We search for Val. Call for Val. There’s no sign that either of them was here except for that bullet in the wolf-dog, and even that’s hardly ballistic proof. It just means someone shot her with a 9 mm.

I don’t know what’s going on here. I can speculate, but the whole thing is just fucked up. There’s no other term for it. Too many puzzle pieces could fit the hole, and yet none are exactly right.

Did Brady set all this up? That’s the answer I both like and hate. My gut likes it for the lack of coincidence. My head hates it for the complexity of the plan.

Also, do I like it a little too much because it proves Brady is a monster, which makes this easier? If it wasn’t for Val, having Brady escape might be the best possible solution—let him die out here, no longer a threat to Rockton. But if he is indeed innocent . . . ? Then he is like any other resident, and we failed him. He ran because we failed. He took Val because we failed. We put his back to the wall, and he lashed out.

Do not test me. If you do, you’ll see exactly how desperate I am.

Please. Just let me go.

Val is the priority here. But she’s nowhere to be found.

We return to the dead wolf-dog, and I examine the site. I find traces of footprints, but the ground is hard enough that they’re only smudges, too faint to even tell if they’re ours. Hell, even a perfect print of Brady’s sneakers could be from our first time here.

When we’re finished, I check Dalton’s hand. The puncture wounds are red and inflamed.

“ ’Cause it’s a bite,” he says. “Trust me, I’ve had them. Gotta get it cleaned and then bandaged so it stays clean.”

I nod.

“I’m okay, Casey.”

I nod again. He puts his fingers under my chin and tilts my face up and bends to kiss me. It’s a very sweet kiss, and when it breaks, I say, “You do realize that’s an invitation for us to be attacked.”

“I’m setting a trap.”

I smile at that, and he kisses me again and then feigns stretching a kink from his neck.

“You gotta get taller,” he says.

“I’ll work on that.”

I smile again, because I know he’s trying to coax one from me.

He rests his forearms on my shoulders. “This sucks.”

I do laugh at that. He’s right, though. It might not be the most erudite description of the situation, but it’s completely apt. There is nothing we can do about this. Maybe not even anything we could have done to prevent this. It just sucks.

“I should have gone looking for you during the fire,” he says. “Should have realized something was up. Fuck, I should have realized what was up—obviously someone set that fire for a reason. We might have stopped him.”

“Or gotten Val killed. Gotten me killed. Forced Brady into a panic and sent him over the edge. In hindsight I should have told you what I was doing. But I was playing a hunch, and my hunch was that someone was using the fire as a distraction to kill Brady. While I wasn’t going to sit back and let that happen, it wouldn’t be the biggest tragedy in the world. Even if he’s innocent. That’s a shitty thing to say, but he was a threat either way.”

“Impossible situation.”

I nod.

He looks out at the forest. “Still plenty of daylight left. You okay with walking another hour or so? Gives us a chance to get farther in while heading for a destination.”

“Jacob’s camp?”

He nods.

“You’re worried?”

“Nah. Brady’s not going after anyone out here. I still want to warn Jacob, though. I also want to let him know what’s going on, get him to talk to Brent, maybe Ty, set them looking for Val.”

“Good idea.”

* * *

Jacob’s camp is empty. That’s no cause for alarm. He’s packed it up, which means he headed off on his hunting trip. I feared that after he didn’t leave a message yesterday. I know Nicole will be hurt, and I hate seeing that.

On our way back to town, we take a different route to widen the search. There’s still no trace of Brady or Val. Tomorrow we’ll visit Brent and swing by the cabin that Cypher used for the winter, see if he’s still lurking about. Brent’s easy to find, though, and he’s a former bounty hunter, which makes him as good a tracker as Jacob.

Back in Rockton, the first thing I do is treat Dalton’s hand. He’s right that it just looks like a bite, but that won’t keep me from worrying.

Anders has explained the situation to the residents. Oliver Brady used the fire as a distraction to escape. He took Val hostage, with a promise to leave her at a set location in an hour. If we hadn’t agreed, he’d have killed her on the spot. Val was not at the promised location. We are currently searching for them.

He doesn’t mention that we suspect the fire was deliberately set. That implies an accomplice, and people might jump to the conclusion it’s the guy we locked up. We won’t do that to Kenny. After Roy’s bullshit, we don’t trust people not to take justice into their own hands.

