room a grand piano still sat forlornly, broken strings dangling underneath and a sheen of frozen damp or slime running along its sides.

I’d brought a pocket flashlight, and I had to use it as we crossed the room and moved away from the weak tendrils of watery light that leaked through the cracked and smeared windows. Shining the beam at the rotting carpet I saw a line, or maybe several lines, of footprints running towards a set of double doors at the far side. They opened, creakily, on to the hotel’s main hall. The level of decay in the hallway was the same as in the dining room. When my beam flashed over the old reception desk, tucked away at the side, I saw where insects or rodents had gnawed at the wood and paler fresh splinters glittered white. The tracks trampled in the carpet ran to the stairs. Ed looked at them, then back at me. “Is it safe, do you think?”

“Without the tracks, I wouldn’t want to risk them. But someone’s been up and down them, so they’ve got to be reasonably sound.”

“After you, then.”

I led the way gingerly at first, then with more confidence. As we climbed I said, “Do you remember Stephanie ever talking about coming here?”

“I don’t recall. Can’t remember anything at all about where she used to go, what she used to see.” Ed sighed. “You can’t hold on to the little things like that, no matter how hard you try. When you lose someone, you tell yourself you’ll preserve every detail, the tiniest little elements of every waking moment you spent with them. It’s like trying to hold a handful of water — it all slips away, it don’t matter how tight you grip. All you’re left with are a few drops, just the big events, the stuff with a bit more staying power. And even they fade over time.”

“Butterflies,” I said. “I think of them as butterflies.” As I said it, for one moment I could smell the meadow scent again. Hear Gemma’s laughter.

“Uh-huh. Same deal. I keep watching, waiting, hoping I’ll find the guy who took Steph away, but I can’t recall exactly who I’m avenging, not any more, not the details. All I remember clearly are my own feelings since it happened. It leaves you kind of hollow.” Ed looked and sounded like a decade or two of wear had just hit him all at once. “Take it from me, you want to find whoever killed your girlfriend before you get to where I am. Get your justice while you can still remember all she was. It’ll make the forgetting a whole lot easier when it comes.”

There was nothing I could say to that so I didn’t try. There was a breeze blowing down from on high, cold and clammy. On the first floor landing I came across the stairwell’s former chandelier lying twisted and corroded in the plaster-spattered ruins of a reading table. It looked like the weight of it had become too much for the ceiling to bear and it had scythed down on its electrical cord like a miniature wrecking ball. The footprint trail cut around the carnage and headed north, away from the stairs, and we followed through a door that opened on to a short corridor with suites at both sides. The tracks didn’t deviate into any of these, but continued straight ahead until they came to another, much narrower stairwell. I shone my flashlight up, and from the height of it I guessed we were in the tower that jutted from the western end of the hotel. As I swung the beam back to my feet to follow the trail upstairs, there was a sudden burst of noise from below.

Wood, splintering. Tiles, or a pile of other detritus, clattering and sliding against each other as they were disturbed. A dull thud, a brief glimmer of daylight and a high-pitched yelp. “Jesus,” Ed said, hand over his chest. “Goddamn animal scared by the light. Nearly gave me a heart attack.”

I breathed out and took my fingers away from the handgrip of my gun. Then I brought the flashlight beam back to bear on the steps, gave Ed a reassuring grin, and resumed climbing.

“I know what you meant back there, about forgetting,” I said. “My parents were killed five years back. Hit-and-run car crash while I was driving them to a restaurant.”

“That’s rough. You find out who did it?”

“In a roundabout way, yeah, eventually. But I don’t want to wait that long this time. You were wrong when you told me I got to say goodbye to Gemma when we buried her. I can’t say goodbye, and I won’t start forgetting, not until I know whoever killed her has got what’s coming.”

“And you think there’s a chance what happened to her had something to do with what happened to Steph?”

“It’s possible, sure. Vermont’s not the Bronx. People don’t just die in the same small area like that.”

“How does this place fit in?”

“I’m not sure it does yet. A guy broke into Gemma’s house the night before last and I chased him back here. He had a car waiting for him. The old town would make a good hiding place if you needed one, and maybe he’d used it before. It’s just a theory, but someone’s been here for sure.”

The tracks took us all the way up. The top floor of the tower was home to a single L-shaped suite that must once have been one of the largest and most luxurious in the hotel. Now it was a dank, almost empty chamber lined by grimy windows with several cracked or missing panes. There was a collection of mouldering furniture scattered around its edges and a hefty hole in the middle of the floor. The carpet had been rolled up and leaned against the wall in a curled, frozen heap. Where it had been was a hole in the middle of the floor, leaving just a couple of feet of boards between the edge and the walls. Not much walking space.

I tested the wood and looked down. There was a six-inch void between the floor and the second set of boards that made up the ceiling below; both layers were broken. The exposed wood around the edges was pale, and although it was a little frost-damp the surviving timber still seemed pretty sturdy. “This damage looks fresh,” I called over my shoulder. “Well, fresher than the rest.”

The remains of the fallen boards were lying in the room below. I lay down and dangled my flashlight at arm’s length to get a good look at them. I got a prickly spiders-running-up-my-arm sensation as I peered down at the shards of hardwood. “You want to look at the room below, we can just go downstairs,” Ed said.

“If there’s something exciting down there, yeah. Otherwise I don’t want to disturb anything I don’t have to. It’s no good if whoever’s been here gets scared away. We both know how obvious footprints are.” Scuff marks, shallow dents in the wood below me. “It looks like the floorboards were deliberately smashed, like someone took a hammer to them. They didn’t fall in by themselves.”

We searched the rest of the suite. There was nothing remotely interesting in the disintegrating furniture. The first door led into a small bedroom. Its furniture was mostly intact, although the mattress and any linen were long gone, leaving just the rusted iron framework of the bed. A dresser whose varnish was pitted and bubbled with decay and a single wooden chair completed the set. The carpet was gone and the boards looked pretty clean, at least by the standards of the rest of the building.

“You know,” Ed said, “sometimes, not very often, I’ve thought I’ve seen lights up here.”

“Really?”

“Like flashlights, maybe. My house is on the north side of the ridge, so I’ve got a pretty good view across the lake. There’s been nights when I thought I could see a light moving around the old town, high in some of the buildings. Never very bright, and I can’t remember there being more than one. I used to figure it was just kids messing around out here after dark. It makes you wonder now.”

“It sure does.”

The last room in the suite was small and narrow and was mostly filled by an ancient enamel bathtub turned ammonia-yellow with age. The tub had a lattice of fine cracks and there was a solid-looking tuft of frozen moss growing from the plughole. The toilet and the chain-flush cistern were both empty. I took a look under the bath and found myself staring at a brick-shaped package wrapped in plastic and tape. I pulled it out. Through the wrapping I could see sharp white powder like ground rock salt, speckled with tiny trace brown impurities. There was a second one tucked further back.

“What’s that?” Ed said.

I held it up to the light. “I’m not an expert, but I’d guess about a pound of heroin.”

18.

When I told Flint about what we’d found at the hotel, I first had to convince him that it might have something to do with him and his case and shouldn’t just be shuffled on to narcotics, then that I hadn’t hopelessly screwed up the scene and ruined any chance of catching the drug traffickers. In the end he told me to sit tight and he’d come out with his partner, who’d at one point been on the Northern Drugs Taskforce, and they’d see for themselves.

It was about an hour until I heard two cars approaching. Another couple of minutes before a Taurus and a Neon bumped down the broken trail and into the ruined town before pulling up, line astern, in front of where Ed and I were waiting. Flint climbed out of the first vehicle and stared at his surroundings with tired, sunken eyes for a moment, frowning. His partner in the Neon was a short woman about my age with quick, dark eyes.

“Alex,” Flint said. “This is Detective Fiona Saric.”

“Mr Rourke,” she said. She had a throaty, smoker’s voice. She extended a hand. “That’s the building, huh?”

“What made you two want to go looking around in that dump?” Flint said.

I gave them the potted version. The break-in at the house. The tracks in the snow. Meeting up with Ed to check it out. I skipped over the part about his granddaughter and he didn’t mention it either. If Flint wanted to remember it for himself he was welcome to.

“You should’ve reported what happened at the house.”

“I’ve got no desire to turn it into another crime scene. The guy had gloves on — in this weather, everyone does. You wouldn’t have gotten anything anyway. If he came here and what we found is anything to do with him, I reckon you’ve got a much better chance at nailing him.”

“Describe these packages again,” Saric said.

“White powder, maybe a few brown-white impurities, sealed in plastic. About a pound, I’d guess.”

“They haven’t been opened at all? This isn’t just some big-time junkie’s private stash?”

“They’re so tightly covered they could’ve been shrink-wrapped.”

She nodded. “And you left them where they were?”

“Put them back under the tub, right where I found them.”

Ed nodded. “Uh-huh. Just like Alex said. Ain’t been no one else out here since we called you, either.”

“We’ll still need to go check it out,” Flint said. “Top room, you said? Let me go see.”

“Do you mind if I come too, sir?” Saric said before he could leave. “I’d like to see the building and have a proper look at what we’re dealing with.”

“Sure.” Flint shrugged irritably. “You’re the expert. We just need to check these men’s stories, make sure nothing’s missing, so you go and I’ll wait here. No sense in us both climbing all that way. Don’t disturb anything if you can.”

Saric tramped off. Flint watched her go. “Gemma told me heroin was pretty big in Vermont,” I said. “Does much get smuggled in this way?”

“Some, I guess, if this came down from Canada, but not very much comes cross-border. Most heroin supplies originate in New York and other places to the south.”

“But it does happen?”

“Sure.” He went quiet for a moment, then said, “You know, I’ve been here before. When I was at high school I went out with a girl from Bleakwater. We came here a couple of times in summer. There was a little more of it still standing back then, but it’s not that different.”

“I didn’t realize it was a make-out spot,” Ed said.

“It wasn’t. Jessica’s dad used to paint down by the lakeshore in his spare time. Since that was where everyone else we knew hung out, we couldn’t; he didn’t like me much. It was sometimes hard to take her back to my place ~ my older brother Jack was an asshole. Drunk, usually, or worse. So we ended up here.”

“Did it last?” I said for want of a better question.

“No. But that’s what high school is all about. Best that way whatever age you are, you know? Being in a relationship is more trouble than it’s worth, you ask me. How about you, how did you meet Dr Larson?”

“I was helping with a murder case in northern Maine a year and a half ago. She was the medical examiner. We hit it off pretty much straight away. She changed jobs, moved to Vermont so she’d be closer to me. If we’d never met, she’d probably still be alive.”

“Tough break,” Flint said. “Makes you think.”

Then his partner returned and spared him further awkwardness. “It’s all there. Just like they described. Hopefully it won’t be long before someone tries to collect,” she said. To the pair of us she added, “You did the right thing, calling this in and leaving everything alone.”

“What’ll you do?” I said.

“That’s not your concern,” Flint said.

The two cops took down what we’d told them in writing and told us everything would be formalized over the next couple of days. Then they said to go home. I figured they’d stake out the hotel — leaving the dope there, that had to be the plan — but I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. Bleakwater wasn’t Bogota, and if Gemma’s death tied to the intruder and he tied to the old ghost town, it followed that its use as a drug drop probably tied to him too in some way. And it wasn’t like he couldn’t have hidden his vehicle someplace else when he broke into the house; he could’ve parked on the street or down by the lakeside easily. The fact he hadn’t suggested he’d gotten used to using North Bleakwater as a safe bolt hole and had done so out of habit. Ed and me trooped back in the cold, footsteps blurring together as my mind wandered with them.

Gemma and I were walking through the trees, back towards the parking lot at the foot of the ridge on West Road. All I could hear were our feet crunching through the leaf litter. No talking. We’d had an argument. Brief, like the few others I could remember, and were now in the period of silence that would, hopefully, lead to making up. I wasn’t even sure what I’d said wrong; maybe it was the way I’d said it. Gemma hadn’t lived here long and I thought — hoped — it was just stress from the move behind the row. She’d asked if I would ever consider moving closer to Vermont. I didn’t think the question was loaded, so I’d said that with my job, living outside Boston would be almost impossible. And so there we were, trudging in silence.

We hit the parking lot. The lake was a sheet of blue-grey through the thin screen of trees to the left. A couple of families with young kids were heading the opposite way to us, towards the water’s edge. Gemma’s shoulders dropped a little and she shortened her stride, falling back and linking her arm in mine. She rested her head on my shoulder and said, “I’m sorry, Alex. I guess I haven’t quite settled in yet.”

“That’s OK, I know.”

“I didn’t mean to take it out on you.”

She looked up at me, eyes wide. “Promise.”

I leaned down and kissed her. “Like I said, it’s OK.”

She smiled and I smiled in return. “You know I can’t stay mad at you. I don’t have the willpower.”

“You’re only human.”

“I wonder why they hid that stuff so high up,” Ed said, snapping me back again, as the woods began to thin again on the hike home. “And here? I’d have thought you’d take your drugs to Burlington or someplace like that, you were trading them.”

“Maybe it’s safer. Dead drop system where no one sees anyone else in a place where you can pretty much guarantee no one will disturb your goods. Maybe they take it to the top because even tourists or kids will only risk going so far in a building that could fall down at any moment. The traffickers know it’s sound all the way to the last room, but other visitors won’t. Smash a hole in the floor so it looks too dangerous, complete the illusion. I don’t know that that’s how most operations would work, but it’s not completely crazy.”

“Seems that way to me,” he said. “Maybe it’s just the thought of getting close, maybe, after all this time… Just seems nuts. I’ll see you later, Alex. You keep me informed.”

“Sure.”

We parted ways, and so I went home to break the law.

19.

Rosemary Saunders, 54, unattended death. Hospital patient in for surgery on one of her knees, died unexpectedly two nights after her operation. Post-mortem needed to determine the cause of death. Coronary thrombosis was the conclusion in Gemma’s report.

They hadn’t deleted Gemma’s OCME network account yet, and now I was using it to find out what cases she’d been working on before she’d died. Drugs, I figured. Maybe there was a drugs angle.

Lester Hoffman, 28, and Kate Wylie, 26, accidental deaths. Both killed in a messy traffic accident on I-91. The only real work for Gemma had been to determine whether Lester, the driver, had been drinking or if he’d simply lost control of his car. She’d concluded the latter. There was no mention of anyone else involved in the accident.

Most of Gemma’s caseload recently seemed to be what I’d expect: routine. Nothing on the outside to suggest she’d died for it. If some sharp-eyed network admin spotted the login on her account, I’d be going to jail for very little gain so far.

Arthur Styles, 72, unattended death. Had a heart attack in his sleep while at his home in Newport. His post-mortem seemed to have been little more than a formality.

Adele Laine, 28, unattended death. Laine had been a habitual drug user, eventually falling prey to an overdose. From Gemma’s notes, it looked like if her last hit hadn’t finished her off, kidney or liver damage would probably have done the job before too long. There was no mention of any suspicious circumstances, and while I couldn’t be certain without the police case notes, I doubted there’d be any connection between Laine’s death and Gemma’s.

I’d stuck firmly to her work. I’d resisted the temptation to look at her own post-mortem, or to try for a connection to the VSP network and a copy of the crime scene report. I told myself I didn’t need either of those things. The reality was that I didn’t want either of them.

Eric Burns, 20, suspected homicide. Hit-and-run victim, the last post-mortem Gemma carried out. Death caused by blunt trauma consistent with vehicle impact, impossible to tell whether any of the damage had happened beforehand. Preliminary results of blood screening indicated small amounts of heroin or a similar opiate in his bloodstream. This must have been the guy Gemma mentioned last time I saw her.

