The road dipped down and the city of Watertown spread out, dominated by fast-food restaurants, big box stores, and car dealerships, everything hazy and shimmering in the midday heat.

“I need a record check for a Jameson Rentz,” Mike said on the phone. “I tried calling him twice already today, left messages; he’s not returning calls.”

“Alright, you got it.” Stephanie was a researcher at BCI, and a good one.

“Thanks, Steph.”

Mike rang off and asked Overton, “Who do we have as known associates for Gavin Fuller?”

“I checked, and there’s no one. Fuller’s arrest was fairly small potatoes, just him and his wife. He was selling Suboxone. We charged them with third-degree criminal possession with intent to distribute. Arraigned, remanded to county in lieu of five and ten. The whole thing came out of an overdose case about a month before; a guy was found dead at his apartment up near Glenwood Road, so we talked to the neighbors, they’d seen Fuller coming around. He never confessed to selling to the guy, but we nailed him on the possession anyway.” As Overton spoke, she pulled up to the curb in front of a nice little Colonial-style home with a white picket fence, black shutters, fat bushes flanking the doorway. They’d called ahead to Lavoie’s sister, Maybelle Spruce, who’d agreed to leave work for an hour that afternoon to let them in.

Mike glanced over at Overton. “Alright,” he said about the Fuller thing. Then, “Ready?”

“Yep.”

They headed up a walkway dividing two sections of neatly manicured lawn. The front door opened before Mike could ring the bell.

Maybelle Spruce was a thin woman with shining skin, graying hair pulled back in a tight bun. Her nursing uniform was a peach V-neck shirt and white pants, and she wore white, comfortable-looking sneakers on her feet. “Come on in.”

She led them down a long, creaky hallway. In the kitchen, she offered drinks, which they both politely declined, and sat them down at a thick farm table. “When my husband died,” she said after some small talk, “Corey moved in with me. That’s what I call Corina – ‘Corey.’ My husband had a construction accident, but he was freelance, so there was no insurance. We’d been married just coming up on five years, had this place for three, and there was the mortgage, taxes, all the bills. Corey helped me with all that.”

The sisters were from Watertown, born and raised, Maybelle said. “Our papa worked in a hotel, The Woodruff in the Public Square, was the maintenance man there for forty-five years until he died in ’99. Our mother worked at the school.”

To hear of it, Mike imagined that the Lavoies had been one of few African-American families in Watertown during the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. The demographic had grown but still only hovered somewhere around six percent. Maybelle traced their lineage to Canada.

“Corey was very nice to move in with me,” Maybelle said. “You know, but that was Corey. Her whole life was about doing things for other people. Casework was just part of it; she never really thought of herself.”

Mike asked, “May we see her room?”

“Certainly.”

Maybelle took them out of the kitchen, back down the hallway, and through the foyer where they’d come in. Mike saw several clocks in the next room, all of them clicking, including a handsome grandfather clock with a swinging pendulum. Beside it hung a picture of Jesus framed in gold; the Sacred Heart hovered in front of him, his hand up, two fingers extended. Next to all the clocks, it seemed to send a message: Your time is limited.

Mike turned and followed Maybelle up narrow stairs, the risers white and the treads natural wood. The clocks and picture left his sight.

“Book of Job talks about suffering,” Maybelle said. “I always look at the Book of Job. People ask why God allows suffering, but if you look at Job, you see it there. Because first Papa died in ’99, and he was only sixty-nine, but his heart had trouble, and then my husband Randy in 2008, and Corey moved in. And then Mama finally passed in 2016, and then Corey disappeared the year after.”

She led them down a hallway, back toward the front of the house. Overton, following, turned to glance at Mike, who was bringing up the rear. Overton’s face said it all: This woman had lost everyone in her life over two decades, and here she was, talking about the Book of Job.

“This is it.” Maybelle swung her arm then clasped her hands together again in front of her, began kneading her knuckles. “Corey’s room.”

Overton stepped in, walked around. Mike hung in the doorway next to Maybelle. Simply decorated, with a single bed, a small desk in the corner, a bureau with some pictures standing on top, a crucifix mounted on the wall above. There were a couple of file boxes beside the bed, two stacked on each other, lidded.

Overton asked the questions. “Did Corey ever talk about her work?”

