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By now he was looking at them all, as if addressing a class. They all instinctively nodded.

“Great,” he said. “Now. Would you like to come in and spend a little time with him? I’ll have one of the nurses help you out.” He glanced regretfully at Gail and Joe. “I’m afraid we’re only letting one person in at a time for the moment, mostly just because it gets so crowded otherwise.”

Joe was already holding his hand up. “Not a problem. We knew about that. We’ll be right here, Mom,” he added, patting her on her narrow shoulder.

She looked around and up at him, her smile belying her concern. “I won’t be long.”

“Take your time.”

They watched her through the window overlooking the ICU as a nurse helped drape her in a gown and fit a sterile mask over her face in preparation for the visit. In the distance, Leo remained as still as a mummy, white-clad and corralled.

“God. What a nightmare,” Gail murmured.

“Could be better,” Joe agreed.

She glanced at him. “You believe him?”

He kept staring through the window. “What’s not to believe? He said Leo’s walking on the edge of a cliff.”

After a momentary silence, Gail said, “I’ve been trading e-mails with your mom. She says you’re looking into the crash.”

He pressed his lips together, considering how to respond. There was a time when his reaction would have been immediate and open.

Gail instantly interpreted the hesitation. She’d always read people well. “That probably wasn’t something she should have told me,” she said quickly.

“No, no,” he then said. “It’s not like it’s a secret. Sure as hell the people we’re asking know about it. I just wondered why a relatively new car would fall apart like that. That’s really all it is for now. The sheriff’s department is helping me out. I’m not even officially involved.”

She nodded. “I thought maybe he’d just hit some ice.”

It was a leading question, but this time Joe played along. “A tie rod nut worked loose. Without it, the wheel pretty much does what it wants. It happens. I just want to make sure that it happened by accident.”

“How do you do that?” she asked.

That felt like pressing, and he resisted her, his reasons at once professional and very personal. “Well, like I said, I’m trying to keep my nose clean. The deputy handling it owes me a call on that very subject. He’s pretty good around cars, it turns out.”

He still hadn’t made eye contact with her, instead studying his mother being wheeled up to his brother’s bed. But he was also consciously aware of Gail staring at him from the side, in search of some reaction.

“How’re you doing?” she finally asked softly.

He glanced at her quickly and then nodded toward the scene before them, using it to dodge the true meaning of her question. “I’ve been thinking about the old lady lately, wondering what’ll happen after she dies—Leo, the farm, all the rest. I never saw this coming.”

This time Gail was the one who remained silent, prompting Joe to seek out her reflection in the glass. She was no longer looking at him, but her sadness radiated like heat.

Damn, he thought. This is too hard.

He glanced at his watch. “Speaking of the sheriff,” he said, his voice loud and bluff in his ears, “I ought to hook up with him. Find out what he’s got new, if anything. Could you handle Mom? Drive her back home, maybe?”

“Sure,” Gail said softly, still not turning. “Happy to.”

Joe patted her shoulder once and left the room, relieved and frustrated, both.

He found them out on Route 5, standing like a line of bird hunters at a shoot, except that they were all standing in a snowbank, looking down instead of skyward, and dressed alike in dark blue pseudo uniforms decorated with glaring white sheriff’s patches. Barring a couple, they were all boys, mostly thin and gawky, sporting hair that looked painfully short in the cold weather. Slightly back of them was Rob Barrows, watching for traffic as much as giving guidance to the two of his teenage Explorers who were actually manning the metal detectors.

Joe pulled over by the side of the road and got out of his car.

“Any luck yet?” he asked.

There was a shout from the most distant detector handler.

Barrows smiled at the timing. “Guess we’ll find out.” They began walking together down the line. “We’d be due,” he added. “We’ve been out here almost three hours, finding enough scrap metal to open a business. Slow going.”

They reached the young woman who’d shouted out.

“What’ve you got, Explorer Ferris?” Rob asked in a clipped tone.

The girl stiffened slightly as she barked out, “A signal, sir. Pretty strong.”

“Show me.”

With her companions looking on from both sides, Ferris swept her instrument across the top of the snow by the edge of the road. They were about a half mile away from where Leo had gone off.