Notes at the bottom of the file described the personal effects found on Burns, which were taken away as evidence the day after the autopsy, the day Gemma died. Three hundred and seventeen dollars in cash. Watch, a couple of bits of personal jewelry. Cell phone, more or less destroyed by the impact that killed him. Wallet with all the usual crap inside, including two scraps of paper folded away inside one of the credit card pockets.

The first had read: You’d better be ready to deal with the big boys, or you’ll have to deal with the consequences. Don’t think you can hide from us.

Gemma had remarked that the note had had two puncture marks in it, similar to staple holes. There was nothing on him to match these, but my first guess was that if you wanted to threaten someone with ‘consequences’, how better to do it than with a photo of someone who hadn’t played ball in the past?

The second note read: Corner of Grant and Dougan, 10PM. Delaney.

20.

I spent the rest of the day laying on the couch, watching TV and imagining I could hear Gemma talking to me, chunks of memory recut into fresh conversation that I found I couldn’t recall once I’d snapped out of it. I left it until long after nightfall before hiking back to North Bleakwater.

Saric’s car was there alone now, concealed not terribly well beside the shell of a collapsed brick building thirty yards from the hotel. I thought I could see a couple of people in it, but most of the windows were fogged solid. Not wanting to scare the hell out of a couple of cops on stakeout I walked along to where I’d be in full view and gave them a wave. The passenger door came open fast and a uniformed patrol officer was up over the top of it real quick, gun ready. Before he could say anything, though, I heard Saric’s voice inside. “Relax, Costain. I know this guy.”

He glanced back, then lowered the gun and I approached. “Help you, sir?” the officer said.

“Out for a walk,” I said. “Nice night for it.”

“Just get in the car, Mr Rourke,” Saric said with a sigh. Once I’d complied and the door was shut again, she added, “You realize I could charge you with obstructing an investigation?”

“Well now, if you’d mentioned you were going to be staking the place out earlier maybe I’d have known to stay away. Can’t be blamed for being curious.”

“We could still arrest you for being a dick,” Costain said. Saric chuckled.

“Case for the defense?” I said and passed a flask of coffee forward.

Saric opened it and nodded. “Not guilty, Your Honor. So long as you explain exactly what it is you’re doing out here.”

“I wanted to see how seriously this was being taken by Flint, what was being done. I don’t know that he likes me much, and I don’t know that I trust him to find Gemma’s killer. And I can’t sleep, so what the hell.”

“Heh.” She glanced at her partner and said, “You might as well take that leak you’ve wanted for the past hour, Costain. You’re not going to get a better time.”

“Sure. Thanks. Don’t drink all that yourself.”

Once the other cop was gone, Saric went back to staring through the dark towards the hotel. She said, “This goes no further, but Detective Sergeant Karl Flint is a prick and I’m sorry for your sake it’s his case.”

I raised my eyebrows. “For real?”

“Five years ago he was nearly kicked off the force. Went off the rails for a while. Drink, more if you believed some of the wilder rumors.” She glanced at me. Her gaze was curiously flat. “I don’t. I like to think I’m a good judge of people, and while I’d say Karl Flint is an idiot and at times only a mediocre cop, I don’t think he’d be stupid enough to get his kicks from anything illegal. If he does, he’s got friends in the testing chain covering for him. He brings the stories on himself. Hangs out with some rough types in some rough places. Likes to act the big man.”

“Why’d he get in trouble?”

“You ever heard of the Damien Ackroyd case?”

I shook my head. “If this was five years ago, I’d have been working out of Quantico. Unless he was a major violent criminal, I’d have missed it.”

“I don’t know about violent, but he was certainly a big-time scumbag. He was like a criminal version of one of those big Japanese conglomerates — he did a little bit of everything. His main thing was selling runaways and impressionable girls who thought they were going to be models into the sex trade in New York, then bringing heroin back in return.”

“Doesn’t ring any bells, sorry.”

“I’d just finished in narcotics. My older brother overdosed on heroin when I was a kid, so I took — still take — that kind of thing seriously. A hang up more about people who use than those who deal, maybe, but that’s just the way it goes. I still wanted Ackroyd taken down. He wasn’t even smart enough to hide the fact that he was a crook. He had a big house in Burlington’s Hill Section, three sports cars, the works. IRS would’ve got him eventually for sure. People were getting suspicious of his business dealings when one of his girls escaped from a brothel in New York and told her parents everything. Big media coverage, and we got involved. We went after Ackroyd. The girl identified her handler and NYPD picked him up. He led us to the next rung on the ladder, and she gave us the name of Isaac Fairley, Ackroyd’s number two. Without him, we could’ve busted some minor crooks, but we only had circumstantial evidence on Ackroyd. Certainly nothing that would’ve made for a conviction.”

“Flint failed to bring in Fairley?”

“No, he found him wherever he was hiding out, subdued him, and brought him in for interrogation. Fairley gave us a full statement implicating Ackroyd, all the details, held nothing back. We made the arrest. When the case came to trial, Ackroyd’s lawyers — the same firm who coincidentally also represented Fairley after his initial interview — produced photos of Fairley’s chest, covered in welts and bruises. On the stand he said Karl beat the confession out of him. The statement he gave us became worthless and the case collapsed. Ackroyd was busted on some minor possession-with-intent charges and escaped without punishment for the whole prostitution ring. He kept his big house and all his cars, although he moved away not long after his release.”

“I bet your superiors weren’t happy about that.”

“No one was happy about that. Karl denied everything, but he was suspended, investigated, and might have been fired. As it was, the only proof was the photos of Fairley’s injuries, and Ackroyd could’ve had him beaten after the interview, both to get the pictures and to threaten him into retracting his statement. Karl was reinstated, but for a few months he was out on the ragged edge. I remember one night I went for a drink with him in Burlington, a couple of weeks after the Fourth of July, end of party season, just to see how things were — I didn’t know him then as well as I do now, otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered. I don’t think he drank much, but he was in a mean mood all the same. He got kicked out of the Bar None for getting in a fight with a couple of guys. I had to drag him away before he put one of them in the ICU. It could’ve been bad.”

“Do you think he did beat Fairley?”

“Who knows?” Meaning, I thought, yes. “Anyway, he kept his nose clean afterwards. Calmed down, rebuilt his ego. Cases he thinks he can score a quick win or doesn’t give much of a crap about, he tends to play his hunches and hope for the best. If he hits, he gets to look great to all concerned, and if he misses, it doesn’t bother him much.”

“What category does Gemma’s case fall into?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it? Either way, don’t hold your breath for a happy outcome. He was reluctant even to have us stake this place out for a couple of days. Too busy chasing wackos who’d make for an easy conviction if they looked a good fit for the shooter. He pulled the same move on the murder of a hooker in Burlington a few years ago and got nowhere. He’s got form.” The door opened and Costain climbed back into the car, smelling thickly of cigarette smoke. “You should probably head back home now, Mr Rourke. Thanks for the coffee, and remember what I said.”

I wondered, as I left, exactly which part of what she’d said she meant by that. And why.

21.

Some time in the dead hours of morning, I dreamed of the lake. Clouds roiled overhead as two figures in police uniform escorted my casket and the gun carriage on which it sat down the gravel drive. I sat up and watched as a hooded man performed a military-style funeral salute with his rifle, firing three rounds over my head. Both cops kept their eyes on the floor. At the garage they stopped and unloaded my coffin, hauling it between them like a bag of cement, occasionally bumping and scraping against the ground. Dr Altmann watched us from one of the windows, Adam Webb standing by his side.

The cops carried me down to the water’s edge and carefully lowered the casket until it bobbed on the surface, rising and falling with the waves as they lapped against the stones and mud beneath. Without looking at me, they gave the coffin a stern push and I went floating out over the lake. The shore receded rapidly behind me into the gloom.

I glanced over the side and saw that the surface swam with loose sheets of paper. The clippings I’d been given by Elijah Charman, printouts of files from the OCME network. Stephanie Markham. The Haleys. Gemma. One sheet of newsprint was playing looped back and white video footage. Elijah shouting for the attention of a couple of cops as they walked up a trail blocked by a patrol car, following a string of state troopers. “Detective, Detective! Are you expecting to find her today?”

The two cops stopped and turned around. “We’re hoping she’ll turn up alive and well. We always hope we’ll find her,” Flint yelled back.

“Ask us about it again this evening,” Detective Saric shouted. “We think she might be up on the Long Trail.”

Lamoille County. Orleans County. Maps. Photos.

Crime scene reports. Diagrams. Position of body at scene of death. A photo of Gemma slumped over the steering column, a trickle of drying blood running down her back, underneath her coat. Eyes open. One hand limp at her side, the other still caught up in the wheel.

Adele Laine, unattended death. Arthur Styles, unattended death. Lester Hoffman and Kate Wylie. Rosemary Saunders. Eric Burns.

Gemma’s voice on a bad recording. “I might have to do an autopsy on a kid killed in a hit-and-run when I go back on Monday. The State Police think it way have been something to do with the heroin trade…”

And then, beneath them all, movement in the water. A woman I didn’t know, dark hair drifting around her head like a black halo, raising both hands up towards me like a reflection trying to claw its way through a mirror. I didn’t know if she wanted to reach the surface or if she wanted me to join her below it. I leaned closer, felt the coffin tilt, tip and spin. Gravity took over and the water rushed up to meet me.

I cracked awake as I hit the floor next to the couch. The room was freezing and it wasn’t even dawn outside.

Rob called me from Boston while I was on my third cup of coffee after waking. If a voice could ever have worn a frown, his was. “Haven’t heard from you in quite a while, Alex,” he said. “Not since the funeral. How’re you holding up? Are you OK?”

“Yeah, more or less.”

“Would I be right if I took a wild swing in the dark and said you’re in Vermont right now?”

“I’ve been staying at Gemma’s place the past few days.”

“Are you planning on staying much longer?”

“You want me to send you a postcard?”

“If they’re not still using the Pony Express up there. Seriously, Al, I know how tough this must be for you, and I’m happy to cut you a lot of slack, but I also know what you’re like and I know you’re not there to box up her personal effects.”

“Yeah,” I said. I didn’t elaborate.

“If you’re grieving, depressed, not feeling capable of work, then I quite understand and you take all the time you need. But if you’re pursuing Gemma’s murder — in however screwy a fashion — then you are feeling capable. Don’t give me a line about being miserable and then go back to hunting in the dark for your own reasons. If you’re well enough to do that, you’re well enough to do your job as well, even just a little. And I hope for your sake you are, because I know you, Al, and I know that you’ll let your head get full of Gemma being gone and then one day you’ll starting thinking about eating a bullet because your life’s as good as over.”

“You’re going to tell me it’s not.”

“Damn straight it’s not. You’ve got people counting on you and if you need a kick up the ass to keep yourself together, it’s down to me to give it because I’m your oldest friend. Colleen Webb called yesterday asking how we were doing finding her son. I told her there’d been a personal tragedy affecting you, but that line won’t hold forever. If you’re in Vermont and you’re up and about and not collapsed, moping on the couch, then I need you to do what you were going to do to find him. You need it as well. You might not see it now, but you do, trust me.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I said nothing.

“I know you’re hurting over Gemma, more than anyone, but you’ve got a client who’s hurting too, worrying about her son. She doesn’t know what’s become of him; you at least know what happened to Gemma. You can make that right for her, one way or the other.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Don’t ask me that question right now, Al. Do it. You don’t live in a bubble. The rest of the world hasn’t stopped because your life has been put through the mill. You engage with it, you pick yourself up, and it’ll be the first step in recovering,” he said. “I shouldn’t need to tell you this crap because you’ve been through it all before and come out in one piece. OK?”

“Sure,” I said with an effort. He was, I had to admit, right. The same as Ed Markham, it wasn’t fair to leave Webb’s mom in the dark if I could help. “I’ll try.”

“Good man. You call me when you find anything, or if you need another pep talk. I charge by the hour, though,” he said. “So what’ve you got so far? How’re the cops doing?”

I told him everything that had happened, skipping some of the crazier-sounding ‘Alex, take your pills’ stuff. “Cops are pretty lousy, in my estimation. But someone took a crack at me the other night,” I said. “So we’ve got to be close. Find out soon enough.”

“OK Alex. Be careful; the heroin business isn’t known for its soft touch.”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed.”

With the hotel under stakeout and no other leads to chase right then, I figured I might as well discharge my professional duty while I had the chance. Fresh snow whirled from the sky all the way into Burlington, fat, greasy, flakes of the stuff peppering the windshield and blanketing the sawtooth countryside around in a white fog. I had to keep my eyes on the road, at least when they weren’t watching the tan sedan, visible a hundred yards back in breaks between flurries, that had been tailing me all the way from Bleakwater Ridge.

22.

Maybe I was being paranoid; if the driver was going from Newport, say, to Burlington, well, it wasn’t like there were a lot of viable routes in this weather. And if they were tailing me, they couldn’t have been a pro because they were doing a poor job of hiding it. The tan sedan stuck with me all the way down to Waterbury and the I-89 interchange, then along the interstate all the way to Burlington until I finally lose sight of it when I took the Kennedy Drive exit for South Burlington.

Elijah Charman had given me the names of a few places that might serve as starting points for finding Webb before. I figured if Webb had been here any length of time he’d have stayed reasonably central. He’d told his mom he was working as a tour guide, but that didn’t ring true; there were plenty of places to visit around here, but not so many or so close together anyone would employ a guide, especially an out-of-towner with no qualifications or experience. Webb would’ve been working for on-the-spot cash hires — bars, diners, nightclubs, manual work — or falling back on the kind of petty crime I knew he’d been involved with before. Since none of that paid well, he’d have been living somewhere cheap.

The three bars Elijah had pointed me to were a bust. The only good that came from any of them was the barman in the Hart, who gave me the names of three more places, as well as the addresses of a couple of dirt cheap housing units he knew.

The first was a three-story block clustered around a central courtyard. There was no sign of the building’s manager and I had no luck trying to reach him by phone, so I contented myself with putting up a couple of missing person flyers.

The second place, over the river in Winooski, looked like converted industrial space, a long hulk of crumbling brickwork with dozens of high narrow windows. A similar structure on the other side of the street had yet to undergo redevelopment. There were a couple of dozen buttons on the intercom by the front door: all numbers, no names. A separate bell beneath was marked ‘manager’. I rang it a couple of times and then, when there was no answer, gave it a solid blast for thirty seconds or so.

Eventually, a sagging man in his forties opened the door, wearing a dark blue jogging suit emblazoned with the UVM logo. His face was covered in sweat, so I maybe I’d interrupted a workout. So I hoped, anyway. The alternatives were unsavory and I’d need to eat at some point that day. He looked me up and down. “Sixty dollars a week, first week in advance,” he said gruffly. “No pets, kids by arrangement only. Electric and water are included. Trash gets picked up Tuesdays.”

“Thanks, I’ll bear that in mind. I’m looking for someone, wondering if you can help.”

“I don’t mess with residents’ privacy.”

“I’m a private eye from Boston. The guy I’m looking for isn’t in any trouble and I’m not here to hassle him. If there were names next to the buzzers down here maybe I wouldn’t be asking you at all. I guess people come and go too quickly for that, huh?”

The guy frowned. “Look pal, there’s plenty of people in this city who need cheap housing. This place ain’t great but it’s OK, I keep an eye on everyone in here, and I don’t screw around with the tenants. If this guy isn’t in any trouble, why’re you looking for him?”