“Oh, no,” Maybelle said. “She wasn’t supposed to say anything about the people she worked with.”

“Just in a general way, then? Did she ever say anything, like she was having a tough time, something like that?”

Maybelle looked into some mental distance. “Oh, you know, sometimes she would come home and she’d just seem tired. But she was… Corey was usually a very upbeat person. You know? Quick to laugh. She’d come home most nights and if I was off, we’d have tea – we’d even stay up and watch Jay Leno on Friday nights.”

“And you’re a nurse?”

“Yes. At Watertown General.”

“So both of you are in the business of helping people,” Mike said, smiling.

Maybelle seemed bashful, tried to find somewhere to look. Mike had all types of friends, ranging the political and religious spectrums, and there was no set temperament that seemed to accompany any belief system. But over the years, he did seem to find a pattern with the devout, people like Maybelle – they were humble. But they weren’t unsuspecting or naïve.

“And you said your sister never married,” Overton resumed, still slowly touring the room, looking but not touching.

“No…” Maybelle seemed to give it some thought. “She was always content being alone. Some people are like that. She had a few boyfriends in school. I think she had a boyfriend in college. But she never… She was…”

“She was choosy,” Overton offered.

“Yes.” Maybelle seemed relieved.

Mike thought the real word she’d been hunting for was chaste. He asked, “So no man in her life around the time of her disappearance?”

She frowned and shook her head. “Oh no. The other… That’s what they asked, too. They thought maybe she’d been in a relationship with somebody, maybe he took her somewhere. But I never thought that. Not for a minute.”

Everything was quiet, just the ticking of the clocks downstairs.

“Thank you so much,” Overton said. Mike stepped back so Overton could exit the bedroom. She said, “We don’t want to keep you from work.”

“Oh, it’s no problem.” Maybelle seemed to remember she was the one guiding the tour and jerked back into motion, returned them to the staircase. “Is there some new evidence in Corey’s case?”

A glance between Mike and Overton. “We’re hoping to shed some light on it,” Mike said, “but it’s early to tell.”

“I understand.”

Down the stairs, and then they stood around in the foyer for another awkward pause. Maybelle blinked rapidly and said, “Oh,” and picked up a purse on a small table by the door, fumbled around for her keys.

She opened the door, Mike and Overton stepped out, then Maybelle followed, locked it behind her.

“We’ll let you know right away if we learn anything new,” Mike said.

---

Detective Frank Corrow was middle-aged, shaggy-haired, wore a brown suit, had sideburns, and generally looked like he’d never quite left the late seventies, stylistically. They met him at the Watertown police station, exchanged greetings, and agreed they’d all pile into his vehicle for the second part of the tour.

If Corrow’s personal aesthetic was outdated, he had a nice, brand-new Impala with all the bells and whistles. He pulsed the gas in traffic, the powerful V6 engine roaring as he jockeyed around the other cars, bringing them to the Watertown Department of Social Services, a square gray block of a building.

“Okay. First stop on the ride: September twenty-second, last year, Corina Lavoie left work. She punched out at 5:02 p.m., and we have video of her in her car, leaving the parking lot at 5:05.” He turned and put an arm up on the seat, gave the two investigators in the back a look. “All good so far?”

Mike felt a little bit like he and Overton were kids, riding in the back seat of the family vehicle. Overton asked, “Did any of her co-workers from that day say anything about her?”

“Nope. She was her usual self. Pleasant, busy, somewhat a private person, I guess. That was the gist I got.”

“And you looked at her cases.”

“Oh yeah. It’s a tough workaround, as I’m sure you’ve found. But, you know, you gotta do it. And I gotta say, not exactly revelatory. I mean, these caseworkers – the stuff they have to deal with… I don’t think I could do it. But you take someone like Lavoie, and she’s on call a lot, because she’s childless; she’s got a real hefty caseload.