We passed a search party as we were coming in. Dalton told them to keep at it for another two hours and then switch off with a fresh group. We have the advantage of daylight at this time of year, and we can keep hunting until nearly midnight.

Next stop is the wolf-dog cub. When we enter my house, Dalton blocks the exit, expecting the cub to charge for freedom. He doesn’t . . . because he’s hiding behind the sofa.

I pull him out. I’m dressed in long sleeves and gloves, but he doesn’t try to bite. Just shakes and whines. I’ve brought sedative, and he yelps at the needle, but a few minutes later, he’s limp in my arms.

I work on his injured front leg. It’s not as bad as I feared. It’s just messy, flesh ripped as he’d struggled against the snare wire.

I bandage the wound. Then Dalton covers the cloth in a goop we use with Storm, when she insists on licking a cut or sting.

Once I’m done, I lean back on my haunches. He looks more like a lion cub than a wolf or a dog, with thick tawny fur, gray and dark brown striping, and an even thicker mane around his head. He has the same freckles as his mother, though.

“Do you think the father was a dog?” I ask.

“Probably not. Take away the coloring and those freckles, and he’s wolf.”

“Which is a problem.”

“Either way, it’s a problem. I’d rather face a wolf, but dogs have the genes for domestication. Wolves don’t.” He looks down at the cub and sighs.

“We’ll keep him until we know he isn’t rabid,” I say. “Then we can . . . do whatever.”

He slants me a look. “Do you really think either of us is going to be able to ‘do whatever’ after we’ve nursed him back to health?”

I don’t answer.

“Yeah.” He heaves to his feet. “We’ll wait and see. But if anyone comes looking to adopt a puppy, the answer is fuck no. This isn’t a pet. We can’t turn him out into the woods at this age, though. Can’t raise him and then release him after he’s lived with humans. That’s just as cruel. Dangerous, too.” He runs a hand through his hair and sighs again.

“We’ll figure it out,” I say. “You and I both understand this isn’t a pet wolf. But it’s not a rabid dog either.” I pause and look down at the sleeping cub. “Or so we hope.”

“He’s not. Just gotta wait to be sure and then we’ll . . . figure shit out.”

* * *

Figure shit out.

That’s what we’re doing, on so many levels, over the next twelve hours. There’s still enough light for us to get to Brent’s that evening, but Dalton doesn’t want to leave town. We’ll go at first light.

Dalton joins the last evening search. That’s where he’s best right now, as our top tracker.

He takes Storm. We’re hoping to make a search-and-rescue dog out of her. That’s what the breed is used for, though more commonly water-based, given their webbed feet and double coats. But her sense of smell is excellent, so that’s our plan. She’s only eight months old, just entering doggie adolescence, with the attention span to match. This is the one area of her training where I’ve discovered I can’t push. I’ve introduced her to the concept of tracking, and we work on it weekly, but it’s mostly play at this point—I give her the scent of someone in town, and if she can find her target, she gets a treat. If the trail’s too convoluted, though, she loses interest.

Still Dalton takes her, along with Brady’s and Val’s dirty clothing. Storm has spent enough time around Brady that we hope that helps—she’s definitely better at finding residents she knows. She knows Val less well—big dogs make Val nervous—but Storm only takes a quick sniff at Val’s blouse, as if to say, “Okay, I know who you want.” Which is promising.

They leave, and I stay behind to “figure shit out.”

Some of that is investigating, some is talking to people, and some is just staring into space and thinking, and then jotting those thoughts into my notebook.

Brady had an accomplice in town. That is a fact. There is absolutely no way someone coincidentally set fire to that shed when Brady was out of the cell. His accomplice put poison in his food, enough to make him violently ill. That gets Brady out of the cell and into the clinic, which was exactly the scenario I expected the moment I saw him throwing up. Not this old chestnut—prisoner fakes illness to get to a less secure environment. Except he hadn’t been faking. He’d gone the extra step and let himself be poisoned.

From there, I’d supplied Brady with a hostage. A nurse at his bedside. Then his accomplice sets the fire and Brady grabs Val as insurance to get him out of town.

Next Brady knows the wolf-dog is near that spot. He poisons her—and kills her poor cubs—to slow us down. It also gives him an “excuse” for Val not being there, in case we catch up with him. He couldn’t exactly leave her with a frothing canine, right?