“Would you believe me if I told you his mom was worried about him?”

“Serious?”

“Yeah. Straight up. That’s all it is.”

He thought for a moment, then nodded and his face relaxed. “OK, fair enough. Who’re you after?”

“A guy called Adam Webb.” I showed him a flyer. “The last time anyone heard from him was a couple of months ago. He said he was working as a tour guide, but that doesn’t seem likely to me.”

“Are these pictures the best you’ve got?”

“Afraid so.”

We shuffled aside to allow one of the residents, a pale woman in her early twenties, to sidle past and out of the building. The manager looked up as she passed and said, “Is your stove working OK now? I don’t know how good a wiring job I did on it.”

“Yeah, it’s fine now, thanks,” she says, looking back over her shoulder at us. Gaunt and drawn. Dark hair, deep-set eyes. Healthy, though thin. She was wearing a fleece jacket and hiking boots. Her gaze wandered briefly to the paper in the manager’s hand, then to me. I couldn’t tell what she read there, but she pulled on a woolen hat and scarf real fast, then turned and hurried down the street.

“I don’t remember having anyone stay here under that name,” the manager said, talking to me again. “I’ll check the records just to be sure, but it doesn’t ring any bells. Same with the face, but the photo’s so blurry I doubt I’d know him if he mugged me in the street.”

“Would you mind posting a couple of these in the entrance here? Just in case anyone living here recognizes him.”

“Sure, sure. If you give me a couple of copies I’ll take them inside and check my records. It won’t take a minute.”

When the guy returned from the depths of the gloomy building he was shaking his head. “I don’t have any Webbs staying here, not in the last two or three months, anyway. Only one Adam, and he’s too old to be your guy. But I’ll stick up the description; maybe someone knows him.”

“Thanks for your help.” I said.

“No problem, man. Do what you can do, right?”

On the way back to the car I saw the woman from the tenement building again. She was lurking in the snow-packed gap between the empty brick shell on the other side of the road and the chain-link fence surrounding the adjacent lot, watching my car. Maybe she was just trying to work out if I was a cop or not. Whatever her reasons, I was curious. I used a break in the traffic to cross over and headed towards her hiding place.

She let out a little gasp and did a brief rabbit-in-the-headlights impression when I turned the corner to face her. I smiled and took out a cigarette. “Hi,” I said. “Have you got a light?”

“Who are you?” Her eyes were wide, pale skin flushing.

“You need ID to borrow a match in Vermont these days? My name’s Alex Rourke. Why?”

“Are you a cop or something?”

“I’m a private investigator. With cold feet and an unlit cigarette.”

“What do you want with—” she caught herself before she said a name “—with that guy you’re looking for?”

“Exactly what I told the manager of your apartment building. His mom back in Boston hasn’t heard from him for a couple of months and she wants to get in touch. The company I work for does a lot of missing persons work, so she came to us.”

The woman sniffed and nodded hesitantly. “You got a card or anything like that?”

I returned the cigarette to its pack and hunted around in my jacket for a business card. The woman took it and read it carefully. “And you work for this Robin Garrett guy?”

“Call the office if you don’t believe me.”

“Why are you looking around here?”

“I’ve been looking all sorts of places. I’ve covered the bars he might have gone to and now I’m checking out where he might have lived while he was in town. Do you want to tell me what all these questions are about?”

“Me and Adam were friends.”

I picked up on the tense she’d used straight away. ”What do you mean ‘were’?”

She looked at me, blinking, and seemed to collapse inwardly as though all the air had been knocked out of her at once. “He’s dead,” she said, tears beginning to sparkle in the corners of her eyes. “I think Mr Delaney killed him.”

23.

The woman said her name was Jessie Taylor. Presumably the same Jessie Adam’s friend back in Boston had mentioned. I drove her to a steam-filled diner a few blocks down the street. She cried the whole way and kept it up for a while inside, which drew some odd looks from the waitress who served us.

I kept my voice down while I talked. “Who’s Mr Delaney?”

“He’s the guy we worked for.” She ran shaky fingers through her hair. “Well, I don’t know if we worked for him, but he was always the guy we spoke to.”

“And what did you do for him?” I took a mouthful of strong, gritty coffee, trying not to show any recognition of Delaney’s name while I thought back to the autopsy notes.

“You sure you’re not with the cops?”

“Sure.”

“We used to carry stuff,” she said, barely more than whispering. “Y’know, over the border. We’d pick it up, usually near some place called Sutton in Quebec. Then we’d hike into the mountains like regular tourists, all the way down to the delivery point. Delaney told us it was always best to use a couple for that kind of thing, so we could pose as sweethearts or something if anyone asked. That way we wouldn’t get so much hassle. But no one ever asked. Maybe he knew someone in the Border Patrol, or he paid off the cops.”

I could guess what ‘stuff’ Adam and Jessie carried over the border. Slightly surprised at the route, but I guessed the old Vermont smuggler ethic died hard, or else the dope was especially good. And I’d have bet good money I knew where their final drop point was. I wrote the word ‘heroin’ on the back of my cigarette pack and showed it to her. “Is this the kind of stuff you and Adam were carrying?”

She nodded, looking away. “Yeah. Not much usually, just a couple of bags.”

“Pure?”

“I guess. I never asked.”

“So how did Mr Delaney fit into all this? And why would he kill Adam?”

Jessie finished the rest of her cofFee in a series of gulps and motioned for a refill from the waitress. She seemed to be calming down now. “I don’t know how Adam met him, but I heard about the job from a guy I was with in a bar. I needed money bad, so someone put me in touch with Delaney — I didn’t know his name then. I guess Adam wound up working for him the same way. He explained everything to us, showed us where to go and such. I don’t know if he checked us out to make sure we weren’t cops or anything; I guess he must have done. The only time I ever saw Mr Delaney he was wearing, like, a scarf, glasses and a hat so I couldn’t see his face. He said that was what to call him, so I doubt it’s his real name.”

“Sure.”

“The way it worked, every now and then we’d both get a phone call telling us where to pick up. Then we’d get together, pack and cross into Canada. We’d collect the stuff, hike back — that usually took a couple of days, trail-camping — and call a number we were given. We’d let the phone ring three times, then hang up, to let them know we were done. There’d be cash waiting for us. And that was it.” She paused long enough to down half her coffee. “The money was good, but once Adam saw how it all worked he wanted more than that.”

“He tried skimming some off the top?”

“The packages were always sealed. They’d have known. And they were usually close by when we dropped the stuff off. One time we even saw their car waiting.” She started picking at one of her fingernails. “But Adam figured he could switch a couple of bags of dope for a couple of bags of baking powder or something and they wouldn’t find out until we were long gone.”

“You went along with his idea? You can’t have known him long. You trusted him that much?”

The hand-wringing increased. “I didn’t want to do it. But we’d kind of become friends from all that time alone together. He was a nice guy. Cute, funny. I could’ve done worse than end up with him. And he said he knew someone who’d want to buy such a large batch of dope and that we’d make a fortune out of it. I knew they’d kill us when they found out, but, well, my life was nothing much at the time and that money was real tempting.”

“That’s understandable. Plenty of people would have done the same.” I didn’t tell her that in my experience there was only one way it had ever been likely to end. Not that it had ever stopped anyone from getting greedy before.

“So one delivery, he had a plan. Before we went up, he left his car and some of our things in a rented garage in Newport. The plan was that he’d hike down and make the drop with the fake packages. I’d walk to Newport and pick up the car, and then we’d meet up at this place we passed through every trip we made. It’s a patch of woods not far from Hazen’s Notch. There’s a couple of parking lots for summer tourists a little way down the slope, either side of trees. We were going to meet up in the woods, then head for New York State.”

“What went wrong?”

Jessie drained her cup and stared at the bottom of it. “It was night. I got the car like we planned. I drove up to the woods; there’s trees all over up there, our place was just an old-looking patch of forest. Nice, really.” She smiled briefly, then it was gone. “I got out of the car and went up the hill, hoping Adam was already there so we could go straight away. Then I saw a light in the trees. When I got a little closer I could see shapes — people — moving. I heard a gunshot, and Adam shout out, but his voice was all garbled. The light stopped and stayed in one place for a while.”

“What did you do?” I asked softly.

“I ran, Mr Rourke. I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t call the cops and tell them what happened or they’d have arrested me. I couldn’t speak to anyone I knew in case Delaney was looking for me as well, and I didn’t have the money to run far. So I got the only shit apartment I could afford for more than a couple of months and I’ve been waiting ever since, either for Delaney to forget about me, or for someone to put a bullet in me too. You know what it’s like when there’s someone out there who wants you dead, Mr Rourke?”

“You wouldn’t believe. Can you draw me a map so I can get to the site where Adam was killed?”

She nodded and wiped her nose on the sleeve of her coat. “Sure. Give me a pen.”

Jessie sketched a very rough plan of the area around the woods on a paper napkin. She looked tired and strung out. Maybe it was just living so long on her nerves, maybe she’d been using a little of the stuff she’d once carried south to relieve the tension. I’d have asked, but her problems weren’t mine and it wasn’t like there was anything I could have done to help.

“Thanks,” I said. “Have you got a number where I can reach you if there’s anything else I think of, or if Mr Delaney gets caught?”

“No. I ditched my cell after Adam died and my apartment doesn’t have a landline. Drop me a note or something.”

“OK. Delaney — if you heard his voice again, you’d know it?”

She nodded. “Of course. He didn’t sound local. West coast, maybe. California. Some place like that.”

“Good,” I said. “Did you ever see him or hear him with anyone else? Do you know anyone else working for him?”

“No. The time we saw the car near the drop point, there was a couple of people in it, but I don’t know if either of them was him.”

“What kind of car was it?”

“I don’t know. Dark color. Might have been a station wagon.”

“Whereabouts was the drop point? Did you use different ones each time or was it always the same place?”

“It was always the same. In a room in this old abandoned hotel, someplace just off Route 100. We’d stash the packages under a bath tub.”

Bingo. As expected. If I could find Webb’s body, there was a chance, however small, that it would still hold some evidence to identify Delaney. I had to wait to look for it though, because right after I said goodbye to Jessie and headed for my car, I got a call that threw out all my plans.

24.

“I know what happened to her, to your girlfriend,” the voice said. The speaker was muffled and gravelly, the words clipped and abrupt like they didn’t want to be recognized. I couldn’t even be sure if it was a man or a woman. “I know, but this is dangerous. I’ll talk if we can meet.”

“How do you know?”

“You want to hear or don’t you? The cops won’t find out. You must know that by now. There’s a reason. Two o’clock. Huggett’s Farm off Route 108 outside Bakersfield. It’s abandoned. Foreclosure. No one there. You call a cop, you show up with company, you get nothing.”

Then I was talking to dead air.

I found it on my second pass. A dirt road with an ancient realtor’s sign out front so weather-beaten I couldn’t even read the name of the agent. The gate was open and rusty. I drove slowly down a gentle slope towards the farm, following a set of fresh tire marks. Unkempt buildings emerged from a stand of snow-wreathed trees in front of me as I rounded the final turn a couple of minutes later and reached the farm complex. It was small and from the weeds and the general sense of rot and decay, I guessed it hadn’t been occupied in at least ten years.

I pulled up in front of a wooden barn that had once been painted red, but had peeled so bad it was now just flecked with scraps of crimson. Climbed out, lit a cigarette, checked my gun and tucked it away again. The air was cold and still and quiet. The front of the property before the stand of woodland framing the trail had mostly been open fields. The back of the farm complex seemed to be a belt of sloping snow-covered pasture maybe a half mile long and three hundred yards across, hemmed in by more trees lining the far side. I thought maybe I saw movement in the bare branches and the gloom, just for a moment, but I no longer knew if I could trust my eyes on that score.

The other vehicle’s tracks seemed to circle the central yard a couple of times, but any marks leading away were confused and part-swept. It looked like it had probably pulled around the back of a feed tower beside one of the other buildings. I circled round the barn and went to investigate. Got almost to the end of the wall before a man in a state trooper’s uniform swung out, gun raised, yelling at me to stop right there and put my hands on my head.

25.

There were five of them, regular cops, as well as Flint and Saric. Once they’d relieved me of my weapon and hauled me over to the unmarked gray van they’d arrived in, the two detectives directed the troopers to go back to their positions watching the center of the farm while they gave me a grilling. Flint in particular didn’t look happy. His eyes had an edge to them, narrow and dark. He looked tense, sweaty. Wired.

“You’d better have a damn good reason for being here, Mr Rourke,” he said. “At the moment you either look like a suspect or a deliberate nuisance.”

“A suspect for what?”

“Most murder victims are killed by members of their family. A man like you must know people who work for hire.” He was trying to get a rise and it almost worked. The muscles in my jaw clenched but I said nothing. “So why are you here?”

“I’m thinking of investing in property and this place looked a bargain. Why do you think? I had a call from someone who said they knew who shot Gemma. They wanted to meet me here, now, and they’d talk. No cops, no company, et cetera et cetera.”

“What a stroke of luck. Name? Number?”

“Neither. Caller ID was barred and I never got a name. They were disguising their voice too. It was an anonymous tip, Flint. You of all people should know how they work. How come you’re here with the cavalry at the same time? Don’t tell me it’s a crazy coincidence.”

The two cops glanced at each other. Flint said, “We had a guy come forward saying he was on Route 100 at about the time Dr Larson was killed. He said he drove past the spot a few minutes before it started snowing again — so a few minutes before she did — and there were two vehicles pulled over at the side of the road. One was a blue pickup or SUV — he wasn’t sure — and the other was a tan sedan.”

“Tan?”

“That’s what he said. There were two guys standing between them, looking like they were checking under the hood of the pickup. One of them was carrying a gym bag. The witness slowed down, thinking they might have had a breakdown or something, but then one of the guys stared at him and twitched his jacket open to show he was carrying a gun. The witness drove off but he tried to get their license plates. He couldn’t see the pickup’s but he got the sedan’s.”

“And he waited until now to report it? That doesn’t seem strange at all.”

“Let’s say the witness is a less-than-upstanding pillar of the community — he’s a recovering junkie with a string of busts, in point of fact — and he didn’t hear about the murder until now.” Flint shook his head. “It happens like that sometimes, as you know goddamn well. And you should be thankful because this witness is the main reason I don’t see you as a major suspect despite your turning up here and now. You understand?”

“Drug deal gone wrong rather than a professional hired by me with money I don’t have for no motive whatsoever. I got the picture. Nice you think so highly of me.”

“We ran the plates and the car is registered to one Randy Faber. Is that name familiar to you?”

“Should it be?” My toes were numb in the cold and my face felt like stretched rubber. I rocked to and fro, just trying to keep my circulation going.

“Your girlfriend never mentioned him?”

“No.”

“What about the name Curtis Marshall?”

“Never heard of him.”

“OK,” he said. “So maybe she got unlucky and drove past something she shouldn’t have at just the wrong time for it. Faber’s from San Francisco and he’s got a record — nothing big, a couple of weapons violations, a charge for threatening behavior that was later dropped. But his name is flagged in SFPD and FBI investigations into a big-shot businessman and criminal boss called Curtis Marshall. They think Randy used to be a hitman for Marshall but had to leave California a few years ago when the local cops busted one of Marshall’s crystal meth plants. There’s no proof of this, but the story goes that Randy was so eager to get away that the son of a bitch fired on a couple of his own guys running for the same car he was. One of those killed was Marshall’s nephew Joel and his uncle has been after Randy’s blood ever since. Why he’s showed up here I don’t know, but as murder suspects go he’s a solid one and he has a history in the drug trade. Maybe he’s running his own operation now.”

