He picked her up in the middle of the night and the rain was still coming down. A decent mid-summer soaker. Between all the sweat and rain lately, Mike thought he was never dry. He opened the door for Lena as she ran down the walk from her house, then jogged around and got behind the wheel.

“Are we on a date?” she asked.

He checked the clock on the onboard computer – just going on 11 p.m. “Kinda late, don’t you think?”

“Did you bring snacks?”

“Right there.”

She pawed through the bag as he pulled away from the curb. “Cheetos? You brought Cheetos to a stakeout? There are no napkins in here.”

“Check the glove box.”

She did, no napkins, so she started going through his belongings. “You’ve got an Adele CD? Mike, I didn’t realize…”

“Hey, get out of there.”

She ignored him and kept shuffling through the mess of items. “Where’s your Michael Bolton? Actually, you seem like more of a Johnny Cash guy… Okay, here’s your registration; looks good, very nice… and what’s this? Is this Kristen?” Lena held up the picture, which was getting old, a folding crease running through it. It showed Mike with a young woman beside a pale blue jalopy.

“That’s her first car,” Mike said. “Thing had a cracked piston ring. She loved it though – kept quarts of oil in the car with her, topped it off every day.”

“She’s beautiful.” Lena studied the picture. “You look happy here. When was this? Had to be seven, eight years ago?”

“About that. Seven years. That’s the house there, too, in the background. We still have it. Five acres of land, there’s a creek in the back woods. Kristen hated the long bus ride, I mostly drove her to school once I got my schedule worked out.”

“Sounds nice.”

Lena lingered a moment longer then put it all back, snapped the glove box closed. Lake Haven wasn’t very big, and they were already coming up to Baker Street, where Dodd lived with his father.

“So, nothing so far on locating Lennox Palmer,” Mike said. It wasn’t really a question.

“Nope. Nothing.”

“And Maybelle Spruce is coming tomorrow to officially identify her sister’s body.”

“Yeah.”

The rain drummed the roof of Mike’s Impala. He slowed as he neared Dodd’s home, doused the headlights, drove in the dark a little ways, pulled off behind another car parked on the street. Dodd’s house was four doors down. There was a light on in the living room, and Dodd’s truck parked in the driveway, plus two motorcycles.

Mike reached beneath the seat and pulled out a pair of binoculars. He looked through the rain and got a better visual on the bikes. “Nice. Couple of Softtails.”

“Harleys?”

“Yup.” He passed her the binoculars.

“Well, then Dodd is definitely our guy,” she said, squinting through the lenses. “Only bad guys drive Harleys.”

“We’re just about to start week two of the Empire State Rally,” he said. “Motorcycles all over the place. I can hear them from my house, and we’re way back from the main road.”

“There’s someone in the window,” she said. “Oh, and look at that. Light just went on in the garage.”

He saw it without needing any magnification.

“Now they’re having their Nathan Bedford Forrest séance.” Her joke was flat with disgust. Thunder rumbled, but it sounded farther off. The storm was moving on, the rain starting to let up.

Lena set the binoculars on her lap, drew a long breath through her nose, rubbed her face.

They waited and watched.

---

One of the men came out of the house and fired up the bike, shattering the midnight silence. He dialed the throttle to rev the engine; the modified exhaust pipes blatted like popcorn thunder. The man left it gurgling and went back inside.

“What if Palmer is in there?” Lena asked.

Mike had been thinking it, and he knew Lena had been thinking it, for over an hour.

“I’m not sure if I hope he’s in there or I hope he isn’t,” Mike said.

“Isn’t,” Lena said. She gave Mike a disapproving look, adding, “We could always go ask.”

“Then we blow it, and whatever might be going on here, they scatter, and we never find him, maybe it screws up everything else, too.”

She sighed. “But we’re… I don’t know. It’s true Dodd’s got a shaky alibi for the night of Harriet’s murder…”

“Real shaky.”

“… and Harriet and Corina Lavoie were both involved in placing his son in foster care, even if Lennox Palmer wasn’t, that we know of. So he’s got motive for them…”

“Yup.”

“… He’s local, he knows the area, knows DSS. If we can connect him to the Fullers, maybe that gives us opportunity.”

Mike was silent, letting her talk.

