“The victim’s been identified as Jerry Perillo, age forty-two.”

Sam was embarrassed by the flood of relief he felt when he realized that his brother had not been the victim. For someone else’s family, the news would be heartbreaking.

“Where was the body found?”

“This is a really sick one.” She tucked her notes into her bag. “Perillo was a cancer patient. He was found inside the parking garage at County Memorial Hospital. He’d just come from his chemo appointment.”

Sam pulled to the side of the road. “County Memorial Hospital,” he repeated flatly.

“That’s what he told me, yes,” she replied.

“My sister died in that hospital.”

“I’m confused. I thought you said your sister was married and lived in Blackstone.”

“That’s Andrea. My younger sister, Eileen, died when she was eighteen. Right after she graduated from high school. She had a summer job in Dutton at an ice cream shop. She thought that was so cool.”

“What happened to her?”

“She was on her way home from work one night and one of her tires went flat. Eileen was not the type of girl who wanted to be bothered learning how to change her own flat. She was sure that she’d always find someone else to change it for her, that someone would come along to help her. And for most of her life, that held true. She was the kind of girl the guys fell over themselves just to talk to.” He smiled sadly. “But that night, no one came along, so she started walking. She was only about a hundred feet from her car when she was struck from behind. Hit and run. The vehicle that hit her never stopped. Just left her there to die in the road.” Sam shook his head. “How do you do that to a kid? How do you leave someone lying in the road to die all alone?”

“Sam, I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah. Well, someone eventually did come along, and they called for help, but it was too late. She was taken back to County Memorial but they couldn’t bring her back around.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Fifteen years ago.”

Sam never thought back on that night without his throat tightening. “She was a really good kid. And the thing is, she always thought she was invincible. She always said she’d cheated death once so she was good until she reached her old age.”

“What did she mean by that?”

“When she was, oh, eight or nine, I guess, a bunch of us went ice skating on one of the lakes outside of town. Me, Eileen, a couple of my buddies, and their little sisters. The big brothers-we were all about five years older than the girls-were supposed to be keeping an eye on the girls. Our parents all thought we’d be responsible enough to look out for them. Well, you know how that goes. Some other guys came along and we started playing hockey, and the game got pretty intense and we… well, we…” Even now, all these years later, the words were hard to get out.

“You forgot about your sister and she got hurt?”

“It was so much worse than that. We were really involved in the game, like I said, so when the kids started screaming, we barely even heard it. Then someone grabbed me from behind and swung me around and was yelling in my face that the girls had fallen through the ice. They’d skated onto a section where a stream feeds in, the ice was thinner there. Anyway, three of them went under the ice. We all panicked.

“The ice was too thin to hold us, so we made a chain, you know, the kind where you lay down and hold on to the legs of the person in front of you. I was first in the chain. I got to the hole in the ice and I could see them down there, all of them thrashing around. You couldn’t tell who was who. I just reached in and grabbed the hair of the girl who was closest and pulled her out. It just happened to be Eileen. The guy behind me took her to the ambulance that someone had called and I reached in and grabbed the next girl. But the third girl panicked and got stuck under the ice. I went into the water but I couldn’t get to her in time. I couldn’t save her.”

Fiona reached across the console for his hand.

“Anyway, after that, Eileen thought she was immortal.” He turned to Fiona. “Can you imagine surviving something like that only to be run down ten years later by some cowardly asshole who couldn’t even be bothered to call an ambulance?”

He jammed the car into gear and pulled back onto the roadway a bit faster than he should have. The tires spun and the back of the car fishtailed.

“Sorry,” he muttered. He eased up a little on the accelerator, and tried to will away the image of the churning water, the colors of the girls’ woolen hats just under the icy surface, the arms and legs thrashing, the frenzied gasping for air. His own desperate attempts to save that last girl. He’d discussed the incident once with Annie McCall, and she’d given him the only advice that had stayed with him over the years.

“Maybe there are some things we’re not supposed to forget,” Annie had told him. “Not to assure that we carry the guilt with us forever, but so that we remember that sometimes our very best effort isn’t going to be good enough. It’s a hard lesson but an important one, one we all have to learn. We’re not always going to win. We won’t always save the day. There are some things that are simply out of our hands. All we can do is to try with everything we have to make things turn out right. But if we succeed even half of the time, we should consider ourselves very fortunate.”

The words hadn’t eased his guilt or soothed his conscience over the child who had died, but it had made sense to him and had turned out to be true. He hadn’t always been able to save the day, but he never stopped trying.

“Heal the sick,” Fiona said after they’d driven a few miles, shaking him from his reverie.

“What?”

“Heal the sick,” she repeated. “It’s one of the remaining acts of mercy. Perillo was sick, he was at the hospital for treatment. But he’s broken his pattern. It’s a long way until February.”

“The whole thing with the dates was to get me to make the connection. He probably knows I’ve noticed. He doesn’t have to bother with the details anymore.”

“He’s really escalating.”

“Well, why wait when you don’t have to?” Sam turned to her. “Besides, I don’t think he can. I think he’s reaching that point where he can’t wait to kill again.”

“Only two more acts, Sam,” she reminded him. “Two more victims. Then what?”

“Then it will be over, one way or another.” Sam stared straight ahead at the dark stretch of road that led him home. He knew who the last victim was supposed to be, and he’d deal with it when it came to that. He wasn’t afraid of facing the killer. But he was afraid of who the next victim might be.

He pressed down on the gas and prayed that he’d get to his family in time.

SEVENTEEN

It was not quite daybreak when Sam turned off the road and onto the long hard-packed dirt lane that led to the farm that his great-great-great grandfather had laid claim to so long ago. In the eerie first light just before sunrise, the farmhouse looked like a mirage. The twin silos for which the farm was known rose through the mist toward the sky. The corn stood motionless in the wide flat fields, their pale tops like silken threads, the fat ears plumping for the coming harvest.

Sam drove slowly and quietly, the light spreading with every passing second. Up ahead the farmhouse glowed softly.

“The house is beautiful, Sam,” Fiona said as they approached it.

“It was white forever, for as long as I can remember, even in all the pictures we have from a hundred years ago.” He smiled. “But the last time it needed painting, Tom’s wife said, ‘For God’s sake, Tom, every damned farmhouse for miles around is white. If we’re going to pay someone to paint it, could we please paint it something pretty?’”

“The yellow is pretty. It’s cheery. And, oh, look”-she leaned forward as they drew nearer-“the front door is blue.”