The detector began signaling loudly as she hovered over a marked defect in the white crust at their feet.

“Does look like something went in there,” Barrows commented quietly. He turned to another of the Explorers. “Drury, get in there and carefully open up a channel going to the bottom of that hole. Take your time.”

They watched as this second teenager got to his knees and slowly began digging into the snow, removing great handfuls in his gloves and dropping them behind him onto the roadway.

“Matthews,” Barrows ordered, “you and Johnson go through what Drury’s dumping there. Run the detector over it. Make sure there’s nothing hidden inside.”

Joe watched the deputy gradually engage more and more of his team until almost everyone had a job and felt useful in some fashion.

Fifteen minutes later, one of the kids helping Drury held up his gloved hand. “Got something, sir.”

Barrows took it from him and showed it to Joe. It was a nut.

Joe looked up at the eager faces crowded around him, discipline having caved in to enthusiasm. He showed them the small piece of metal and spoke in a loud voice.

“You’ve done some great work here today. I thank you, and the Bureau thanks you. When I get back to the office, I’ll make sure you all get officially recognized for your efforts. This is a terrific example of how some police work, maybe a little dull at first, pays off big-time in the end. Thumbs-up to all of you.”

He poked his own thumb into the air, feeling only slightly foolish, comforted by the obvious pride and pleasure he saw in their faces.

Leaving the Explorers to pack up the equipment and trade excited one-liners, Rob and Joe walked back to the vehicles. Barrows held the nut out in front of him as they went.

“You can definitely see tool marks on it.”

“You sure that’s it?” Joe asked, hoping not to sound too doubtful.

Barrows gave his signature easy smile. “No. It’s not like Subaru stamps every nut it uses. But what’re the odds? It even has fresh grease on it. I’d bet that alone might connect it to your brother’s car. Amazing what forensics can do these days.”

He carefully dropped it into a small evidence bag he’d extracted from his coat pocket. “In any case,” he added, “I am sure it’s enough to get into Steve’s Garage with a warrant.”

Willy Kunkle pulled out his cell phone and responded in his standard professional manner.

“Yeah?”

“It’s Scott.” To Willy’s total lack of response, the caller added hesitantly, “McCarty. You know . . .”

He did. McCarty was one of his many snitches. “So what?”

“Well, so I got something for you.”

Willy stopped in mid-stride at the edge of the parking lot behind the municipal building. “Oh, right,” he said scornfully. “Like I’m going to waste more time with you.”

“No, no,” Scott pleaded. “Don’t hang up. It’s about the guy you’re looking for, one of the ones in the paper—‘Do You Know Either of These Men?’ Well, I do. I mean, I don’t, but I know who does.”

“Who?”

There was a telling pause on the other end of the line. Willy’s grip tightened on the phone. “Listen, you little asshole—”

“Okay, okay,” Scott interrupted him. “Meet me at the town garage in an hour. I’ll have my man there and we’ll do business.”

“
Business?
After all the crap you put me through last time? That officially made you one of the worst informants I got,” Willy blew up. “You owe me this as a freebie.”

But Scott demurred, taking his time before answering, “I’m sorry you feel that way, Detective, especially since this is such a big deal—two dead men, big mystery, police at a standstill. Be a shame if you don’t know what I know.”

Willy scowled. Like it or not, he had to take a closer look at this. “And how much is what you know gonna cost me?”

The answer was instantaneous. “Hundred bucks.”

As was Willy’s. “Fuck you.” He hung up.

He stayed where he was, phone in hand. It rang a minute later.

“Seventy-five,” Scott said. “I gotta split it with—”

Willy hung up again without a word.

This time, it took three minutes for the phone to ring again.

“Fifty,” Scott said in a flat voice. “After that, I don’t give a shit.”

Willy believed him. “See you in an hour.”

In fact, Willy drove to the meeting place immediately, to stake it out. Brattleboro’s town garage was on Fairgrounds Road, just beyond the sprawling rebuilt high school. The road was on the edge of town, not heavily traveled, not overly well lighted, and the “garage” itself was actually an assemblage of buildings—storage sheds, equipment units, repair bays, and the like, all affording a wide choice of shadowy hiding places.