“Lennox Palmer was familiar to me from the beginning – the name. It’s a unique name. I want to go back to an old case of mine and have a look at something. Jesus, Mike, this thing…”

“Regardless of whether Palmer was part of Dodd’s casework back then, he still works at DSS now,” Mike said. “So he’s not just connected by race. There is that overall through-line: these are all social workers, all civil servants.”

“I hear you, but I don’t know… maybe we’re looking at this whole thing the wrong way…”

“Here he comes,” Mike said.

They watched the man mount the bike, knock away the kickstand, and walk the motorcycle down the sloping driveway to the street.

“We need to follow him,” Mike said, and Lena went for the radio.

Mike grabbed her hand. “Let’s keep it off the air, remember?”

She withdrew. “I want to know where he’s going.”

“Me too. Call Mullins on your cell.”

“What about his cousin?”

“Mostly I didn’t want the two caseworkers to know what we’re doing – Bobbi and the other, Rachel. I think we can let Mullins in.”

Lena was already bringing up his contact info. “Thank God. I thought you were going totally rogue – Mullins is good; we can trust him to keep quiet.”

Mike dropped the car into gear. “Have him come here, wait here. We’re going to follow.”

“Alright.”

Mike rolled out with the headlights off, giving the Caruthers house a look as they cruised by. He glimpsed a couple of shapes in the window and then they were moving on. The Harley guy made a right turn at the end of the street. Lena was giving Mullins instructions on the phone.

Mike didn’t hurry, got to the stop sign, made the turn. A short street, connecting to another in just fifty yards. No visual on the Harley, but he could hear it – the guy had made another right. Mike popped on the headlights, followed, this time goosing the gas, catching up a little bit.

The night was wet, everything glistening. The houses in the neighborhood were old, cure-cottage vintage, with big porches, small lawns. The streets were a crazy scramble, and Mike drove with his ears more than his eyes. Finally, they dropped down a steep hill and hit the main road through Lake Haven. He saw the Harley up ahead, passing the fire station, some cheap apartments, a sandwich shop.

They kept rolling, the bike zipped through a stop light just as it changed from yellow to red. Mike hit the brakes. “Shit.”

Not a lot of other traffic, but he didn’t want to run the red in case the guy was watching in his mirrors. The Harley slipped along, past the post office, past a restaurant on the river, the guttural gurgle of it amplified as it cut through the canal of storefronts. Mike was ready to bust the intersection – he didn’t want to completely lose visual contact; the guy could end up stopping somewhere in town, or park down by the river in the municipal lot, and they’d lose him.

But the light changed, Mike hit the gas, they sped down past the post office, the sound of the Harley engine sinking into the night. Cresting the hill, the Haven Hotel was on the left, Main Street veered off to the right; they passed the bank, gift shop, bike shop, a couple of bars, no sign of the Harley.

Mike felt a pulse from Newberry’s parking lot, thought he saw a couple of people standing around way in the back, on the edge of the dark. The Bark Eater was next, plenty of people out on the deck, drinks in hand, music clanging, the open front door throwing a sticky yellow light.

“Gonna circle around,” Mike said. “Think maybe he stopped in for a drink.”

He turned at the main intersection. The immediate left after it was a one-way, coming the other direction. No one was out on the road, Mike took the turn, sped up the hill going the wrong way, sensed Lena tensing beside him. The back end of the parking lot, though, fed out onto the one-way. Mike looked, no longer saw the people there, and whipped into the lot. He found a parking spot right away near the back and jerked to a halt.

They stared at a row of about fifteen motorcycles, most, if not all of them, Harleys.

He got out and walked along near the bikes, acting casual, going slow, pretended to pick at something in his teeth. The bike near the end of the line gave off some nice heat. The engine pinged once. That was their Harley. The guy driving it had definitely gone into the bar – nothing else was open for business.

Mike returned to the Impala, dropped into the driver’s seat as Lena was getting off the phone. “Mullins is there,” she said. “Says all-quiet. Still one bike in the driveway, plus Dodd’s truck – he said now there’s music coming from inside.”

“Poor Bill,” Mike said. “How does the guy get any sleep?”

“It’s a shit world for an old man,” she mused. Then, “Are you kidding? He’s probably partying the hardest.”