Saric nods. “So now, Alex, you may have walked clean into the middle of drug gang business right when they’re cleaning up loose ends. We had a tip from an informant that Randy was supposed to meet a distributor here right about now. But instead you show up. That looks bad, or else very unlucky. This guy’s armed, dangerous, and has a record for shooting his way out of police raids. We’ve got five other officers with us and I still wish we had more. That’s how serious this is.”

“And if it wasn’t for the fact that we need to keep a low profile until he does show, I’d still be arresting you for interfering with an investigation,” Flint said. “You say you had a phone call from some guy who tells you to come out here. Either that’s Faber himself planning on putting a bullet between your eyes, or it’s a rival hoping you’ll do for him instead, or you’re right and our witness is no good and maybe you hired Faber yourself, or else your story is bullshit and you’re just trailing our people, hoping for scraps.”

“If I was looking for scraps I’d try elsewhere because so far you’ve found jack,” I said. “I get a lead, I follow it up even if it could be a set up. I’m not a fool, but I’ve got no choice. What about you, anyway? You get one tip that says your suspect does business by the side of a public highway — less than a mile from the ghost town he apparently uses to keep his goods in, in fact — and another says he knows a nice, isolated farm that’s been empty for years he uses as a meeting place. Any parts of that strike you as contradictory? Someone’s lying to you, Sergeant Flint.”

“A witness put an armed guy at the scene of a shooting. That part’s enough for me. So far. Don’t make me dig further.” He glared at the snow-blanketed fields. “On top of all that, Faber’s late and I’m frozen stiff. Give him his gun back, Fiona. He looks like he’s going to do anything with it, you shoot him. Then you stay by the van, Mr Rourke, out of the way until we’re done here. You so much as go for a piss and I’ll think twice about not taking you in. Clear?”

“If your informant had been genuine, Alex,” Saric said, handing me my Colt, “and you’d found out who killed Dr Larson, would you have told us, or would you have gone for him yourself?”

I didn’t get to answer that because at that moment there was the snap of splintering wood as a bullet punched into the wall beside me.

26.

It took a moment for me to realize what had happened. There was no gunshot crack, just a distant pop like a damp firework. I looked at the hole in the wooden boards. Shredded, uneven. Tiny motes of dirt, sawdust and frost still hanging in the air. Hard to say who it was aimed at. I dived around the van while Saric shouted, “Gunshot!”

A second slug buried itself in the hood and I knew for certain now that I’d been the target. I ducked down, hopefully keeping the engine block between me and the shooter, and cradled my gun. It wasn’t a massive endorsement of my life to date, but this wasn’t the first time someone had tried to kill me, and experience at least lent me a certain grace under fire. Not everyone was so lucky, of course.

“You see anything?” Flint yelled. I didn’t know who he was asking. I could hear the panicky voice of the state trooper inside the van as he radioed in. Splinters of black plastic burst over my head as a third round punched through one of the wiper blades.

Looking around, I saw that Flint and Saric had taken shelter behind the vehicle the same as me. Saric was bobbing her head out and back as she tried to get eyes on the treeline opposite. Flint looked at me and said, “I told you not to pull a weapon, Rourke.”

“It’s licensed, I’m ex-Bureau, and right now there’s some son of a bitch trying to put a hole in my head,” I shouted back. “The hell with that.”

“I said—”

Another round hit the van. “Have that argument with me later.”

“God damn it! Saric, you stick with him. He fucks up, you shoot him.”

I could see one of the cops scooched down at the corner of the barn beyond Saric. To the right, my field of vision was restricted by the building on one side and the wheel arch of the van on the other. I saw an empty tract of farmland, trees in the far distance. No sign of movement.

“Nothing,” Saric said. The trooper beyond shook his head too, eyes wide.

I peeked quickly left around the front end of the vehicle. Saw a blur of snow-covered fields, dark forest encrusted with white. I held that first glance like a Polaroid as I ducked back. Nothing was out of place. Not a goddamn thing. With no answering shot I risked another, longer look, this time over the top of the van’s hood. Two-fifty, three hundred yards away, the dark gaps between the bare branches along the treeline were still and empty.

Back down again. The couple of troopers I could see looked scared — only natural when someone’s firing a gun at you, but not helpful. I guessed none of them had ever been in this kind of situation before, and training only carried you so far. Flint was keeping his head down, and didn’t look like he fancied budging any time soon. “We’ve got to get over there,” I said to Saric. “Unless you’ve got SWAT out here somewhere, we can’t hang around behind the van, waiting an hour for backup, while this guy repositions and gets a bead on us.”

“What’ve you got in mind?”

“We get back into the farm buildings, through the trees by the road, then break right into the woods. Work our way around to him in cover.”

She frowned. “You and me? You’re not a cop, Alex.”

“So take one of your cops if any of them know how. Point is, I’m not going to sit here forever waiting to get killed. You can shoot me yourself, or else we can deal with this.”

“Jeez. OK. Try to leave any firing to me. I don’t want to be up in front of Professional Standards to explain any more than I have to.”

We ran, keeping low, towards the barn. As we rounded the corner, there was another distant shot and the trooper crouching there, right next to us, went down clutching his arm and swearing. One of his colleagues dashed to check on him as we scurried past.

“Faber’s off his game today,” Saric said as we cut through the derelict buildings towards the trees. “I wonder if he was expecting all of us, or just you.”

Once in the cover of the forest we doubled back, around the edge of the field, trying to keep as quiet as possible. The ground was rough and broken, peppered with fallen branches and old stumps. The carpet of snow was enough to deaden the noise we made but there was still plenty of crunching and scraping as we stalked through the trees. Everything around was quiet.

At a spot behind a frosted holly bush opposite the van, cops still visible clustered in cover around it, we found the shooter’s trail. Footprints, a rectangular patch of packed snow where Randy Faber — presumably — had laid down at the base of the holly to fire. Good position, plenty of cover. There were dimpled scuff marks off to the right that looked like fingertip scrapes.

“He’s gone. He picked up his brass before he left,” I said. “Smart guy.”

“Back the way he came,” she said, pointing at a line of footprints heading west through the woods. The trail was easy to follow even at a jog. About a quarter mile through the forest we hit a narrow gravel road running north-south along the line of the mountains. I thought I could still hear an engine fading into the distance. There were fresh tire marks in the snow, curving in to the shoulder where Faber had parked his car.

“We missed him,” Saric said, out of breath. “We goddamn missed him.”

27.

Backup eventually arrived with an ambulance and a crime scene unit hot on its heels. The wounded cop was fine, sitting up and talking to the paramedics while they checked his injury. Then there were questions for me, and paperwork, and a great deal of waiting around in the cold before I was allowed to go. Flint wasn’t happy with his attempted bust turning into a shooting gallery, but I didn’t care. When I climbed into my car he handed me a photo, though.

“That’s Randy Faber,” he said. “Remember what he looks like. If you see him at all, you call us straight away. Don’t approach him, especially after today’s events. You meet him, you’re liable to end up having to defend yourself.”

I said, “Sure.” Wondered if he’d really just suggested he’d accept any claim of self-defense I made if I happened to shoot Faber, or if I was just reading too much into his words.

“We’ve stopped watching the old town, by the way,” he said before leaving. “Someone snuck in already and took the dope. I didn’t see a thing. Faber must know the area pretty well. Watch yourself.”

Then he was gone.

The guy in the five-year-old picture looked young. He would have been twenty-seven by now. Blonde hair, dark brown eyes. Lean and fit-looking without being heavily muscled. He didn’t look particularly intimidating, but maybe he didn’t need to be.

I knew Faber had been shadowing me. I also knew the voice on the recording of Gemma’s death had an accent that wasn’t from the northeast, and he was from California, just like Jessie had said ‘Delaney’ was. Had he really killed Gemma and Adam Webb? If he had, Gemma’s murder hadn’t played out like Flint’s witness suggested; though I’d already seen that much at the scene. The car color matched, though. Faber could have arranged the farm meet to get a shot at me, but he might just as easily have been going there for his own reasons, only to find a bunch of cops waiting for him.

And then he’d tried to kill me anyway.

After the events at the farm, it wasn’t until the last twilight dwindled to black that I finally reached the site of Adam’s murder. Jessie’s scrawled map was easy enough to follow even in the dark and I had little problem finding the same gravel parking lot she’d pulled into on the night he died. As I bumped through the entrance my headlight beams picked out the edge of a sizable copse of trees a little way up the slope. I parked and waited with the door ajar for a minute, getting used to the chill and the dark. The overcast night was starless, but the snow carpeting the slopes around Hazen’s Notch glimmered faintly.

“I could do this forever,” Gemma said softly, nestling tighter into the crook of my arm. Lying on the turf under a blanket, night air cooling, surrounded by the flickering of insects drawn out by the darkness. The rocks off to our left were dull gray gleams. We were looking up at the stars. God’s great join-the-dots puzzle. It was the end of one of the last days of summer. On the cusp of fall, nights already lengthening, warmth heading south into distant memory. “I’m warm, I’ve got you, and all that above me.”

We’d spent the day picnicking on the slopes between the bulwark of Mount Mansfield and White Face Mountain in a little hollow out of the wind. I wasn’t sure where we were exactly and it didn’t seem to matter. We’d made love like teenagers as the sun went down, the sky a brilliant purple-orange. Had hardly moved since. While Gemma talked, I wondered whether to suggest we get married. It wasn’t a simple matter, with our jobs and the distance between us, but it was the kind of thought that came easy at times like this. As if by sealing your relationship you’d also be able to seal and hold your feelings exactly as they were on that beautiful night in the middle of nowhere when nothing else mattered.

“Yeah, I’d like that,” I said. I didn’t know whether I was replying to her or to my own thoughts.

I grabbed my flashlight and a folding tool that doubled as a snow scraper and a shovel from the trunk and checked that my gun was loaded. Felt a spike of adrenaline. The trees here were primarily evergreens. I guessed this was all plantation wood. On the edge of the copse the trees were still thick with needles but the interior was mostly bare brown trunks, and the only green parts visible were high up in the canopy. The plentiful outer cover meant I didn’t have to go far inside to know I was near the site of Adam’s murder as Jessie couldn’t have seen what had happened otherwise.

Under the high, heavy sheet of needle-lined branches the snow was far thinner than the open ground beyond. I used the shovel to clear away the ice, started looking for traces of a dead man. For an hour the only sounds I heard were metal on snow and the white noise swish of the fir trees in the wind like a hundred vengeful spirits from some Japanese folk tale. Then finally I found two brass shell casings. 10mm caliber, centerfire pistol. The earth nearby was disturbed, rumpled and crushed by what looked like running feet, everything preserved by ground that had been wet enough to make clear impressions and cold enough to freeze soon after.

I followed three, maybe four, sets of footprints back to the spot where Webb had waited for Jessie that night. There I found a confused line where one set strode back and forth repeatedly. There were a good couple dozen cigarette butts dropped in its path. The others — definitely now two of them — converged on Adam’s from the direction of the other parking lot further up the trail. By the time they reached the camp they’d spread ten yards apart, the hunters fanning out as they closed. Once Adam had ran they’d followed, trying to hem him in. There was no sign of other shell casings, so it looked as though they waited until they were certain of a killing shot before firing. They chased Adam to the point where I’d found the two cartridges, then, to judge from their stride lengths, they’d slowed to a walk. Both hunters’ tracks converged on one spot at the end of Adam’s trail. Here and there I saw signs of what was maybe a third set, coming from the same direction as me. The tracks were smaller, probably a woman’s: Jessie, finding the scene just like she said.

The mass of prints became confused at the killing site as the two pursuers had milled about. On the edge of this well-trodden patch, I found the beginnings of an area of broken earth with a couple of thin, mangled tree roots still clawing up from the frozen surface.

I cleared away more snow. The patch was six feet long, maybe just over. A couple of feet wide. All frozen soil that had been turned over and broken up not long before winter set in.

Here lay Adam Webb. I started digging.

The grave turned out to be fairly shallow. I was a little surprised the killers had chosen to bury him right here, but then they’d had no way of knowing anyone would look for him in this spot. A couple of feet down I uncovered the fingers of his right hand, blackened and distorted, but unmistakable as such even in the dark. Further down his arm, the remains of a wolf tattoo were still visible. There was no smell, not over the acrid scent of ice-hard earth.

I carefully scraped away the rest of the dirt packed around his corpse. He was still dressed in hiking gear and the winter had held back the decomposition process enough for me to instantly recognize the face as Adam’s, even discolored and smeared with powdered mud. His eyes were open, but the orbs were cloudy and looked cracked where the fluid inside had frozen. There was a ragged, bullet wound at the base of his throat and another in the left-center of his rib cage.

The first wound was so similar to Gemma’s that for a split second I couldn’t stop myself imagining what she must have looked like in her own grave near Bangor and I almost lost it.

Breathe out, focus.

I looked at the icy eyes of the corpse. I knew I should leave it alone for the forensic technicians, but I also wanted as much information as possible myself so I checked his pockets, clothes, and the ground underneath.

The pockets yielded a fair amount. Wallet, cards, driver’s license, other crap, all in the name of Adam Webb. Just over a hundred bucks in cash, a couple of business cards from the kind of small-time places he might once have applied for work, and a scrap of paper with a cell phone number on it. There was a decent map of the Green Mountains in his jacket, on both the US and Canadian sides of the border, as well as an unused guidebook entitled 101 Secluded Walks In Northern Vermont. A pocketknife, some keys, and loose change completed the collection.

The cell number was the only thing which stood out. I didn’t recognize it, and I didn’t want to try calling it from my own. That meant waiting until I was off the mountain and could find a payphone. Then I had to decide what to do with Adam. Going to the cops would mean a bucket of trouble for disturbing the scene at the very least. In the end I figured I’d leave the shell casings on top of him, then call the Orleans County Sheriff’s Department anonymously. Not perfect, but it’d do, and at least then Mrs Webb would be able to bury her son.

In the nearest town I did just that from a phone at the intersection of two empty, icy streets. I gave the sheriff’s department decent directions, but said nothing about who I was or why I’d found him. Then I dialed the number Webb was carrying. Delaney’s, I assumed, the way Jessie had described the system. Ring three times then they’d hang up. I didn’t do that, though; I wanted to hear his voice.

One ring.

Two rings.

Three rings.

Four rings.

Five. “Hello? Who is this? What do you want? What the hell’s going on?”

It wasn’t Delaney — if Delaney was Randy Faber — but his boss, because the voice at the other end of the line was that of Detective Sergeant Karl Flint.

28.

I waited until I was back at Gemma’s to call Rob. Before she passed the phone over, his wife Teresa asked me how I was coping and I said I was OK. The lie came easily. Once Rob was on the line, I told him where Webb was and what he’d been doing in Vermont, how come he’d ended up shot, and how I’d tipped off the cops.

“That was fast,” he said. “Less than a day. You do realize how we charge our clients, don’t you?”

“I think I told you once that either he’d show up quick or not at all. If his girlfriend hadn’t seen him killed, if she’d fled the state, I’d have got nothing. But she saw, and she hid out in a town where you can count the number of easy places to hide on your fingers, so I found her. Way it goes.”

“What about you? What are you going to do now?”

“I just need a couple more days. The operation Webb worked for is run, I think, by a bent cop, one of the detectives working Gemma’s murder, using an ex-mob guy from San Francisco as a go-between. I’m close to tying them all together: them, Gemma, Webb, the other people who’ve disappeared. Do that and I’m finished.”