Just to be on the safe side, Willy was going to make sure he was the first to take advantage of that.

Brattleboro is not the kind of town that harbors ambushes. There are no drive-by shootings, few muggings; murders crop up once every few years on average. The police largely respond to calls involving people they’ve come to know personally over time.

None of which mattered to Willy Kunkle.

Willy was not a Brattleboro native, or a Vermonter, or easily influenced by peaceful precedent. He was a recovering alcoholic, a recovering Vietnam-era sniper, an ex-NYPD cop, and a man whose crippled arm—the ironic gift of another sniper—stood as more of a symbol than an actual disability, since it certainly didn’t slow him down on the job. He was hard-bitten, paranoid, short-tempered, and intolerant.

Of course, as Joe Gunther—his defender against every law enforcement bureaucracy so far—might have put it, he was also insightful, intuitive, hardworking, driven to perfection, honorable, and faithful.
And
a total pain in the neck.

He was also a born survivor, convinced by everything he’d experienced so far in life that you could never be too suspicious of, or too careful about, people.

As an example of this, he parked his vehicle unobtrusively in the high school parking lot and walked almost invisibly toward the town garage complex, eventually blending into its crosshatching of shadows until he could no longer be seen.

And there he waited.

As it turned out, he waited for quite a while, since Scott McCarty, not atypical of his ilk, was only vaguely aware of time. Nevertheless, he finally drove up in an exhausted Toyota sedan, slithering to a stop on worn summer tires, and killed the engine in the middle of the complex’s dooryard, leaving his headlights on to play across the mashed and rutted landscape of ice and dirty snow created by countless truck tires.

He had someone sitting beside him.

As Scott pushed at his door to get out, he found that it only opened a foot. Through the gap, a cold and muscular hand reached in and grabbed him by the neck.

“You’re late, you little shit.” Still jamming the door with his leg, Willy called out to the passenger, “You, beside him—move a single muscle and you’re dead. Ask Scott.”

Scott nodded nervously. “He’s not kidding, Benny.”

“What’s your name?” Willy demanded of the passenger.

“Benny Grosbeak.”

“And I’m supposed to believe that?”

“It’s true. My parents were hippies and changed their last name.”

“Why’re you here, Benny?” Willy asked.

Benny opened his mouth, but Scott spoke up first. “That’s what I—”

Willy tightened his grip, making him gasp. “Shut up.”

Benny hesitated. “Scott told me about some money.”

“How much?”

“Twenty bucks.”

Willy laughed. “What do you know, Benny?”

Again the pause, followed by “I saw that man.”

“The one in the paper?”

He nodded.

“Which one?”

“The bald guy.” That was the floater, found in the stream.

“Where?”

Now Benny was freer to talk, the truth being out. “At the motel where I work. I’m the night clerk.”

Without prompting, he gave Willy the name of the place, on Brattleboro’s Putney Road, about a mile from where the other John Doe had been found at a far better motel. Willy liked the coincidence. He opened Scott’s door wide with his knee and leaned into the car, so he was face-to-face with the occupants. “Benny and I are going to step outside,” he said. “You are going to stay here, waiting for your money, right?”

Scott nodded again. It was only then that Willy unlocked his fingers from his informant’s throat.

Willy glanced over at Benny, his voice almost gentle. “Okay, Ben, why don’t you climb out and stretch your legs a bit? I want to ask you a couple of more questions.”

Benny complied and Willy circled the car to join him, escorting him until he was beyond earshot of the car. He then positioned the young man with his back to the vehicle, so Willy could see, over his shoulder, Scott’s pale face through the windshield.

“Sorry about the rough stuff,” Willy began. “Scott and I have a history. I gotta pretend to be the tough guy.”

“You do a nice job.”

Willy laughed. “That’s good. I like that.” He reached into his pocket and extracted a twenty-dollar bill, using Benny’s body to hide the gesture from Scott. “This is something extra for your efforts. Scott’ll give you what he owes, so you might want to keep this between us.”

Benny palmed it and slipped it into his pocket. “Thanks.”

“No sweat. You help me; I help you. Tell me about the bald man.”