“We went back a couple years, looked at ten or so reports. And of these ten reports, only three came back as indicated. You know, somebody makes the complaint, call comes in, report gets filled out, then there’s an investigation. That’s what these people are doing, what Lavoie was doing. But, often it’s something like… say, some fifteen-year-old girl and her mother are in an argument, and maybe it gets a little rough, then the girl falls down, hits her head. That, or it’s suspected child abuse. The report comes in, then the investigation to see if it’s indicated. They can go to the kid’s school, go into the home, sometimes the cops are involved, sometimes it’s more a ‘team’ effort…”

Mike knew all this, but it was interesting to hear Corrow’s take, the way he subtly diminished the scope of Lavoie’s workload, and didn’t interrupt him until the end of his spiel. “Were you ever involved on a case with Lavoie?”

“That’s not my area. That would be the uniformed guys, usually. There was a couple where they had to get involved, where the people wouldn’t let CPS come in the house, things like that.”

“But nothing that stood out to you.”

“No.” Corrow sniffed then rummaged around for something out of sight, put a stick of gum in his mouth, started balling up the wrapper. Mike noticed he looked at Overton in the rear-view mirror quite a bit.

“Did you check into any of the reports?” Mike asked.

“Of course we did, yeah we did. We talked to a couple people. So, like I… this is delicate. You can’t roll up on someone because they had a CPS report at some point. Most of them turn out to be unfounded.”

“But of the indicated cases…”

“We looked at a guy, yeah. He’s since been convicted; he’s a registered sex offender.” Corrow tossed the gum wrapper aside. “But nah, it wasn’t him.” He gave them both a look. “Listen, I understand you got this murder in Lake Haven. I mean, what’s that – first murder in ten years?”

“Eighteen,” Overton said.

“Eighteen years. So you’re scrambling, I get it. But trust me when I tell you, we went through all this with a fine-toothed comb. We worked round the clock for weeks. Months. Nobody from her cases did this. Just remember: Corina Lavoie is a missing person. We didn’t have a corpse, didn’t have a crime scene. All we had was the goddamned car. I think she just took off.”

“And left the car?”

He waved a hand in the air then faced forward, got the Impala moving. “Ah, she was with some guy. Doesn’t matter what her sister thinks – sisters hide things from each other. I know. I’ve got three of them. I bet she was seeing some guy, someone outside the area, and he came and picked her up, you know, met her at the movies and they took off and that was that. She doesn’t wanna be found. She doesn’t wanna go back to that weird little house with all the Jesus stuff in it.” Corrow’s eyes found Mike in the mirror this time. “No offense to any religious sensibilities.”

He took them along the route that Corina Lavoie was supposed to have driven on her last day in a world that knew where she was, what she was doing. Corrow said, “She came home, we’re pretty sure, because the sister said there was evidence of that – Maybelle was away, visiting friends in Gouverneur. Her church group, or something.”

“Her church group had overnight functions?” Mike asked.

Corrow’s eyes in the mirror again. “I guess so. What do I know? The woman says she spent the weekend with friends… Oh, it was a retreat, that’s what it was. A religious retreat.

“But the sister says when she came home she found dirty dishes in the sink, though she’d cleaned up the morning before she’d left, indicating Lavoie had come home after work before going to the movies. Oh, and the clothes – Lavoie had left dirty clothes in the closet, and we showed those clothes to co-workers, and it was what she was wearing that day. We went through her whole wardrobe, the sister helped, trying to do a process of elimination on what clothes she could be wearing based on what she’d left behind.” He started laughing, like it was the funniest thing, and his laughter turned to coughing. Corrow rolled down the window, spat out the gum, rolled it back up.

“So,” Mike said carefully, “Corina Lavoie goes off with some guy she’s secretly seeing, but doesn’t take any of her clothes, any of the things in her room. Just leaves her sister – she moved home to be with her sister, help out. Then she ups and leaves?”

“Look,” Corrow said, starting to sound agitated, “I told you, with all due respect, we went through this. I was in this woman’s room two days—” he held up fingers to accentuate the point, recalling the gesture made by Jesus “—two days I’m in there going through this woman’s clothes, her personal effects. I know it looks capricious, but maybe that’s the point. Maybe she’s bogged down by her sister, her job, and the only way out is to just bolt. Just escape. I’ve seen it plenty of times. And we had no evidence of foul play. Nothing. No blood, no DNA, no weapon, no witnesses. I understand you want to link this to the Fogarty case you got. Whip up a little serial murder investigation. But I can’t sit here and tell you I think Corina Lavoie was murdered.”