The way the parking lot was L-shaped, they had a view on the back, where a border of trees separated it from the residential street beyond. An alley cut through to the street, another one-way, and the Haven Hotel. Mike keyed the engine and rolled forward a little, tucked them into the corner, against the trees, facing out so they had a good view of the whole lot. The closest street light was far enough away that they were in the dark.

“We’re not going back?” Lena asked. “This guy is just getting his drink on.”

He showed her his palm, where he’d written down the license plate number of the Harley. “Let’s see who he is first.” He tilted the MDT monitor to face him a bit better, tapped the plate number into the small keypad.

The info showed up after a few seconds: Randall Bates, age forty-two, from Malone, New York. He was bald, blank-eyed, with a brush mustache. No wants or warrants, but had an order of protection against him from a woman named Tricia Long.

Lena leaned over and read from the screen, looked at the picture. “Yeah, okay, he’s interesting.”

Mike called BCI and had a researcher log into the eJustice database – Stephanie was off and it was a new kid named Sven. Sven plugged in the information on Randall Bates and in half a minute came back with criminal records. Bates had done seven years at San Quentin for armed robbery.

Mike hung up and said, “Real interesting.”

---

Another hour. They’d exhausted the small talk. Lena knew everything about Kristen that Mike knew – which wasn’t much, he admitted. “How can someone be so close to you, and familiar, and so exotic at the same time?”

“That’s a good thing,” she said. “That means you’re alive. That’s what real parenting is.”

“What did you do with your boys tonight? That same neighbor come over?”

“My neighbor, Rita, yeah.”

“Rita?”

“Yeah, I know. Bit spooky. But I’m lucky to be one of those people with an empty-nester living right next door who loves kids.”

“Is her full name Harriet?”

“Margaret. She’s got eight grandkids. Doesn’t see them much because they’re all over the country. But she seems to love my boys. Her husband spends half the night watching TV, falls asleep in the chair; she’d just as soon come over to my place.”

“Where does she sleep?”

“A sixty-eight-year-old woman, and she crashes on the couch. I’ve told her to take my bed, but she’s too polite.”

“Do the boys each have their own room?”

“We remodeled the basement, Eric moved down there when he was fourteen. He actually did a lot of the work. The kid is handy.”

“So’s Kristen. She’s always liked working with her hands… Okay, we got something.”

They straightened their spines, watched as four men came walking abreast, silhouetted by the main street lights, moving into the dark. Mike grabbed up the binoculars and had a look. Hard to really make out faces, and they were stopping at a parked car, turning their backs. One of them leaned in the driver’s side, popped the trunk. Then two of the other guys started looking around, and Mike recognized them.

“Jesus. You’ve got to be kidding me.” He handed the binoculars to Lena.

She sucked in a breath, looking through. “Fuller?”

“Yeah. Gavin fucking Fuller.”

“And that’s… with him that’s Dmitri Petrov.”

“Uh-huh. That’s the guy Steve Pritchard was fighting with last week.”

“Not only that, Petrov is one of the league guys.”

“You’re shitting me.” Mike leaned forward, squinting. “What’re they doing now?” He could see them gathered at the open trunk, but not much more.

“They’re just looking in the car. How is Fuller out? Must’ve made bail – I didn’t hear about it. He just pointed at something, now he’s laughing a little bit. And the other guy with them, that’s our Harley-driver from Dodd’s house; Randall Bates. The fourth guy – I don’t recognize him.”

“The one who popped the trunk?”

“Yeah. Must be his vehicle, don’t know who he is.”

“Gimme the tags.”

She read off the license plate number and he punched it in, waited, suddenly feeling a kind of frisson he hadn’t felt in years. Maybe ever.

“John Chapman. No warrants. He’s a… okay, he’s fifty, last known address is Ballston Spa.”

“There’s more guys coming.”

“What?”

“More guys.”

Mike saw them, a group of men, their leather clothes sheening under the street lights, on their way over from Main Street, from the bar. “Can I?” He took the binoculars and watched as Chapman closed the trunk of his car, and the men with him dispersed.

“Mike…” Lena sounded like she was getting a little claustrophobic.

“It’s okay… Hang on.”

Gavin Fuller and Dmitri Petrov stayed together, Chapman got in the driver’s side, Randall Bates greeted the others walking to the row of motorcycles. One of the bikers at that point looked toward the back of the lot, seemed to look right at Mike.

He lowered the binoculars, shoved them under the seat. “Let’s go,” he said.