Rob went silent for a moment. “A cop, huh? You’d better be sure before you try anything, Alex. It’s liable to blow up in your face if you’re not. OK. Take what time you need. And good work finding Webb.”

That was it then. I’d solved one disappearance, dug up a corpse, nearly had a hole blown in my head, and found out one of the cops investigating Gemma’s murder had probably had her killed in the first place. I was about ready to collapse. I lay on the couch in the silent dark, occasionally rolling from one side to another in a bid to get comfortable. It was cold, far colder than usual, but that didn’t stop me drifting for a couple of hours, more or less asleep. In my dreams I’d lost something, someone, and I was wandering through the woods trying to find it. I felt as though I was following a trail, an invisible set of tracks that I could sense even though I couldn’t see them. But it was confused and patchy, faded. Eventually I came to the edge of the twisted trees to see an expanse of calm water stretching out in front of me. I was able to walk across its flat, motionless surface, still searching. Flocks of small butterflies danced slowly here and there above it. I’d gone some way out when I began to realize that I was in the wrong place, that this lake was too small and the one I needed was larger and deeper. The one where I’d find what I was looking for. Cold seeped through my clothes, making it hard to hold on to unconsciousness. I tried to ignore it and keep searching, to stay inside my dream, but eventually it was too much and I snapped rudely awake.

There was no couch. No front room. No roof.

I was lying on a flat sheet of white beneath a dark sky. The edge was just visible as a line of shadows deeper than the night, surrounding me on all sides like the rim of a bowl. My head rested on my arm, which was wedged in a layer of snow over ice. My clothes were slowly becoming soaked with melt water from my failing body heat. Stray flakes fell from above. I stood, wide-eyed, and looked around. A line of scuffed footprints led towards me from the edge, beyond which some faint lights rose into the sky, studded against the black. I was in the middle of Silverdale Lake’s frozen surface. The ice beneath me creaked and groaned as I moved and I wondered just how thick it was and how likely it was that I’d make it back.

My screwed-up sleep patterns needed sorting out, and soon. Weird dreams and falling out of bed were one thing; this was totally different. If I’d slept longer, I could have died from exposure. Tomorrow night, I promised myself I’d try my pills. The hell with this.

Shivering, I shuffled through the snow, arms wrapped around my chest, and followed my own tracks towards the trees, praying the moaning ice would hold just long enough for me to make it.

29.

This time, I met Elijah Charman at the offices of the Press on College Street. I’d more or less rationalized last night’s walk on the ice as a stress thing related to insomnia. Short term, the pills would fix it. Long term, grief, the stress of someone trying to shoot me, and being left with nothing outside the job was probably going to kill me. It was even possible, I now figured, that the shapes I’d seen at night in North Bleakwater were a symptom of the same thing and nothing to do with being clubbed on the head.

Worrying about it, as they’d been fond of saying when I was in therapy first time out, only made it worse. You pushed ahead, tried to shake the fear, or else tied yourself up in knots and it claimed you all the faster.

Elijah was hard at work, hammering out a story in preparation for tomorrow’s front page. “Nice juicy homicide,” he said when I sat down opposite. “Don’t know much so far, but it should be a solid one. Body found near Hazen’s Notch by Orleans County Sheriff’s Department. State Police say it’s a definite murder, but haven’t said who yet. I don’t often get the chance to work on something like this. Came in late last night, after deadline, though, so now we have to beat local TV for detail. You’ve kept our intern busy since you called earlier. What you’re looking at sounds… well, I’m not sure. Mad, or fascinating.”

The headline on the screen in front of him screams: ‘MAN MURDERED NEAR STATE PARK’. “As I said, I’ll take you both out for steak if he’s found what I need. How’s the flu?”

“It looks like I’m over the worst of it, so it’s probably just a bad cold, thanks for asking. So, we get dinner and I have the exclusive to the story if all this cloak-and-dagger nonsense results in something we can print, right?”

“Right.”

“Then let’s get Neal up here. He’s got the written material. I’ve got to say I was surprised to hear you asking about Carita Jenner.”

“I didn’t. All I asked was about the murder of a prostitute here in Burlington that someone had told me about.”

“Ah,” he said with a grin, “but that’s the same thing. We don’t have a lot of hookers, and fewer murders of any sort. Make it an unsolved one and there’s only one candidate. Carita Jenner was my first homicide as crime editor.”

“Who was she?”

“Carita was a hooker and a junkie — twenty-two or twenty-three, I can’t remember exactly. She’d been picked up several times by the cops during the three or four years previous and talk came out after that maybe she’d been seeing one regularly, perhaps swapping tips for freebies, perhaps just shakedowns for kicks. Anyhow, she was working her usual area one summer night in ’98 when she was beaten to death with something blunt. A baseball bat, iron pipe, along those lines. She was found the next morning in an alley near Stageway and South, a few blocks from where I used to live. Been dead a few hours. A real mess. Still had her night’s earnings on her. She didn’t have a pimp, no obvious guys with grudges, nothing.”

“No suspects?”

“The cops tried to find her clients, but that got nowhere. Her dealer had a solid alibi and no motive. The weapon was never found. No one witnessed the killing. Nothing at the scene to trace who’d done it. That was that. Tragic.” He looked past me. “Here’s Neal. He’s got the stories we ran at the time, you want to know more.”

Neal Skipworth, interning at the paper, was a young guy, neat, wearing a shirt and tie underneath a thick grey sweater. He shook my hand and said, “That was a pile of work, Mr Rourke. Old crime reports. News references to a detective in the State Police going back a half dozen years… Well, anyway, I’ve got it, but what’s it all for?”

“Mr Rourke’s keeping his cards close to his chest,” Elijah said.

“Yeah.” I shrugged. “Matter of life and death? Would that suffice?”

“It depends whose,” he said, grinning. “You’ll have to come with me and read what I’ve got off my screen; I didn’t have time to print it all. You can run off copies of anything you want.”

“Great. After you. Appreciate the help, Elijah.”

Neal had put together an impressive collection of files referencing Flint that covered almost his entire career. He’d trimmed some repeats and missed a couple of two-liner ones that wouldn’t, he thought, have interested me, but otherwise it was solid.

On the surface, Flint’s case history looked reasonably sound. His earliest mention in the archives was as a young detective nearly ten years ago, before his promotion to sergeant. He worked a couple of relatively high-profile cases, or what passed for them in a low-crime state like Vermont. Made sergeant five years ago after an investigation into a serious assault uncovered a ring stealing cars from Montreal and bringing them over the border for sale. The Damien Ackroyd case was his first at his new rank, and one that received a lot of coverage, especially when Isaac Fairley testified that Flint had beaten a confession out of him.

The collapse of the original charges against Ackroyd was followed by widespread criticism of the police, with specific accusations leveled publicly at Flint. As well as discussing the beating of Isaac Fairley, some parties went further and made broader allegations, later retracted, about corruption, violence, and drug abuse within the State Police’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation.

Flint’s suspension lasted for just over three months. No charges were made against him and no further action was taken. He returned to work four weeks after Carita Jenner was killed and seemed to have been given a role in that investigation, though, as Saric had suggested, he hadn’t added anything concrete to the mix.

There was a lot of information on Jenner. She’d been killed on the night of July 17-18 that year, sometime between 11:30 PM and 1:30 AM, and was found the following morning by the owner of a liquor store which backed on to the alley where it had happened. Forensics made it clear she’d been murdered on the spot, not dumped there, and that it had been a savage attack. There were no witnesses, and trace evidence never pointed to an identifiable suspect, although it had exonerated the guy selling her dope. The Press mentioned rumors of her relationship with someone in the police, but Burlington PD denied this. There’d been repeated appeals for clients to come forward, but I understood why they’d have been even more reticent than usual; it was hard enough for most guys to admit to using a hooker, but but tell them they might have been the last person to see her alive and suddenly everyone was an amnesiac.

After Jenner Flint dropped off the press radar again for a while. His superiors had probably made sure he missed out on anything else too important until things had cooled down post-Ackroyd. His subsequent case history was much patchier. Over the four and a half years since reinstatement, he’d successfully worked a couple of murders — both domestic killings by one family member of another — several robberies and serious assaults, and a couple of child abuse cases. However, he also seemed to have been responsible for several failed investigations, predominantly violent crimes and disappearances. From the information in front of me, and the things he was sometimes quoted as saying, his performance seemed rather erratic. I remembered what Saric had told me about him being out on the ragged edge during his suspension; maybe he’d never quite come back.

If Flint was Delaney, or was Faber’s superior, the one running the show, there was enough in his past to suggest he might have helped bury a few crimes that could conceivably have been connected to the dope trade. Maybe more if, as with Adam Webb, the victims had simply disappeared without anyone who counted noticing they were gone.

When I was done, I thanked Neal and went to bid farewell to Elijah. “Before I go,” I said, “have you heard anything about Gemma’s murder? The police come out with anything?”

“No,” he said. “Not recently. Was there something you were expecting?”

Well, I considered telling him, they’ve got a specific suspect who tried to kill me in a shootout, all of which apparently hasn’t been made public. “No, just wondering. You’re not always the first to hear things in my position.”

Elijah gave me a wry smile. “I’ll bet. Sorry, man. Don’t forget about that dinner.”

30.

My phone rang as I walked back across the lobby of the Press building. I recognized the number, but I couldn’t remember from where. “Hello?”

“Hello, Alex.” It was Murray Larson, Gemma’s dad. His voice was flat, clipped. He didn’t sound any happier with me than he’d been at the funeral. “I’ve been trying to reach you at your home, but I guess you’re away at the moment.”

“That’s right.”

“Where are you at the moment?”

“Does it matter?”

“Under the terms of Gemma’s existing will, her possessions pass to her family and her property is to be sold. Her attorney is handling those matters. Do you have anything that belonged to her at your apartment?” Murray sounded as though he was forcing the words.

A will. Neither of us had ever thought about making one. Or, in Gemma’s case, another one. Neither of us had planned on dying, because you don’t, as a rule. “No,” I said.

“Are you sure? If you’re going to be home any time soon I can have Mr Chalmers call round just to see if there’s anything you’ve forgotten.”

“I loved your daughter, Mr Larson. I don’t like the suggestion that I’d steal from her or her family.”

“If you loved her, you wouldn’t have asked her to make the sacrifices she did. She did everything for you.”

“Goodbye, Mr Larson,” I said. I didn’t want to be drawn into an argument, not with a grieving old man, so I cut the connection.

To shake the bad feeling Gemma’s dad had left me with, I drove to the corner of Stageway and South, and the place where Carita Jenner’s battered body had been found on a summer morning four and a half years previously. There was no longer any sign of what happened in the narrow gap running between a row of dusty stores and the back of a set of commercial units converted into small office space. The urban fabric had closed over the brutal killing of a young woman, just as people forgot. I wondered how long it would be before Gemma’s death was remembered only on her gravestone.

The snow in the alley was barely disturbed except where stores had taken out their trash. At night I doubt there’d have been any reliable witnesses living for at least a block in any direction. The walls lining the alley muffled the outside world, closing it out. I could imagine how alone Carita would have felt as the first blows rained down and her screams went unnoticed.

If this had been her regular spot, I guessed there had to be enough prospective clients passing down South after dark. I took a drive around the surrounding couple of blocks, getting a feel for the area, and before long came to an unlit neon sign that read: ‘Bar None’. The same place, Saric had told me, she’d dragged Flint out of a couple of weeks after Fourth of July that very same year for getting into a fight. One so bad she’d been worried he’d hospitalize a man. I didn’t know if it was exactly two weeks after, but maybe. If so, the very same night a prostitute, a dope user who’d been involved with a cop, was viciously beaten to death in a seemingly motiveless attack.

Sometimes things look connected but they’re just coincidence. But when the coincidences pile up, sooner or later you’re left with no other viable explanation.

I spent the drive back to the house remembering Flint sitting in his office, calmly telling me that he had no real leads in the investigation into Gemma’s death, that sometimes shit just happened for no good reason. I thought of him trying to tell me it might have been a hunting accident.

Crack.

Flint telling me I should go back to Boston, let the police handle the investigation. Staking out the hotel where Delaney’s organization — his organization — had arranged the delivery of heroin smuggled in from Canada.

Crack.

Flint storming out of a bar on a July night. Beating a young woman to death because he was angry and she wouldn’t do what he wanted.

Crack.

With every thought I heard Gemma’s windshield smashing again as the bullet punched through it, killing her over and over.

For a long time after I returned, I sat in my car with the engine dead and tried to calm down. When I finally walked indoors and into Gemma’s front room, Randy Faber was sitting in one of the armchairs facing me.

31.

I slammed my hand into my jacket, clawing for my gun. Randy jumped out of the chair with his empty palms outstretched. If he was armed, he wasn’t going for a weapon. Not that I cared one way or the other.

“Whoa, whoa,” he said. I recognized his West Coast accent from the recording of Gemma’s death. Randy Faber. Mr Delaney. “Easy now, man.”

I snapped the Colt up two-handed in front of me, flicking the safety off and sighting down the barrel at his face. It took a huge effort not to pull the trigger. Every microsecond that passed I thought of Gemma’s windshield going, of her slumping against the wheel with blood pouring from her throat, of this son of a bitch lowering his gun and going to fix the scene. Every regret for every lost opportunity I’d ever had, every shameful memory of every fuck-up I’d ever made, every moment I’d spent living out the results of a bad decision, all of it coalesced into a single voice screaming for me to get it right just this one time and shoot. To kill the guy in front of me and avenge everything Gemma and I had together and everything we’d never experience now because of him.

Two things stopped me. For one, even through the blinding fury, part of me still wanted to nail Flint first for his ties to the whole thing and Faber could be the key to doing that. Number two, he no longer looked like the cold professional I’d pictured pulling the trigger to kill Gemma, or shooting his way out of a drugs bust in California.

His eyes were red and puffy, his skin was pale and his hair and clothes were a mess. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a couple of days. He was scared, and not of me. On the table was a police scanner, quietly squawking into the air.

I blinked hard a couple of times, tried to regain my composure. Murmured, “What the hell?”

“Easy, easy,” he repeated. “We need to talk. I’m not going to cause trouble.”

I laughed openly at that. “You’ve already—” I started, but my throat clamped shut again. I felt close to tears. “What the fuck do we need to talk about after what you did?”

“Steady,” Randy said, still keeping his hands out. “Look, I can help you.”

“Help me?” Another laugh threatened.

“I can give you the guy who told me to shoot the doctor. I swear. You know who I’m talking about, right? I mean, you must be getting close.”

“Flint?”

“That’s right.” Randy dropped, very slowly, back into the armchair. “I used the name Delaney when I worked for him; maybe you know that. He must be shitting bricks about you by now.”

I didn’t shift my aim at all, but I slowly maneuvered on to the couch opposite Randy. “You mean you can get evidence that’ll see him arrested, convicted, all that? Or do you mean you can just set him up to go someplace I can kill him?”

“Whatever you want, man. They’re both as good as each other. You want to take police along, or you want to do it yourself. I can do that, yeah.”

“Why?”

Randy sighed and slumped a little in his seat. He seemed to know that I wasn’t about to kill him. “Look, I’m fucked right now. The cops are looking for me, they’ll know I’ve stolen another car and probably have its license number, and I can’t touch my credit cards or my cell phone in case they trace them. The only friends I’ve got here are all people I’ve met through him. If I go to them for help, he’s going to find out, and I can’t ask people I knew before.”

“Why not?”

