They drove in the dead of night, two people uncomfortable with the silence as well as the expectation to fill it. She wore the evidence of an impossibly long day in the form of bloodshot eyes and redistributed makeup. He carried the deadened countenance of a man poisoned by grief. The steady sloshing of the wipers worked like background music. She wanted to be home in bed, the victim of a temporary, eight-hour suicide, her brain all but used up.

“I miss them already,” she said. They had left the kids off an hour ago.

“They’re safer there.”

“I know that, but it doesn’t make me miss them any less.”

He said, “After what happened to Beth and Tony, we don’t have a choice.”

He kept telling her things she already knew. She let it go. “Did you see their faces?” she asked. Tears and confusion, a hopeful pleading that Mama and Daddy were not going to drive away and leave them.

“They were laughing and playing by the time we were out of the drive. Count on it. They love Kathy. And knowing my sister, she’ll spoil them rotten. It’s a match made in heaven.” Lou’s sister, unable to have children of her own, doted on Sarah and Miles as if they were royalty. Liz didn’t think it the best for anyone.

“We need to think about getting him tested,” he said. “His music aptitude. It’s something we need to think about. When to do it, what it means to him, to us, in terms of some home schooling. And there’s the cost, of course.”

“I can’t do this now,” she said honestly. “I can’t pretend all’s well like this. Between us, I mean.”

“What would you rather talk about? Broken promises? If we don’t pretend it’s normal, it’s never going to be.”

She turned toward the car’s rain-streaked side window studying the bars of silver and black, like a cage. “This is coming apart on us, Lou.”

“Uh-huh.”

They worked through another few minutes of silence. Lou reached for the radio at one point but apparently thought better of it. He pulled the car off the highway into a service station close to the on-ramp to buy himself a cup of tea and her a bottle of water.

“I didn’t mean to go back to him and I should have told you right away. I know that.” She waited to say this until he was closing his door to head inside.

“Uh-huh,” he said after the door was shut.

Back on the highway, he told her, “I’m ready when you’re ready.”

“I know that,” she said.

“Doesn’t have to be now.”

“It can’t be now. Not when I’m this tired. And you… you look sick with grief.”

He didn’t respond.

“Please don’t give up, okay? Don’t shut me out. So much has changed. So much good has come into our lives. That’s worth fighting for.” She waited for him to say something. Anything. When he did not, she said, “I think I’d like it better if you yelled at me or something, got angry, if you let out whatever’s inside of you. How can you be so calm?”

“I am not calm.”

“Then show it. Do something. Say something.”

“I need to hear it from you,” he said. “Whatever excuses you have, I need to hear them. Just confessing it isn’t enough. I have to understand it.”

“He tricked me. He used sympathy. He probably did it just to make the tape. He played me-that’s how you would put it-and I gave in. I regretted it at the time, and I regret it now.”

She saw anger pass across his face with the oncoming headlights.

“So you got drunk rather than tell me.”

The bars of the cage bent with the speed of the car. She cried privately, not allowing him to see. He dug out a handkerchief, offered it across the seat to her and she rejected it, angry that he would attempt such a gesture.

He said, “You came home and made love with me and pretended it hadn’t happened? How could you have done that?”

“I don’t know,” she answered honestly. Slap, slap, went the wipers. “For what it’s worth, with him it was never ‘making love.’ It was sex. An escape. Nothing more.”

“That’s not worth anything. Not to me,” Lou said, “though I’m certainly glad you made that important distinction.”

Mile markers slipped past, the distance between them growing.

“I miss them already,” she said.

“Yeah. Me too.”

TWELVE

BOLDT’S DASHBOARD CLOCK REGISTERED 7:04, the colon between the numbers flashing as it counted off the seconds in the evening darkness that enveloped the car’s interior. Less than twenty-four hours earlier he and Liz had dropped off the kids, and now the events of this day occupied him as he navigated around the streets clogged with traffic, inventing a route that might speed his arrival to what he had been told was a bloodied cabin and possible crime scene.

He had not slept well, if at all that prior night, laboring under the strain of their discussion in the car, wondering about their future, feeling betrayed by their past. The early morning, derailed without the routine of the kids, had presented them with too much time together, too much opportunity to speak, and nothing to discuss. They settled on a truce of silence, each reading a different section of the morning paper, or in Boldt’s case, pretending to read.

Work that day had been paint-by-numbers: one of the only times he welcomed a lieutenant’s paperwork, the administrative meetings, the indulgence of actually reading the group e-mails. Anything to occupy him without discussion, without human contact. He had swum around the fifth floor like a fish in the wrong school.

Now a call from Danny Foreman summoned him to a cabin in the woods, a cabin that Foreman claimed to know about because Liz herself had provided its location. Boldt’s head spun with possibilities.

Earlier, he’d been thrown into turmoil over a call he’d received from Dr. Bernie Lofgrin, the civilian director of the police department’s crime lab.

“You got a minute?” Lofgrin had asked.

“I’m signing off on overtime vouchers and desperate for distraction,” Boldt said. Not that he would have ever put off a call from Bernie, who was both a close friend, a fellow jazz enthusiast, and the sole source of all things evidentiary. Among several dozen active cases, the lab was currently working both the Foreman crime scene evidence and Liz’s videotape for Boldt, and the call could have concerned either or both. Boldt had been eager to learn about one, extremely reluctant to hear about the other.

“The tape’s a second-generation copy.”

“Dubbed from the original,” Boldt clarified.

“Correct. And not to worry about content. For viewing I digitally obscured a central panel allowing only a half inch border to show. I sampled the first thirty seconds of sound for bandwidth and signal. Also supports the determination of it being second generation. Those half-inch borders don’t reveal any live action, only the setting, a darkly paneled or log room, and a time-and-date stamp. I suspect the location is a bedroom, and I’m not asking questions. I’m the only one who handled the tape and it remains in my possession. No case number has been assigned, which means you owe the taxpayers for about an hour of my time.”

Boldt thanked him, knowing when Bernie needed to hear it. The man had taken several key steps to protecting the tape.

“I developed four good latent prints and six partials off the videocassette itself. Ran them through ALPS,” he said, meaning the computerized comparison, automated latent print system, “and struck out with known felons, convicted or otherwise. No hits.”

The bubble of Boldt’s building optimism burst. He’d hoped against hope that some of the prints would come back for David Hayes, a registered felon and ex-con. The letdown was severe. “Well, I don’t mind saying that’s a disappointment.”

“So I ran it through WSW,” the Washington State Workers database that included all day care instructors, public school teachers, most health care personnel, all firemen, policemen, politicians, their spouses, and in some cases their children’s prints as well, “and I nailed down two. Then on to the State INS database,” Immigration and Naturalization Service, “and a hit for one of the partials, but I’ve got to caution you, it would never hold in court in case that’s a consideration. You got a pencil?”