He finally fell silent after that, and they slowed in front of Lavoie’s house, where Mike and Overton had just been. Then he sped up again. “So this is the route we figure she took. Mall is a mile away. This is the easiest, most natural way to go.”

He made a few more turns and they made the rest of the trip with no one talking.

Corrow pulled into the mall where the movie theater was, a Regal, with a grand entrance that looked like something out of Las Vegas. Even midday in the middle of a work week, there were plenty of cars. The parking spot Corrow wanted to show them was occupied by a minivan.

“This was the space, right here, this was where her car was. We let it sit here a week; Regal finally threw a fit at us, and we impounded it. Nothing in the car but her registration, a few candy wrappers, a couple pens; that was it. You want to go look at the car, too?”

Mike opened his mouth but Overton beat him to the punch. “No thank you, Detective. I think we’ve seen enough – can you just send us the info on that sex offender you said?”

“Uh-huh, sure,” Corrow said and nailed the gas, Mike feeling the Gs.

---

With Corrow off chewing gum somewhere on his own, maybe grooming his sideburns, the investigators had left Watertown with a copy of the file on Lavoie, a hard summer rain drumming the car’s roof. They were cruising along, Overton driving, Mike reading when Mike said, “Pull over.”

She shot him a look then brought the car to a stop in front of a restaurant. Before she could ask a question, he handed her the open file, poking the top page with his finger. “Read that.”

Overton held his gaze a moment then turned her attention to the file, started reading. “Okay… Lavoie was fifty-five when she disappeared… born in Watertown… went to school at SUNY Buffalo, was a social worker in Buffalo for almost ten years before she moved to Lake Haven to—”

She stopped reading to look at him again. “She worked in Lake Haven?”

“Yeah. And during the time she was a caseworker at Lake Haven, Harriet Fogarty was there, too.”

“Holy shit. How did we miss that?”

“Missing Persons didn’t have her work history. And what Corrow originally sent us only covered the Watertown stuff.”

“He didn’t think it was relevant – we have a murdered caseworker in Lake Haven, and his missing person used to work there?”

Mike didn’t have an answer. Sometimes cops missed things. Corrow was as busy as any other investigator, juggling multiple cases, being a chauvinist.

Overton continued examining the file. “Well, I think he’s just got his mind made up, and that’s the reason. If this is foul play, and someone abducted her, there’s no sign of it. Her car was fine, no scratches, no forced entry, no marks. So I can see why Corrow thought this was a boyfriend or something.” She looked out into the rain.

“Or it just means it was someone she knew,” Mike said. “Maybe the same as Harriet.”

Overton kept scanning, flipping pages. “Not a trace of Steven Pritchard in here,” she said. “Or Jameson Rentz, or the Fullers, nothing. Looks like Corrow worked it for about a month before considering it cold.”

Mike was quiet a moment, letting her read. Then, “Maybe this thing has to do with something further upstream.”

“Like a case they shared back – what? Ten, fifteen years ago?”

“Just a thought.”

“Okay but what about the MO? Like Cheever said, Lavoie is abducted, missing. Harriet is not.”

“That we know of. Lavoie is gone, yeah. Dragged off, hidden, murdered, who knows?” Mike thought of his talk with Crispin about a killer breaking pattern, escalating things, seeking a new high. Maybe hiding a body wasn’t satisfying enough the second time, and no one could see the handiwork when you hid your victims.

Mike’s eyes drifted to the rubbery shapes just visible through the thick rain. A neon sign in the restaurant window glowed red in the dark downpour. They’d stopped in Black River, just outside Watertown, still hours from home. “Again, maybe she knew him,” Mike said. “Maybe Corrow’s got that part right. He met her in the theater, convinced her to go somewhere with him, she never came back.”

“Still a different MO – no sign he was in the car with Lavoie. With Harriet, he obviously had a way in.”

“Right. Maybe he does it one way with Lavoie – uses the fact that she knows him to lure him to his car or something. But maybe that’s too much hassle, almost doesn’t work; I don’t know. Or his relationship to each of them is different, requiring an altered method. But think about it – in twenty years, how many CPS caseworkers have been murdered or vanished into thin air?”

“I’m going to guess two.”