“There’s a guy in San Francisco I worked for a few years ago. He’s big. I mean, Karl Flint’s operation is nothing to what this guy has going. I had to leave, and he’s wanted me dead ever since.”

“Curtis Marshall. The way I heard it, you shot his nephew so you could escape from the cops during a raid.”

Randy scowled and ran a hand through his hair. “Whatever. Point is, I can’t ask anyone I know from California to help me get out of the state, and I can’t ask anyone here either. Except you. If I help you get Flint, you can get me away. Give me a ticket to Miami — I’ve got a cousin who lives down there — and a ride to an airport outside Vermont and I’ll repay the favor. I’ve got good reason for wanting to see that son of a bitch Flint get what’s coming to him. He’s sold me out, probably would’ve had me suicided-by-cop.”

“OK,” I said, keeping the pistol pointed at him. “But before I decide whether or not I’ll help you, I want a few things. First, you carrying a weapon?”

“In my coat pocket.”

“Pull it out very, very slowly and place it gently on the floor over here by the coffee table.”

“Sure,” he said. “I’m not here to shoot you. Take it.”

Randy did exactly as instructed. I waited until he’d sat back down and then reached for his pistol. “Now talk. I want to know how your operation works, who else you’ve killed to keep it covered up and what you did with them afterwards, and I want to know why the hell Gemma died. Then we’ll see about whether or not we can do a deal. And I want to know how you came to be here in Vermont in the first place.”

Randy pinched the bridge of his nose. “You must know most of that already.”

“You run dope over the border.”

“Flint does. I just work for him, man. He’s a delivery service, like UPS.”

“The two of you bring heroin down from Canada. You’re ‘Delaney’. There’s people who ship it that way rather than through the Caribbean or the East Coast. Your people to smuggle it safely across the border. They work as couples, hiking down to North Bleakwater where they stash their deliveries under the tub on the top floor. They pick up their cash and they leave before the buyer comes to collect. I guess you use a dead-drop system and no one ever sees each other, just to keep it all secure. Every so often, someone sees something or hears something and you have to silence them. What I don’t know is why anyone pays you to be delivery middlemen when they could do it themselves.”

“Stuff that comes south is purer than what gets up here from New York,” Randy said. “It’s been through fewer hands. Buyers make more of a profit on it, but they can’t afford to lose any shipments. Flint’s a cop and he says he’s got a friend in the Border Patrol, so he can pretty much guarantee it makes it. Plus his system’s solid. Even I’ve never met him face to face, and I’m the one does most of the work. It’s all blind.”

“And this has been going on for, what, a few years? How come you never met?”

Randy shrugged. “He’s careful. He’s a cop, so he’s gotta be. Sometimes we talk over the phone. Urgent stuff mostly. And even then he talks weird, fakes a voice, y’know? Other times we use email. Anonymized and all that shit. No way anyone could trace it to us even if they did manage to get a look at it. It’s a tight system. If I didn’t know his name, he could be anyone — man, woman, black, white. Anyone. The whole thing’s in layers. Everything buried two steps back. Solid.”

“So what about when someone finds out what’s happening despite all that? What do you do with them? Who were they? My guess is there was a couple called the Haleys, a girl called Stephanie Markham and then Gemma. You also shot one of your couriers, a guy called Adam Webb, because he tried stealing from you.”

Randy couldn’t maintain eye contact and looked down at his feet. For a pro he didn’t seem especially proud of his work. I guessed he’d been used to killing other people in the business when he started out, not just those who walked into the wrong place at the wrong time. When he answered, he didn’t hold back. “The first time, just over three years ago, it was this pair of old folks who must have been here for hiking in the fall — what do they call it, foliage season? I got a call from two of our couriers saying there was a couple joined up with them, heading in the same direction. The couriers were shitting themselves in case they were undercover cops or something. I would have let it be — it seemed harmless — but Flint said no. So I had to go and intercept everyone on the trail. I told the two couriers they should just clear out and I’d deal with the people tagging along with them. And I did; I killed them, stabbed them right there, hid the bodies. The guy was dead before he knew what was happening and his wife, she just stood there looking couldn’t believe what the fuck she was seeing. Blood all over the place, man. I called Flint and he said to get their corpses away from the trail. Stick them in my trunk and take them to Lake Champlain. He’d have a boat ready. So I ditched them.”

“That would be the Haleys.”

“Fuck knows,” He shrugged. “I just killed them, I didn’t get introductions.”

“Who was next?”

“The next summer we were expecting a delivery. I went inside the old hotel in the ghost town across the lake to leave the cash for the pair carrying the dope. I was just on my way upstairs when I turned the corner and there was a girl wandering down the hallway towards me. She saw me clear as day, and she saw I had a gun. So I told her I was a cop and she should clear the building. Nothing to see here. She walked away a little, but must’ve known that was bullshit because she ran. Didn’t make a sound. Just ran. And I took off after her.”

“Red shirt, dark hair, early twenties?”

Randy nodded and kept looking at the floor. “She was quick — I didn’t think I could keep up with her — but I caught her in the end. Smashed her in the jaw as she ran. I did the same to her as I did to them other two, with my knife.”

“Why didn’t you just shoot her?”

“The noise, man. I didn’t know if there was anyone else nearby. It was broad daylight in the middle of summer, for Christ’s sake. Flint told me to do the same with her body as he’d done with the first two — wrap it up in tarp and chicken wire to weigh it down and stop it ever surfacing again, and drop it into the lake. But this time he said to leave the knife and the shirt I was wearing for him to deal with. I didn’t want to, but I didn’t think I had much choice. Then you gotta figure he had me by the balls once he had those.”

“Flint doesn’t help you dispose of anyone?”

“No. Guess he don’t like to get his hands dirty. Plus this girl was mostly my fault and he was pissed at me.”

“But he makes sure there’s no serious investigation afterwards.”

“Sure. He says he’s untouchable. He says it’s like this is his kingdom and he can get away with anything he wants. He told me once about this time he killed some hooker in Burlington, said no one even thought to touch him for it. I reckon he enjoys it. Until you showed up.”

“You broke into the house we’re in a few nights back, right?”

He nodded.

“So why didn’t you kill me then?”

“Flint hadn’t told me to, was all. I was just supposed to make sure she hadn’t left behind anything that could tie back to us, and to maybe scare you away. You hadn’t been enough trouble to kill you by then, and two murders is a lot harder to cover than one.”

“If it hadn’t been me, someone would have investigated him sooner or later. He’s not well-liked. What happened at the farm?”

“I knew he must’ve set me up when I saw tire marks on the trail. I don’t often have to meet with anyone and when I do, I make sure I’m there ahead of time. No fucking way they could’ve beaten me to the farm. So it wasn’t a big surprise when I came about through the woods and saw you and a bunch of cops. I figured I’d get a little payback before I split.”

“So why shoot at me and not Flint if he set you up?”

“Like I said, we’ve never met. There were a couple of detectives, but I didn’t know if Flint would have had the guts to show up himself. And if you shoot a cop they really fucking hunt you down. So you seemed easier, and I knew you were the one who’d turned everything to shit in the first place, so you had it coming. I would’ve had you first time but you moved just when I fired.”

“Aren’t I lucky. Who came next after the girl in the hotel?”

“Things were quiet for ages. But a couple of months ago, that courier, Webb, got greedy and tried to steal a shipment. We found out as soon as the buyer collected their dope that he’d switched it for powder. He might have got away, but the seller had a transmitter in the packages — like a LoJack — and the buyer knew what to look for. We knew where that dumbass was before he did himself.”

“So you went up there with someone, shot him and buried him.”

“Some guy called Wallace, worked for the buyer. Making sure both sides were happy. We caught up with him in some woods about ten miles north of here. No boat this time, so we had to bury the guy where he was. Wallace took a couple of photos to show them we’d done it. Next one was the doctor.” He paused, studied the floor real hard. “I guess you know about that.”

I leaned forward again, a fresh spike of anger rushing through me, and said, “Explain it to me, you son of a bitch. Why and how.”

32.

When he started talking again, Randy’s voice had sunk even lower. The words came in a continuous stream as though he was afraid I’d kill him when he finished. And maybe I would. “I got up in the rocks looking down on the road. I’ve got a hunting rifle with a starlight scope. The rifle’s only small caliber, but it was all I could afford. Same one I shot at you at the farm. I waited until I saw the car Flint said I should look for. She was driving slowly, trying to stay safe on the ice, I guess. I aimed just above the steering column where I figured she’d be sitting, and fired. The car carried on a little way and I thought I might have missed, but then it coasted off the road and into the trees. I went down there to check she was dead and to find the bullet. Flint said I should make it look like it had passed all the way through and out the back, so that’s what I did. The slug was lodged in the seat. Then I made sure I hadn’t left anything behind and got the fuck out of there, covering my tracks as well as I could.”

“Did you use a silencer, anything like that? There didn’t seem to be much noise when you fired.” I smiled with intense distaste. “She was on the phone when you killed her. I listened to the whole thing.”

“Shit, man, I’m sorry. I never wanted to get—”

“Who gives a fuck what you wanted. Did you use a silencer?”

“No. The rifle’s quiet because it’s low caliber, like I said, not very powerful. I don’t have any kind of silencer.”

“I had you pegged as some kind of ex-military hired killer type,” I said. “All the best equipment, proper training. Shows how wrong you can be.”

“I didn’t plan to end up doing this kind of thing,” he said, self-pity shading into sorrow. Dropping back into a kid who got sucked into violence and killing, just because that’s the way it goes. A guy bullied into doing other people’s dirty work because he was too scared to say no and found himself stuck with it. Not much different from Adam Webb. Whatever; I found I didn’t care. “It just happened that way. Even working for Flint, I was hoping I wouldn’t have to do shit like that, I thought maybe I’d left that all behind in California. Most of the time, all I did was pretend to be ‘Mr Delaney’ to recruit new couriers and make sure the dope turned up smoothly. Shit.”

“Why did Flint want Gemma killed?”

“A few days before, Flint had someone whack a dealer who’d told him to go fuck himself. Made it look like a hit and run. When Flint called me, he said the doctor was doing the autopsy. Apparently, whoever killed the guy didn’t check the body too well because the doctor found a note with the name ‘Delaney’ on it. Flint had sent him the note with a photo of that guy Webb — with his face blanked out, of course. The photo was missing and Flint thought the doctor took it because she’d already been asking questions about Webb, sending out pictures and stuff. Flint was fucking furious. He hates problems, and now he thought she’d recognized the picture and knew everything. He said that was enough and he’d kill me if we didn’t silence her.”

I rested my forehead on top of the pistol and closed my eyes. Gemma’s dad was right when he’d said I got her killed. If I hadn’t asked her to help with the Webb case, she’d still be alive.

“So he called me straight away,” Randy said, oblivious. “When she left, he followed her car a way back and phoned every few minutes to say how far away they were, so I knew when she was going to reach the road in front of me. Then afterwards he just carried straight on past while I cleared up. I checked but she didn’t have the photo. Flint found out the dealer had just left it at his house before we hit him.”

For a long time neither of us spoke. The only sound in the room was the faint chatter of the police scanner on the table, crackling and indistinct. Eventually, I leaned back on the couch and dropped the gun next to me. Randy hadn’t moved since he stopped talking. “If you don’t like being in this kind of business, why the hell haven’t you quit before now?”

He looked rueful. “I wanted to when I got out of California, but I never finished high school and there’s not much else I’m good at. By the time I reached here I needed cash, so a guy in Burlington put me in touch, just when Flint was starting out. But once you’re involved in all this, you can’t just walk away. The people you work for are paranoid, and if they’re serious they’ll usually kill rather than risk being betrayed. Marshall was serious enough, even if I hadn’t fucked up and panicked in that drug bust, shot through every son of a bitch between me and freedom. Flint is serious enough that I couldn’t say no to him the first time he asked. You do it once and you can’t refuse to do it a second time because they can turn you in if you do. Flint was even worse. He kept shit on me, like the shirt and the knife. I guess he was starting to worry about me by then. Got to do what he said after that.” Randy suddenly smirked. “But now I’ve got my own insurance.”

“Yeah?”

“A few days ago, I guess after you showed up, he called and said he needed me to pick something up for him, and that I should leave our contact cell phone with him, the one we used for talking to our couriers. I think he was worried about someone tracing it or something. Anyway, the package he left for me was all wrapped up, hidden in a parking lot in Burlington. I didn’t see him, but he must have been watching, else he couldn’t have collected the phone after I’d left it in its place. I was just supposed to keep it safe, but I looked inside. It was a piece of steel pipe, all bagged up. Dried… well, something that looks a lot like dried blood at the end.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I figured it was what he’d killed that hooker with. Maybe he’d been hanging on to it in case he ever wanted to fit anyone for the crime. Like me; maybe that was the plan. Maybe he just wanted it out of sight in case someone like you checked his place. I don’t know. And I don’t know if he thought he’d wiped it carefully or not, but there’s part of what looks a hell of a lot like a bloody fingerprint on it too, you look closely. This thing’s gold.”

“If he’s as careful as you say, that seems weirdly careless of him.”

“I don’t know. He must have had it a few years, kept it hidden, packaged up. He probably doesn’t even think about looking at it now. Why bother after all that time? For me, it was something new. And like I said, he thinks he’s the king of northern Vermont. He thought he’d wiped it, so he didn’t worry. Same as he didn’t worry about anyone seeing the doctor getting shot, or finding out about how we use the hotel. The way he sees it, he’s invincible and if anyone causes trouble, he can just kill them too. Except you, because you’ve already talked to too many people.”

“So it’s the steel pipe you’re offering me?”

“That, and more. He leaves some of his cash under the floorboards at the old hotel in the room next to the bathroom — that’s where I always take my cut from and get the money to pay the couriers. He probably cleans it out regular, but there’s still plenty there. He’s probably got shit at his house too if you can get a warrant. I dunno if you’d find any dope there, though. He always told me he’d kill me if he found I’d been using. He said drugs had done bad things to his family, so I couldn’t touch the stuff because it turned people into screw-ups. If you don’t want the cops involved, I can just call him and tell him I gave that pipe to you, that you know about the money, whatever, so he’ll have to come and get you himself. It’s up to you.”

“And all I have to do in return is buy you a ticket to Miami and make sure you get to an airport out of state?”

“That’s right. I want out of here, away from Flint and all the shit that comes with him. Maybe this time I’ll be able to stay out of trouble.”

“Why’d you come and see me? You already said you stole another car. You could hitch a ride out of state. Hell, you could even walk the same route into Canada your couriers do.”

“A stolen car’s not safe for long. Once it’s reported, they’ve got the plates and it’ll only draw cops to it. Anyhow, they’ll be checking the roads for me, and if they know about me, they probably know to watch for hikers over the border. If you drive me away, I can hide, way down low in the back. And I can’t buy a plane ticket if they’re watching my cards. Besides, I know I’ve got something you want. We can work something out.”

“You’ve not thought about testifying against him, cutting a deal for immunity, that sort of thing?” I guessed the answer already.

“No way. Flint’s friends, people from San Francisco, everyone who’s ever been pissed at me, they’d all come for me. I’d probably be dead before the trial even started. No, fuck that idea. I just want out.”