And the sniper? It could very well have been his accomplice, hoping to convince us Brady was in danger. Or hoping to scatter us so he could rescue him.

As a hypothesis, this solidifies Brady’s guilt. He is a monster. A killer.

But it’s only a hypothesis. The assassin might have come from his stepfather. That would give Brady reason to panic. Then Brady enlisted a local mercenary of his own, with promises of rich reward.

Was Kenny that local mercenary? He is just about to leave, and he’ll need money. Still, when I consider him as a suspect, I feel sick. I won’t interview Kenny until both Dalton and Anders are back. The point is that Brady has a confederate in Rockton, and it doesn’t matter right now if it’s Kenny or . . .

There’s another possibility. One person that I know suspects Brady is innocent. The one who delivered that petition. Also the one who came running to notify us of the fire. Jen.

Too much to think about. It’s a puzzle of configuration, and each piece in it has two sides—guilt or innocence—and the meaning changes depending on which side I place up. If Brady is innocent, then x. If he is a monster, then y. Two ways of looking at everything, leading to two ways of investigating.

Stop. Focus.

Take it apart. Look at the trees, not the forest. That’s what my first detective partner taught me. There are times when, yes, it’s good to step back and see the whole. But there are also times in police work when you must focus on the minutiae. On the trees. On one puzzle piece. Figure out where that fits and that’ll help you find where another goes. Get a few of those done and then step back, or you’ll go crazy with possibilities, each configuration sending the investigation spiraling in a new direction.

Focus.

Start with the fire.

The problem with determining the cause of a fire? The evidence has gone up in smoke. Which is why there are trained experts for this—experts who are not police detectives. But I am every investigator in Rockton, and this is one of the many areas I’ve been researching. I’ve always been a believer in lifelong learning. I took every course my department would send me on. Learned every new technique. Subscribed to every journal. Attended every local conference on my own dime, even as my colleagues rolled their eyes and said, “We hire experts for that, Casey.” True. I did not need to know anything about forensic anthropology, because I wouldn’t ever be the person analyzing buried remains. But I wanted to know. And now I am that person. Jack-of-all-trades, feeling truly master of none.

Arson investigation.

I evaluate the scene. Document it. Process the evidence.

This time, the building has been saved. There’s damage, but it can be repaired. And it doesn’t take much investigating to know it’s arson. The smell of kerosene gives it away, as it did the last time.

It is an arson easily set by anyone with any knowledge of wood and access to kerosene. Which really doesn’t narrow it down in Rockton.

Dalton comes back ahead of the others. A dripping black rug trails behind him with a look that is unconvincingly contrite.

“Got too close to the lake, didn’t you?” I call as I walk toward them.

Dalton only sighs.

“We need to take her there more often,” I say, “so the siren’s call of water is a little more resistible.”

“I’m not sure it ever will be. Been thinking of buying one of those pools.”

“The plastic kiddie ones? She’s a little big for that.” I gingerly pat her wet head, and she slumps happily.

“I mean the ones you set up,” he says. “The bigger pools.”

“Then we’ll have to keep the humans out of it.”

“If they want to swim in dog fur, they can go ahead. Just make a rule: you use it; you clean it.”

He walks over. I take his hand to examine it, but he wraps his fingers around mine, holding tight. His expression is calm, as if he’s just returned from a walk in the woods, but his tight grip tells me the rest.

“Not a trace,” he says. “Storm did well. She found the trail out of town and followed it along the path. They turned off before the spot with the wolf-dog.”

“Turned off or doubled back?”

“That’s the problem. The trail left the path, and Storm followed it awhile, but the undergrowth thickened and hit a whole warren of rabbit holes. She went nuts and lost the trail. I couldn’t get her to focus. So I took her backwards, in hopes she’d pick it up again.”

“And?”

“And I don’t know. She kept finding the same end point. I moved higher up the path in case he rejoined it, and then we were too close to the dead dogs.”

He looks down at her. “She smelled those, and she was upset. Really upset. She got away from me and kept nosing the first cub and . . .”

He exhales. “It wasn’t good. I got her out of there. Which means I can’t answer the question. All I know is they left the path at one point and neither of us could figure out where they’d gone from there.”