Mike said, “Right now, we’re looking at present, open, child protection cases. Corrow said he looked at ten.”

“Yeah, Corrow…” she said skeptically.

“I think he brushed off the sex offender because of Lavoie’s age.”

“Or maybe her race. I don’t know if Corrow struck me as socially liberal.”

“Me neither. But what I’m saying is…” He took the file back, thumbed through a couple of pages, pulled one out and handed it to her. “Lavoie transferred to Watertown in 2008. Like her sister said, she moved in to be a support. We need to see all her case files.”

Overton clucked her tongue. “That’s gonna be tough – she’s considered a missing person, not a homicide. Her confidentiality is protected. It’ll be hard to get Cheever to sign off on a warrant opening Lavoie’s stuff when the connection is this tenuous.”

“There’s got to be a way around it. I think we can get Cheever on board.”

The rain made shifting shadows over her face as Overton thought it through. She said, “Well, this could be good news for Bobbi Noelle.”

“I think she’d be relieved, yeah.”

“I mean we can’t say anything, obviously… I wish we could. She seems pretty freaked out.”

Mike had felt the same, even if she showed an aptitude for self-defense.

“You know what strikes me about Noelle?” Overton asked.

“How much she looks like she could be Harriet’s daughter?”

“Not that. But that Noelle comes from a well-to-do family – her father worked for Xerox in Rochester for years, and when they shut down he went into business for himself and did very well. What’s she doing up here in the sticks?”

“You’re a classist?”

She hit him on the shoulder. “Stop it. You know what I mean. Stock County is the second most dependent county in the state. Know what the first one is?”

“Point taken.”

“More people in Pierce County on disability, Medicaid, than anywhere else. People are leaving – not coming in. Plenty of jobs and higher pay in Rochester.”

He shrugged. “There’s a need, I guess. And just because she comes from money doesn’t mean she doesn’t have… Maybe it’s one of those things where a kid takes off in a completely different direction from her parents.”

Overton got a half-smile on her face and leaned back in the seat a little, looking toward the restaurant. “Well, my son, Eric, says he wants to be a cop, so, there goes your theory.”

He waved a hand. “Bah, anecdotal.”

“Hardly. You want statistics? I bet we can find them. I bet more kids get up to similar careers than different from their parents. Eldest children, most definitely. What did your father do?”

“Cop.”

Overton threw her head back and laughed. “See? You jerk. Where was he a cop? Around here?”

“Dad worked the Seven-Seven in Brooklyn.”

Her jaw dropped. “East New York?” Sections of Brooklyn in the late 1970s had hotbeds of organized crime and law enforcement corruption; most cops had heard a story or two.

“East New York was the Seven-Five district,” Mike said. “He was right next door.”

She faced him. “You lived down there or what?”

“I grew up there for the first few years, then my parents divorced, I moved up here with my mother but went back to Brooklyn in the summers for a while. How old is Eric now?”

“Uhm, he’s… Eric is sixteen.”

Mike whistled.

“What?” Her eyes accused him though she smiled.

“That’s just got to be something. You’ve got two teenaged boys under your roof. Got to be a handful. And, so, what does…?”

“Avery.”

“And what does Avery want to become?”

“Right now? He wants to go to work for the National Park Agency. But it changes almost weekly. Last week it was a foreign correspondent for a major news network.”

“Where? Like Moscow?”

“No way. Avery is a warm-weather boy. Hates the snow. He’ll wind up someplace tropical.”

“But still a quagmire of American imperialism…”

“I hope not. I plan to visit wherever he goes. Before that, it was a professional surfer. I liked that one.”

“Ambitious for thirteen.”

“You should’ve heard him at five.”

They stopped talking, the rain hitting the roof like coins. Mike’s stomach grumbled, drowned out by the noise. “You want to take this inside?”

“Yeah, let’s do it.”

She handed him back the files and he tidied up. “We’re going to have to run for it,” he said.

---

They each took to a bathroom to dry off then grabbed one of the only free tables. It was the busy summer season, boaters and fishermen and motorcyclists driven indoors by the storm.

The restaurant was attached to a motel; Mike counted seven rooms from his seat by the window. When his eyes drifted back to Overton, he felt his stomach clutch, a sensation he’d long forgotten – he hadn’t experienced anything like it since college, when he’d fallen hard for a girl named Molly.