That left me thinking for a while, running through ways of handing in the weapon that killed Carita Jenner without it seeming strange or leading to a lot of awkward questions. Eventually, I said, “OK, I’ll help you out like you wanted. But here’s what I need you to do. You leave the pipe in its bag and write a note to go with it like: ‘Here’s the weapon that killed Carita Jenner. I’ve been holding on to this for Detective Karl Flint. I was working for him, but now he’s turned on me.’ I can take it to the cops and tell them it was left on my doorstep, or just drop it somewhere for them to find. But I want him first. So you’re going to call him real early in the morning and say you’re going to send the pipe to the cops if he doesn’t pay you off. That you want to meet him to swap the weapon for a pile of money and if he doesn’t show real quick you’ll give him to the police. Get him to North Bleakwater, alone. If he thinks you’re carrying the pipe he can’t risk bringing backup. Do that and I’ll get you your tickets.”

“Why all that?” Randy said. “Just give them the weapon. That’ll be enough.”

“Even if you’re right and there’s a print on it, even if they can match that print to his, matching the blood on it to Carita’s DNA — if they’ve got a sample — will take days at least, probably more, giving Flint time to hear about what’s going on and get out of the state. I don’t want him getting away. Not with what he’s done. That’s my deal, Randy. Take it or leave it.”

33.

I booked Randy into a hotel in New York for the following night, and found him a flight to Miami the day after. Flint I’d deal with in the early morning, catching him tired and off-balance. With nothing left of the day, and Randy’s presence in the house threatening to drive me nuts at any moment, I headed for the bar. Told him to stay out of sight and not to get too cosy or I’d shoot him myself.

Ed and Charlie were in. I got a beer and ordered a burger and joined them, trying not to think about the murderer in Gemma’s house, eating her food, watching her TV. Breathing air that by rights should still have been hers.

“You look like you’ve got something on your mind, Alex,” Ed said.

I sipped the beer. “You could say that. So much so that I woke up on the lake last night. Gone sleepwalking.”

“On the ice? Jesus, you’re lucky to be here. Doesn’t get thick enough to trust standing on it until later in the winter usually. Maybe at night it’s not so bad, but you could’ve drowned.”

“I was just cold. How are you? I haven’t seen you since the hotel.”

“I’m OK. I’ve just been doing some thinking.”

“Do you feel better for it?”

“Yeah, I suppose. It was mostly trying to remember, you know. I looked at some old photos, stuff like that, thought back to things I’d forgotten a long time ago.”

I thanked Bella as she brought my dinner to the table. “It’s a strange thing, memory,” I said. “I look at this burger and I know I’m hungry, but I can’t remember when I last ate.”

It was the truth. Every detail of the case was pin-sharp, everything I’d learned or guessed about Gemma’s murder and the events connected to it. I could remember everything about Carita Jenner, Adam Webb, Karl Flint. But everything else was haze, memories no more tangible than thick smoke. I didn’t know if I’d eaten at all that day. I couldn’t remember if I ate the day before or shaved that morning. I couldn’t remember whether it had snowed or not. It was as though I’d started to only fully exist when I was concentrating on something, and the rest of the time I just ghosted through the world. The only thing real was Gemma and she was dead.

“My system’s got to be fed up with the all-coffee diet by now,” I said, “but I guess I haven’t felt much like food.”

Ed nodded. “But tonight you do.”

“Yeah, tonight I do. Eat, drink and be merry.”

“For tomorrow, we die.”

After a couple of moments’ silence, Charlie tried to steer us on to firmer ground. He downed the rest of his beer and said, “Have you heard about that body they found near Hazen’s Notch?”

“Yeah, I heard about it.”

“I can’t remember the last time we had so much of this sort of thing happening around here. Don’t think we ever had. Do you reckon we’ve got one of those psychopaths living here? That could explain it.”

“No, I don’t think so,” I said. “All this’ll be for a reason, and it might be ugly and pointless, but it won’t be crazy.”

“Where’s your girlfriend buried?” Ed said out of the blue.

“Maine. Near Bangor. Why?”

“When everything’s over, if the guy who killed her and Steph gets caught, I think I might like to go and see her sometime, if you don’t mind. It seems a bit nuts, but it’d feel like the right thing to do.”

“That’s fine with me.”

Charlie seemed to sense that his friend wasn’t his usual self and that I had even more on my mind than I was letting on. He left after a couple of drinks, saying something about a TV show he wanted to catch. Ed and I sat there for another three hours or so, not talking much. I switched to Coke after the first two beers, keeping a clear head. It was gone ten when I left. I said nothing to Ed about what was coming in the morning; I figured he’d find out soon enough when it was all over. Snow was falling heavily outside. The wind was picking up as well, and clumps of ice whipped against my eyes. The breeze blew the sound of my own footfalls back past me, echoing every step I took. At least I assumed it was just the wind because when I checked behind me there was no one there.

Randy was watching TV when I came through the door. He’d been smart enough to dim the lights in the front room and close the drapes and blinds in the kitchen. He was perched nervously on the only chair from which he could see both the front door and the windows. I guessed the hours alone had kept him thinking about how much trouble he was in. “There’s not much to eat here,” he said. “I found some cookies and some instant soup earlier.”

“Sorry. I guess my girlfriend hasn’t been keeping up with the groceries lately.”

That knocked him back and he went quiet for a while. Then he asked, “Where am I going to sleep tonight? On the couch?”

“No, I’m on the couch. You’ll have to make do with the kitchen floor. I’ll sling some blankets down or something. It won’t be comfortable, but it’ll have to do.”

“What about…” He paused and scratched his ear, dropping his gaze. “What about upstairs? Aren’t you sleeping in the bedroom?”

“No, and neither are you. You even set foot in it and I’ll kick your ass out and let you deal with Flint, the cops, and everyone else by yourself.”

“Easy,” he said, holding up his hands. “I was just asking. I’ll be fine on the floor. In fact, if you get those blankets, I think I’ll turn in now.”

With Randy out of the way I tried to get some sleep myself, but his presence in the house stopped that dead. For all that he seemed to need me, and appeared too scared to think of me as anything other than a ticket out of the state, Randy was still a killer. Specifically Gemma’s killer. The house seemed to be reacting too, creaking and groaning louder and more violently than I could remember before. The stairs and landing had joined in the general unrest, the shrill squeal of their worn boards occasionally adding to the clamor. At first I thought it might be Randy moving around, but when I went to check there was no one there and the kitchen door was firmly closed.

Some time in the small hours of the morning I had the impulse to stretch my legs and maybe get some fresh air outside born of the frustration of the near-sleepless. I clung to the idiot hope that a minute’s movement might generate enough fatigue to drop me at last into unconsciousness, that a blast of the cold might make me appreciate the couch more.

I opened the front door and stepped out on the thin icy crust blanketing the porch. Flecks of snow seemed to be falling upwards, carried by an updraft I couldn’t feel, as though the night was somehow rewinding, time flowing backwards. If it ran long enough, I wondered if I’d have the chance to undo everything and play it out anew.

From the snow-scattered, TV static blackness I heard footsteps crunching through the ice, someone approaching. Long dark coat, hood pulled up and over their face, hands scrunched in their pockets. A single lock of hair, pale in the night-time monochrome, dropped down from the dark-shrouded face. My throat clenched and I caught myself nearly saying “Gemma”.

Two, three steps further to the bottom of the porch steps. She lifted her face. A flash of her eyes reflecting some distant light, from another time, maybe, another world. I tried to work out when and where I was — if this was another memory dredged up from a lost backwater of my mind, a waking hallucination or a genuine visitation, a temporary crossing of the ephemeral boundary that forever separated us, Gemma and me.

She smiled, quick and pure, the way she used to. I caught a faint scent on the air, metallic like rain or damp steel. Heard soft wings beating for a moment. Then she was gone.

The snow steadied, seeming to hang on the air, then began to flutter downwards again. Sluggishly, time returned. I went back indoors and closed the door behind me.

If I slept in the hours before dawn, I didn’t notice it.

34.

The first violet strands of sunlight found me crouched by the cracked panes of a rot-laced window, listening to an approaching engine growing louder in the still air. My knees felt cramped and I was tired enough to be feeling light-headed, but I kept my mind fixed on the car and the man driving it. Randy had done as instructed and now here was Flint before the rest of the world was even properly awake. It took an age for the Taurus to crawl through the snow-covered trees and emerge on to the open ground by the hotel. I watched it pull up, the engine died, and there he was, alone, gazing warily at the ruined town before he locked his car and crunched through the snow to vanish beneath the base of the hotel.

I was hiding in one of the rooms below the old top floor suite, surrounded by shards of rotten wood and shreds of fabric and carrying the pistol I’d taken off Randy. I waited until I heard Flint pass by on his way upstairs, then followed as quietly as I could, gun drawn.

He was just done checking the suite’s second bedroom, when I walked in, skirting the hole in the center of the main room. “Good morning, Detective,” I said.

Flint twisted at the sound, whipping his pistol up to face me in the time it took to blink. As he moved, so did I, and there we were with guns on each other. There was a faint sheen of sweat on his forehead and his eyes were dark pits. When he saw it was me and not Randy, he frowned and relaxed his stance a little. The hand holding his gun was shaking. “Alex,” he said, breathing out hard. “What the hell are you doing here? You need to lower that thing.”

I didn’t. “I came to see you. Everything OK, Flint? What were you expecting here?”

“Lower the gun. You’ve got some explaining to do, Mr Rourke.”

“So do you. Like why you killed Carita Jenner for a start.”

“What?” His face was blank, but his eyes gave him away.

“I was right there in the room when he called you to say he had the pipe you beat her to death with. But this isn’t a blackmail attempt. This is your reckoning. The weapon’s gone to the State Crime Lab and I guess it won’t be long before they match everything to you and to Jenner. And you know they will already; otherwise you wouldn’t be here. It’s over.” I wanted to shoot him, but I also wanted him to answer for what he did to Gemma and the others first. At least to tell me, to admit it.

“What are you talking about? Why does some hooker who died years ago matter to you now?”

“Because she should’ve mattered at the time. Because she was the start of something. Unless beating a confession out of Isaac Fairley was the true start, in which case she was just your first murder.”

At the mention of Isaac, Flint shook his head. His skin was pale, drawn. “Lawyers,” he said. “You’ve been talking to someone about me, I guess. Who?”

I ignored that. “So you knocked Fairley around to get the statement you wanted. Why’d you kill Carita?”

“I don’t—”

“You enjoyed it, right? It felt good. You were a couple of months into suspension, everyone on your back, pissed off at the world. She didn’t want to give you any favors, not that night. She should’ve known better, right? Came out of the Bar None full of anger and hate, and wound up beating her in the head with a length of steel in an alleyway behind a liquor store.”

“Where did you get it from?” he said at last.

“A mutual acquaintance. Why’d you kill her?”

“It doesn’t matter now. Shit just happens, like I told you once, and that night it happened to her. She was a nobody. I don’t deserve all this, not now. One mistake shouldn’t fuck up an entire life like this. She’d have been dead before long anyway. What difference did it make?”

“So what about the others?”

“What?” His face went blank again.

“The Haleys, Stephanie Markham, Adam Webb…” Blood was pounding in my ears. “And Gemma. Killed to protect your dope racket. What about them? Was it worth it? Such great and lofty secrets to protect.”

“What are you talking about? I worked three of those cases, Alex. What dope racket? The only dope rackets I know about are the people I buy shit from when I want to. You’re a goddamn lunatic.” His gun came up again and mine followed. His eyes were twitchy, hand still trembling. “Now you just hold where you are. I don’t know what’s going on with you or what you think you know, but I’m leaving. I’m on a tight schedule now. I didn’t kill your woman, so don’t do anything stupid. I’m not your guy.”

“You going to run, Flint?” I said, and something he must’ve seen in my face tipped the balance. I saw his knuckles whiten as he pulled the trigger.

35.

A sound like a thunderclap and I was diving sideways, dimly aware of his bullet, flown wide, slapping through the rotten wall behind me. I fired back, one round, and caught him clean through the right arm. Flint yelped with pain and the gun fell from his suddenly limp hand and clattered through the hole in the suite’s floor. As I rolled to my feet he smashed through the door into the second bedroom and there was the sound of glass breaking. I raced to the doorway and he was gone out of the window. Crashing noises came from the rotten balconies down the side of the tower as he dropped from one to another.

Then I was out too and following him down, expecting the whole damn thing to fall to pieces around me. Below, Flint jumped onto the fallen roof of the wraparound veranda and the last pieces of it still attached to the building collapsed beneath him. I kept on: hang, drop, hang, drop, while he stumbled out of the wreckage, blood soaking his sleeve, and scuttled for his car. I hit the snowdrift at the base of the hotel, feeling my ankle twist and pull from the fall as I did, in time to see him fumble his keys left-handed and drop them into the churned ice beside the car, lost. He glanced at me, judged his chances, and ran.

Flint ignored the open ground and crashed into the trees, loping between the dark and gnarled boughs. I chased, limping from the shooting pain in my ankle. By the time the trees ended suddenly and we were out on to the flat, white sheet of Silverdale Lake, he had a good thirty yards on me. The ice snapped and creaked as my feet hit it just like it had the night I woke up out here. I remembered what Ed had told me about the danger, about the way it wouldn’t be fully frozen yet, about how the temperature drop in the middle of the night could’ve saved me, at the very moment the lake swallowed Flint.

He’d glanced back right as it happened, maybe hearing the same noises I was, and I could see his eyes clear as anything, staring at me, as the surface gave way beneath him with a wet crunch and he shot straight down in a gout of spray.

I thought about trying to reach the hole in the ice, or else finding something to throw him and help him out. But I didn’t do either of those things. I just stood there for a time, then turned and walked back to dry land.

36.

The sun was well up by the time I limped back to Gemma’s house. I’d been careful to disguise my tracks, and had taken a while to dispose of Randy’s gun where no one was likely to find it. Flint was gone and I was done. I hadn’t killed him, but I hadn’t saved him either, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

The house was silent and still. Randy was already gone, picked up by the driver I’d hired to take him to New York and his ticket to a new life in the south. If things had worked out differently, it could have been Gemma and me on a plane, heading for a vacation someplace warm. Sitting on a beach, hand in hand. Basking in the warmth of the sun and each other. That wasn’t going to happen any more, not in this life, and Flint hadn’t been the only one who’d taken that from me.

On Gemma’s computer I went looking for a particular business in San Francisco, tied to a particular name. It took a few minutes, but it seemed ‘Bluewave Financial’ was the one I was looking for.

My call was answered by a perky Californian voice. “This is Bluewave Financial Services, Michelle speaking, how may I help you this morning?”

“Curtis Marshall, please.”

Vivaldi played briefly before a second woman’s voice said, “Curtis Marshall’s office. How can I help you?”

“I’d like to speak to Mr Marshall,” I said.

“I’m afraid he’s in a meeting right now. Can I take a message?”

“This is extremely urgent and it’s a call Mr Marshall has been waiting for.” I pictured Randy in the car, listening to the radio. Relaxing, maybe thinking about hooking up with his cousin in Miami. “It concerns his nephew Joel,” I said. “If you could put me through, I know he’ll be grateful for the interruption. It won’t take long.”

“Who should I tell him is calling?”

“You shouldn’t.”

More Vivaldi, this time for a minute or so. Then a man’s voice, deep, a little hoarse. “Who is this?”

“Mr Marshall?”

“Yeah. Who is this?”

“We’ve never met, Mr Marshall, but I guess right now I’m a friend.”

“What do you want? This better not be a waste of my time.”

“The same thing you want, Mr Marshall. A guy called Randy Faber stole someone close to you once.”

“What do you know about Joel?” Marshall’s voice cracked a little as he said the name.

“Not much. But Randy also took someone close to me, and now he’s run out of friends. I know where he’s going to be twenty-four hours from now. If you’re interested.”

No hesitation. “Go on.”

