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Then there was the hammer. The hammer had been on Hutter’s mind for days. The more she learned, the heavier that hammer weighed in her thoughts. If Vic were going to make up a story about being attacked, why not say Manx had come at her with a baseball bat, a shovel, a crowbar? Instead McQueen described a weapon that had to be a bone mallet, just like the one that had gone missing with Manx’s body—a detail that had never appeared in any news report.

Finally there was Louis Carmody, Vic McQueen’s occasional lover, father of their child, the man who had driven her away from Charlie Manx all those years ago. Carmody’s stenosis was not a put-on; Hutter had spoken to the doctor who treated him, and she had confirmed he had suffered from one, possibly two, “prestroke” events in the space of a week.

“He should not have left the hospital,” the doctor said to Hutter, as if Hutter herself were to blame for his departure. In a sense she was. “Without an angioplasty, any strain on his heart could initiate an ischemic cascade. Do you understand? An avalanche in the brain. A major infarction.”

“You’re saying he could stroke out,” Hutter said.

“At any minute. Every minute he’s out there, he’s like a guy lying down in the middle of a road. Sooner or later he will be run over.”

And still Carmody had walked out of the hospital, grabbed a cab to the train station half a mile away. There he’d bought a ticket for Boston, presumably in some half-assed attempt to throw law enforcement off, but then walked down the street to a CVS where he made a call to Dover, New Hampshire. Forty-five minutes later Christopher McQueen arrived in a pickup, and Carmody got into the passenger seat. And here they were.

“So. What do you think Vic McQueen was into?” Daltry asked.

The tip of his cigarette flared in the dark, casting an infernal light on his seamed, ugly face.

“Into?”

“She made a beeline for this guy Bing Partridge. She hunted him down to get information about her son. Which she did. She said so, didn’t she? She was obviously involved with some reprehensible shitbuckets. That’s why the kid was grabbed, don’t you think? She was being taught a lesson by her business partners.”

“I don’t know,” Hutter said. “I’ll ask her when I see her.”

Daltry lifted his head, blew smoke into the pale mist. “I bet human trafficking. Or child pornography. Hey, that makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“No,” Hutter said, and began to walk.

At first she was just stretching her legs out, restless to move. Walking helped her think. She put her hands in the pockets of her FBI windbreaker and took herself around the deli truck, down to the edge of the highway. When she looked across the road, she could see a few lights from Christopher McQueen’s house through the pines.

The doctor said that Carmody was lying in the road, waiting to get run down, but that wasn’t quite right. It was worse than that. He was strolling up the middle of the street, willfully walking right into oncoming traffic. Because there was something at this house that he needed. No, correction: that Wayne needed. It was important enough that all other considerations, including Lou’s own continued survival, could be set aside. It was there in that house. It was two hundred feet away.

Daltry caught up to her as she was crossing the road. “So what are we doing now?”

“I want to sit with one of the surveillance crews,” Hutter said. “If you’re coming, you’ll have to put out that cigarette.”

Daltry dropped it in the road and stepped on it.

When they were across the highway, they walked along the gravel margin. They were forty feet from the drive to Christopher McQueen’s cabin when a voice called.

“Ma’am?” someone said softly.

A small, stout woman in a midnight blue rain jacket stepped from under the boughs of a spruce. It was the Indian woman, Chitra. She held a long stainless-steel flashlight in one hand, but she didn’t switch it on.

“It’s me. Hutter. Who’s here?”

“Myself and Paul Hoover and Gibran Peltier.” They were one of two teams positioned in the trees, watching the house. “Something’s wrong with the equipment. The bionic dish quit. The camera won’t turn on.”

“We know,” Daltry said.

“What happened?” Chitra asked.

“Sunspot,” Daltry said.





Christopher McQueen’s House


VIC LEFT THE TRIUMPH BY THE TREES, ON A SLIGHT RISE ABOVE HER father’s house. When she stood up from the bike, the world lurched. She had a sensation of being a small figure in a glass snow globe, being tilted this way and that by an insensitive toddler.

She started down the slope and was surprised to find she could not walk in a straight line. If a cop pulled her over, she doubted she could pass a basic sobriety test, never mind that she had not had a drop to drink. Then it occurred to her that if a cop pulled her over, he would probably cuff her and give her a couple of swats with the nightstick while he was at it.

Her father’s shape was joined at the back door by that of a big, broad-chested man with an immense stomach and a neck thicker than his shaved head. Lou. She could’ve picked him out of a crowd from five hundred feet away. Two of the three guys who had loved her in her life, watching her make her unsteady way down the hill; the only one missing was Wayne.