Maybe it was the fact that Overton’s hair had gotten a good soaking, her blouse was still a little see-through, her skin flush from the run inside. Or maybe it was the way she stood against the wall during interviews, exuding composure while displaying genuine compassion for a victim’s family. Maybe it was her clarity on the job, or her obvious but understated love for her sons.

And then there were her eyes – each color that formed hazel sparkling in the steel light that shined through the big restaurant windows.

“What?” She grew self-conscious. “What are you looking at?”

“Just thinking.” He dropped his gaze and studied his menu.

Heart pounding? You’ve got to be kidding. Days of stomach butterflies and a jacked pulse over a woman were supposed to be long gone.

Shit.

---

They ordered and talk came back around to the case.

“So,” Overton said, sipping a Coke.

“Yeah.”

“Alright – I’ll indulge this. We’ll go with your old scores theory for a minute, see where it leads.”

“Old scores… It’s got a ring to it. Okay.”

“I was thinking about this idea that the killer altered his MO with Harriet. Maybe it was like you said – a better fix.”

“Or maybe it was something unforeseen. Messing up his plan.” Mike took a sip of his own drink, water with lemon.

Overton was watching him. “So let’s say this guy gets involved with DSS and Harriet or Lavoie is his caseworker. Could be both – lots of these cases go through all sorts of social workers, lawyers, judges. Do we have anybody so far that fits? Who do you have written down in your little book there?” She was referring to the black Moleskine notebook he kept, currently warmed by his right butt cheek.

She answered for herself, ticking them off on her fingers. “I’d say you got Pritchard, number one. Jameson Rentz we still don’t have eyes on. Then there’s mystery person X – someone like the sex offender from Corina Lavoie’s cases. What about other employees from DSS? As long as we’re taking it all apart, looking at everything – what about Lennox Palmer? Before he chased down absentee fathers for child custody payments, he was a caseworker, too.”

Mike set down the glass, wiped his mouth with a napkin. He was about to respond when there was a commotion at the far end of the restaurant: two men arguing. Mike didn’t peg them as locals, but bikers. There was a row of nice-looking Harleys parked out front, getting wet. It was that time of year, when long chains of motorcycle enthusiasts roared through the small picturesque towns of the North Country. They came down from Canada, or up from New Jersey, Massachusetts, lower New York. For the most part, they were ordinary folk: weekend warriors who were plumbers and teachers and business owners in everyday life. Occasionally, though, you ran into some hard guys.

“God dammit,” one of the men said loud enough to carry. His tone had a ripple effect on the other patrons, most of whom seemed to shrink in their seats. The biker then shoved his seat back, stood up, and pushed his large stomach through the crowded restaurant and out the front doors into the rain.

Mike glanced at Overton, who was twisted around to watch. She turned back, gave Mike a look, lifting her eyebrows.

The door to the kitchen swung open and a man in a stained white apron looked into the dining room and strode to the table. The cook spoke to the remaining biker, who wore a leather vest and gray goatee. Mike took a long sip of his water.

Overton stood up.

The cook was quieter, but his face was red – he pointed after the biker who’d left. The biker in the vest threw down some cash on the table, stood, and strode to the door, giving Overton a look as he went. Then he was gone and she sat back down.

---

Back in the car, Overton poked at her teeth with a toothpick as she looked at the restaurant.

The storm hadn’t let up. It was getting dark, the rain just slamming down. Three motorcycle riders in leather huddled beneath the awning, peering out at the row of Harleys. Water poured from the gutter ends, milky white.

“A nice family place,” Overton said.

“You looked ready to splash someone on the floor in there.”

She laughed. “Yeah that was tense for a minute.”

They watched the trio of bikers some more and Mike said, “I wonder where their rain gear is.”

“Nobody should ride in this. Why don’t they just get a room?”

He turned toward her, and his heart started to gallop again. Like a teenager, for God’s sake.

“We never really got our flow back in there,” she said.

“Yeah. We need to, ah…”

Then she leaned in toward him a little, her lips slightly parted, like she had a secret.

He closed the distance, wrapped his arms around her.

They had to stretch across the seats and it pinched his sore neck, but it was worth it.

Totally frigging worth it.