“He’s boarding a flight from New York to Miami at ten thirty tomorrow morning, touching down at thirteen forty-five. I won’t go into details over the phone, but maybe he’d like to see some familiar faces down in Florida, being in a strange town and all. And I know how eager you must be to catch up on old times.”

“What is this information costing me?”

“Nothing. All I want is peace of mind. You can give me that by making sure Randy doesn’t take any more lives.”

There was a slight pause at the other end, then Marshall breathed out and said, “I’ll be more than happy to see the little shit gets the welcome he deserves. I guarantee you’ll have your peace of mind.”

“Thank you very, very much, Mr Marshall,” I said, and meant every dirty word of it.

I packed my meager things, took out the trash, made sure I’d left the place as tidy as Gemma would have wanted. Before I left, I took one final look around, breathed in the faint traces of her scent for the last time.

Then I was gone. I’d just dropped my bag in my passenger seat when a new-looking maroon sedan pulled up by the curb. Two middle-aged men got out, both wearing suits. One carried a clipboard, his eyes wandering over the building, and the other had a briefcase. They saw me and walked over, careful to keep their footing on the icy drive. “Good morning,” said the older and better dressed of the two. He checked his watch. “Just about, anyway. Lindsay Chalmers.”

I gave him a wave but didn’t shake his hand. “Alex Rourke.”

A light went off in his head. “Ah. You have my deepest condolences for your tragic loss. I’m the attorney handling Dr Larson’s estate and this is Jerry Kollina. He’s valuing the house as part of the handling of her will.”

“A realtor and a lawyer. I’m sure there’s a joke in there somewhere. Well, do what you have to. I’m going home.”

His eyes strayed briefly towards my bag. Then he saw me watching him and guessed from the displeasure coloring my face that I maybe wasn’t the sort to go stealing my loved one’s possessions before they could be divided up according to her last wishes. He tried an awkward smile. I didn’t return it. “Have you been here long?” he said. “If you have anything left to attend to here, please, feel free to stay. I wouldn’t dream of intruding.”

“A few days. I had to pick up some of my stuff and deal with a couple of things, but they’re taken care of now.”

He gave me his card, and that was that. As I reversed on to the road, ready to drive away from the two men, away from Gemma’s empty house and away from Bleakwater Ridge, I thought about what I’d just done to Randy. I thought about Flint and how he’d ordered Randy around, and that had given him the power to kill people with a single phone call. I didn’t like that same feeling of control, but I could see how some people would get off on it. I just felt I’d owed it to Gemma, and I hoped she understood why I’d done what I’d done.

And knew that if she’d been alive, if she’d been able to talk to me, that she’d have been horrified, because that was the thing with avenging someone. The people who deserved it the most were always the ones who wanted it the least.

Then I thought some more about Flint’s orders to Randy and something clicked. With a cold, sick feeling, I realized what had happened. What I’d missed. Flint was dirty, a murderer and a drug user, but he hadn’t been Randy’s boss. I’d got the wrong person.

37.

I wished I was a cop. I wished I could summon swarms of cruisers to hunt down Fiona Saric, to corral her and arrest her and lock her down before she could vanish. But I wasn’t, and I couldn’t call them on the basis of things I shouldn’t have known in the first place, all to tell them to seize one of their own.

The dope operation had been run by a cop. Randy knew that, and it made sense. All the right connections. But it hadn’t been Karl Flint. Saric had been his partner for years. She knew everything he knew, and using the name of a cop everyone else knew was probably crooked and violent gave her the perfect fallback for when things went south on her. A fallback so good Flint had died for it. It had been Carita Jenner which had made it all feel right, and Saric had been the one to sow the seed with me on that score. She must have followed him out of the Bar None that night, seen what happened and where he ditched the weapon, and kept it. Then she’d given it to Randy a couple of days ago because she knew everything was coming to an end. Took the cell phone he used for dope running so she could plant it on Flint; it was why he’d been surprised when I’d called. Not because he wasn’t expecting it, but because he didn’t know whose phone it was. She was probably the one who’d tipped Flint and me off to the farm, figuring either me or Randy would take a bullet. Maybe the same one who’d pushed the search parties away from where Steph Markham had been killed. Covering her operation.

Always two steps ahead. Two layers deep. Randy had said the voice on the phone could have been anyone, man or woman. God damn it. God damn it.

That’s why they’d never met in person. She’d been setting Flint up to take the fall right from the very start. She’d been smart in the way Damien Ackroyd never was, keeping it damned well hidden that she was anything other than a regular detective. No sports cars or fancy houses.

And it had been the Ackroyd case which had given her away. She’d said she couldn’t stand drug use for what it did to people. ‘Flint’ had told Randy he’d be killed if he ever sampled the wares. But the real Flint, by his own admission, had sampled plenty himself.

I knew she wasn’t at work because I’d called the BCI and they’d said she wasn’t on duty. Now, as I pulled up in front of the pleasant-looking old brick house in Burlington the phone book suggested was hers, I could see she didn’t seem to be home either. No lights, no movement, no car out front. No answer when I rang. One of the neighbors said he’d seen her loading up the car and leaving first thing that morning.

She was gone. Probably driven all the way to Montreal by now. God damn it.

Short of anything better to do, I drove up the hill to Battery Park and spent ten minutes walking in the cold along a path lined by bare, empty trees at the top of the bluff. Beyond was Lake Champlain and the last, unmarked, resting places of Stephanie Markham and the Haleys. Everything felt grey and empty even though the sun was shining through the tattered clouds. I tried to think of a way to trace Saric but came up empty.

Then my phone rang, and Saric herself said, “Hello again, Alex. I imagine all hell’s about to break loose back home.”

“How did you know?”

“Karl called me in a panic first thing this morning, wanting me to cover for him at work. Since Faber survived the farm, I assume he’s just made use of the evidence I gave him.”

“Yeah. So what do you want? Unless you’re calling to tell me where you are, I doubt I’m interested in what you’re going to say. You won. Well done.”

“I thought I’d apologize. I overreacted with Dr Larson. I thought she was on to something when she wasn’t. That was probably the only mistake I’ve made in all the time I’ve been doing this. I shouldn’t have killed her; I’d still be in business if I hadn’t. For a while, anyway.”

“Business? Is that what you call it?”

“Semantics. Listen, Alex, I still have something that belongs to you. Well, sort of. I thought you might like it back.”

I paused. Somewhere, muffled in the background at the far end of the line, I heard a man’s voice yell something in French. The high-pitched tones of a child answered a second later. “What?” I said.

“You don’t know?” She sounded curious.

“No. Don’t know, don’t know if I care.”

“I thought someone would’ve told you. I’ve still got a piece of your girlfriend’s jewelry. Randy took it from her body.”

I frowned. “What?”

“It was hit by the bullet. I think he was worried he’d left traces on it. And I kept it in case we ever needed to plant it on someone. I’ve always tried to be prepared. Oh, I suppose her family were given her personal effects, not you, and they wouldn’t have known. It’s a silver necklace with a sort of flower-bird-thing hanging from it. Very nice, though I’m afraid it’s in two pieces now.”

I thought of Gemma, holding the necklace up to the light when I gave it to her. The last time I saw her. The last time we were together.

“I forgot I had it,” Saric said. “If you want it back, you can have it.”

It stuck in my throat, but I asked anyway. “Where are you?”

There was a roar of wind as she turned. “You might want to move the phone away from your ear for a moment.”

A thunderous boom erupts from the earpiece. “Who did you kill this time?” I said.

She laughed. “Not me, Alex. Cannon. I don’t understand it myself, but I’m told it’s a tradition. They fire the cannon out over the river this time every year. A little cold, but everyone’s enjoying themselves.”

“Name the place.”

“Figure it out. There aren’t too many spots near the border that will fit the bill. I’ll be waiting.”

She hung up.

I wondered who, amongst the few local non-cops whose numbers I had, would know about tourist attractions over in Quebec. Gemma’s friend Bethany was the first to jump to mind, but when I dialed the number she’d given me it was dead. I double-checked the slip of paper and saw that the handwriting on it was my own and the number was Gemma’s landline.

I screwed up the note and tossed it away real fast, tried to pretend I’d never seen it. Tried to pretend that I didn’t know what it meant.

Rob solved it in the end. I asked him if he could look up events on the border for me. “Somewhere with a cannon or two by a river,” I said. “I guess it must be an old fort or something, but I don’t know where. I heard people talking French so I assume it’s in Quebec.”

“Huh.” Tapping on his keyboard. “Fort Lennox? But that’s mostly open in the summer. Nothing about them firing off cannon in winter. How are you, by the way?”

“I’m OK. Back at work tomorrow, the day after at the latest. What else?”

“Hmm… looks like there’s a few over the border on the Richelieu River. Here we are: Fort St Marc. Today’s the anniversary of something long-winded from the War of 1812. They have an annual fete there. Fireworks, guys in costume, the works. Looks nice.”

“Whereabouts is it?” I said.

38.

Ah hour and a half later, I pulled into the visitors’ parking lot next to the hulking stone bulwark of Fort St Marc. The place looked busy enough. Carnival atmosphere, everyone wrapped up warm. Stepping out of the car and hauling my coat around me, I felt isolated, cut off from the people milling to and fro. Exposed, especially since I’d had to leave my pistol behind on the other side of the border. I joined the weekend visitors to the old fort, heading through the gates and up on the flat-topped ramparts. The central courtyard was alive with food stalls, most of which were adopting a pretense of simple period stuff, as well as entertainers of all sorts. The sun was going down and I guessed it wouldn’t be long before the fireworks started. From where I stood on the western bastion I had a great view of a sweeping bend in Richelieu River and everything for at least a mile in almost every direction.

My gaze turned inwards as I scanned the faces of the people ambling around below, looking for Saric. Not easy, not with so many scarves, hoods, big coats. She might have been down there, but I didn’t get the feeling that she was. I’d switched my attention to the visitors on the ramparts by the time my cell rang. “I was beginning to think you weren’t coming,” Saric said. “I thought I’d got it wrong again and you couldn’t work out where I was.”

I turned, trying to run my eyes over everyone in the fort, looking for anyone holding a phone. “I nearly couldn’t. Nearly didn’t bother, either.”

One, two. Deep in conversation. Both men.

“What, can’t see me?” she said.

No point hiding it. “Not yet.”

“You’re looking in the wrong place. Turn around.”

The rampart behind me was empty all the way to the edge. Beyond, though, on the far side of the river, a figure was leaning against a dark car parked by the side of the dirt road that ran above the bank. The figure waved. “Hi, Alex,” Saric said in my ear.

“I thought you might have had the guts for a face-to-face.”

“Don’t be stupid. I’m not suicidal. I thought it might be fun to see you one last time, but I’m happy doing that through binoculars. And don’t even think about trying to get round here in time to catch me. The nearest bridge is three miles away and I’m gone as soon as I see you leave.”

“Where’s Gemma’s necklace?”

“The people organizing the festival have a property collection point. There’s a package with your address given as the sender, but no postage on it. I told them someone must have forgotten it on the way to the post office.” Her tone changed. Nasty, controlling. “Go fetch, boy.”

“At what point did you stop being a cop, turn your back on everything you should have stood for?”

“When I saw that big old house that Damien Ackroyd had, all the things he owned, and I thought about my idiot junkie brother.” She sighed. “He must have known the dope was killing him, but he still had to keep buying it. Dealing didn’t appeal to me, but that kind of customer demand was hard to resist, as was the money, so I decided to go into delivery. Karl was an easy fall-guy if I ever needed one. I was already giving it serious thought when he killed that hooker. When he made a half-assed attempt to wipe that pipe down and hide it in a dumpster a couple of blocks away, he became my ‘get out of jail free’ card. It’s all been roses ever since.”

“Well, I sure am sorry to ruin it for you.” Looking at her, the world tasted sour. Only a few hundred yards away, but it might as well have been a million miles. And I knew she was enjoying herself.

“Don’t sweat it, Alex. It had to happen eventually. Karl was so easy to control, once you knew what buttons to push, but he was never stable enough for this to last forever. Everything ends.”

“You were in it for the cash, huh? Was it worth killing for?”

“Alex, do you have any idea how it feels to be top of the heap? Do you think someone with my skills should spend thirty years investigating burglaries and auto theft and then retire on a police pension? Really?”

“No. I’d never have let someone like you join the force in the first place. I’d have let you rot under the rock where you were living.” I wished I had a gun. Pistol, rifle, anything. Grab that cannon they were firing earlier, put it to use. Anything at all, if it could only reach her. Hit her with the fury I had balled up inside. Give her what she deserved. But I couldn’t.

“Do you know how much fun it is to know you can have someone killed just because you want it to happen? And when I’ve done it, they vanish and I still get invited to all of the department’s parties. I only wish it was possible to drop it into conversation. ‘How was my day? Well, I did a couple of hours at the office, then I had a pair of tourists stabbed to death, then I did lunch. How was yours?’ Too bad it doesn’t work that way.”

The line went quiet, although I could hear her breathing. When she spoke again, her tone was lighter, almost playful. “You’ll never bring her back. You know that, don’t you? You can’t get back what I took from you.”

I hung up. Tried to forget her words, the truth of them, the bitterness left in me. I went to collect Gemma’s shattered necklace, a reminder both of the woman I’d loved and the woman responsible for taking her away, and faced the drive south knowing that Fiona Saric was well and truly beyond my reach.

39.

Back in Burlington, I kept my word and took Elijah and Neal out for a steak dinner, even though there was nothing I could give them story-wise that wouldn’t have seen me arrested. But Elijah had helped with so much, and I’d promised. I didn’t talk a great deal, but it was an OK evening, all things considered. I wondered if he’d figure some of it out when the lab examined the pipe Flint had beaten Carita Jenner to death with. I wondered how long it would be before Flint’s car was found, and if anyone would realize what had happened to him. After we were done eating, I called the Owl’s Head and asked to speak to Ed. I told him everything was finished, and that Steph could rest easy now. I didn’t want to go into detail over the phone, and he didn’t ask me to. He just said, real simple, “Thank you, Alex.”

After another night in the E-Z Rest I left Vermont for good, but I didn’t head for Boston. I took US-2 east all the way to Bangor, Maine. The cemetery there was covered in a fresh coat of thick snow and more fell in slow, heavy clumps from the charcoal-grey sky above. From the top of the low hill where Gemma lay buried, I could no longer see my car, the wall that lined the cemetery, nothing but snow falling against the blanket of white beyond, cutting this place off from the world outside. I looked down at the new, clean, stone marker, cold tears studding the corners of my eyes like shards of glass.

Then I thought back and remembered her face, the way she moved, the warmth of her body. Her eyes, shining. Her voice, her laugh. I felt her moving against me, her hand brushing against my cheek, her hair on my shoulder. The air smelled, one last time, of spruce bark and tall summer grass. A pair of butterflies danced through the snow above me until they were lost against the clouds as I stood there with my eyes shut, holding Gemma long and tightly for the last time, the touch of ghosts upon my skin.

By the Author

Find out more about these titles, get free downloads and more at johnrickards.com.

The Alex Rourke series

The Touch Of Ghosts

The Darkness Inside

Burial Ground

The Desperate, The Dying, And The Damned

The Levels series

The Levels

The Razor Gate

Murder Park

All You Leave Behind

The Surge

Day Zero

Virginia Day Zero (short story)

Other Writing

Portal of the Gods

Hardboiled Jesus (short story)

Wishes (short stories)

Find me:

blog: namelesshorror.com
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home: johnrickards.com

Table of Contents

- Copyright & Credits
- THE TOUCH OF GHOSTS
- By the Author