Lily shook her head. ‘You men. You always want to know who did this or that terrible thing, so someone can find them and make them pay. Always it’s been like this for men, the eye for the eye, as if it would make any difference.’

Jack was well on his way to a fine toot by the time Marty and Lily got up to the house, the weight of the weather and their conversation weighing them down, slowing their steps.

He was sitting at the kitchen table, a bottle of Glenlivet in one hand, a glass in the other, dispensing unwanted legal advice to Officer Becker. The young cop was standing off to one side, watching his charge, the windows, the doorway. Marty figured he’d had them made before he and Lily ever got anywhere near the house.

‘Marty, ole’ buddy, glad you’re here. Tony here’s a hell of a nice guy, but he’s a little stiff, you know? And he’s making me nervous, hopping around peeking out windows and all that.’

‘That’s his job, Jack. Saving your sorry life.’

Jack giggled. ‘A little too late for that.’

‘We’re all going to a hotel. Right after supper.’

Jack raised his glass. ‘Whatever you say, Marty. In the meantime, grab yourself a glass, I’ll make your world a better place.’

And it was a little too late for that, too, Marty thought, watching Lily shoot a sharp glance in Jack’s direction that sent him slinking away into the living room, Becker close behind.

They ate a myriad of cold salads and meats contributed by thoughtful friends and neighbors. ‘Funeral food,’ Lily called it, making a plate to force on Officer Becker while Marty made one for Jack he probably wouldn’t eat.

After supper Marty went upstairs, showered, dressed, and started packing a few clothes in his duffel. In the contained environment of a hotel with an officer posted at the door, Jack and Lily would be perfectly safe. There was no logical reason for him to go with them – except for this sudden sense that that was where he belonged. This was his family, dysfunctional though it was. It was all he had; all he’d ever had, really.

When he went to the closet to get his favorite shirt – a short-sleeved white linen Hannah had gotten him for his birthday last year – it slipped from the hanger and fell on the floor. When he bent to retrieve it he saw an old red metal tackle box tucked into the back corner.

‘I’ll be damned,’ he murmured, pulling it out, remembering his disbelief when Lily told him Morey had gone on fishing trips with Ben Schuler. He flipped the hasp, opened the lid, and saw an array of lures, hooks, and bobbers, still encased in unopened plastic, tucked into the neat compartments of the upper tray. Marty didn’t know much about fishing, but he did know you probably had to take the lures out of the plastic to use them. This was not the tackle box of a real fisherman.

He caught himself smiling. In his heart he had known that Morey, who revered all life, was incapable of pushing a barbed hook through a live worm, but Lily’s assertion had been so unequivocal, it had planted a troubling seed of doubt. What he was looking at now seemed to prove that Morey had been exactly the man he appeared to be. He may have sat on a dock or in a boat with Ben Schuler, but Marty would bet his life that he never dropped a line in the water. As a matter of fact, he probably freed the minnows when Ben wasn’t looking.

He lifted the top tray by its handle, and stared curiously at what lay beneath – a clear plastic sandwich bag, and inside it, a passport.

Morey Gilbert smiled at him from the photo on the inside of the front cover. Not the young Morey who had come to America in the late forties, but Morey as Marty had known him. He checked the date of issue – eight years ago – and flipped through the pages, his frown deepening with every entry stamp, then he tucked it into his pocket.

There was a small, dirty cloth bundle on the bottom of the tackle box. Marty tugged at a corner of the fabric, then scrambled backwards when the thing inside fell out, his heart pounding, his mind seeing Morey again, standing at his front door holding out a paper grocery bag. It had been exactly one month since Hannah’s murder.

This is for you, Martin.

What is it?

Jack’s inheritance back when he was my son. He didn’t want it; now it’s yours.

I’m not taking Jack’s inheritance, Morey… Jesus. Where did you get this?

Beautiful, isn’t it? Government Model 45-A Colt. Custom pearl handle. It’s over sixty years old. I took it off a dead Nazi who probably killed an American officer to get it. This is the most valuable thing I own, Martin. This is my legacy.

Marty sat on the bedroom floor, catching his breath, staring at the pearl-handled.45 preposterously kept in the bottom of a tackle box. He’d never expected to see that gun again.

He didn’t know he was reaching for the gun until he felt the smooth mother-of-pearl against his palm. The texture, the weight, the little indentation in a curve of the trigger – it was all the same. Exactly the same as it had been last time.

He smelled urine in the room, smoke, and the unmistakable acrid odor of someone cooking death. A rat crossed his path, stopped and looked at him, then moved on at a leisurely pace. He watched his own shadow move along the wall he approached, darkening the long, stringy blond hair of the noncreature who slumped there as he slid a needle into his arm.

And then he saw the eyes he would never forget, the pale, sinewy hands that had slashed Hannah’s throat, and then the Colt, rising into his line of sight, pointing at Eddie Starr’s forehead like an accusing finger. Fire seemed to jump from the muzzle when he pulled the trigger, but it didn’t startle him. He stood there for many moments, watching with empty eyes as red blood dripped down the wall.

The next morning Marty had gone to the nursery and given the gun back to Morey. It was too valuable, he’d said; too much a part of family history; he couldn’t keep it. That afternoon he’d bought the.357 and started planning his suicide.

He was calm now, maybe calmer than he’d been in months. He carefully wrapped the gun, put it back in the tackle box, and tucked that back in the closet corner where he’d found it. At some point in the last three days he’d decided he still had a family, he still had obligations, and amazingly, he still wanted to live.

So he’d turn in the gun, he’d turn in himself, and he would pay the price for what he’d done, because that was the way it was supposed to work.

But not just yet.

36

By five o’clock Magozzi could see thunderheads piling up in the distance outside the window, as if someone had dumped a bag of cotton balls on the western horizon. Langer had come back from his hasty exit from the office a few minutes later, looking a little pale, but solid, and they’d all been hitting the phones ever since.

They’d confirmed unsolved murders that matched the dates on the twenty most recent photos pulled from the Schuler house, put the locals to work tracking family members, but now they were hitting a wall. Farther back than that a lot of law enforcement records were archived in dusty boxes in a warehouse someplace, and most of the detectives who had worked them were long since retired.

Magozzi wasn’t particularly worried. The way he figured it, if some vengeful family member wanted payback for a relative Morey, Rose, and Ben had killed, they weren’t likely to wait that long anyway. If it was a family member at all. There were no guarantees with that theory. Maybe they were just spinning their wheels in a rut that went nowhere, and that did worry him.

But ten minutes ago he’d come upon something interesting, and now he was drumming his fingers on his desk, waiting anxiously for the phone to ring.