Connor was working around Moody Pond not far from where Lennox lived, and so Bobbi circled the pond, looking for his truck.

She found it and waited.

She’d been texting Connor throughout the day, his responses curt, though he’d said he was sorry about Lennox, hoped he was found soon.

He emerged from the woods twenty minutes later with another surveyor, who climbed into the truck. Connor opened the door and stopped, spotted Bobbi. He said something to the other guy, shut the door, and headed over, his expression hopeful. “They find him?”

Bobbi got out of her car, shook her head.

He gazed at her a moment, then looked off into the trees. There was a smudge of dirt on his face, and he was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, with an orange, reflective safety vest and orange hard hat. “Pretty crazy,” he said. His eyes drifted back to her. “You okay?”

“I’m okay. How’s Joly?”

The mention of his son seemed to sting Connor a bit, but he recovered, said, “He’s good. With his cousins tonight, giving me a break.”

“Yeah? You going out?”

“Just a couple beers maybe. It’s Monday, so, open mike night at JJ’s.”

“Cool… My friend Rachel is a wreck. You know they released the name of the woman from Watertown? You were right.”

“Yeah. Saw it on the news. She was in a river?”

“In a pond near some nature preserve. I don’t think I’m going to stay out after dark tonight. I didn’t go to bed last night, I was awake until dawn, it was just so…” She trailed off, catching herself telling him her troubles like he was her boyfriend. She could see the same thought register in his face, and he cleared his throat, glanced at the truck, started to move away.

“Listen.” She caught his arm, quickly let go. “Let me, ah… Can we talk?”

His eyelids drooped and lips formed a tight line. “What do you want to talk about?”

“Let’s just talk…”

“Bobbi… I don’t want to play any games.”

“I know you don’t. I don’t either. I’m sorry.”

“I have a kid, you know? Yeah, I have a kid. But I’m his parent. That’s how it works. That’s why I don’t wear a T-shirt saying, you know, Single Dad Looking for New Baby Mama.”

He took his construction hat off, ran a hand through his mass of dark, sweaty hair, and his eyes acquired a sadness. “Okay. I gotta go take a shower. Like I said, we’re going to JJ’s, maybe to Trackside, have a few beers.”

Softly: “Who’s going with you?”

“Just me and a couple of the other guys.”

He meant surveyors on his crew, she assumed, and flicked a look at the guy in the truck, who was watching. She wanted more time with Connor, was afraid to let him walk away. “What’re you guys doing out here?”

“What’re we doing? We’re making precise measurements to determine property boundaries. We’re providing data relevant to the shape and contour of the Earth’s surface.”

She felt some relief at his dry humor. “It’s important work…”

“That’s why they pay me the big bucks. Hey – look, I gotta go. Okay?”

He started to the truck, and she let him, just waited, feeling her heart beat against her ribs, a mix of emotions pin-wheeling her thoughts – she should be thinking about Lennox, thinking about Rachel, not watching Connor’s ass as he climbed up into his truck, not feeling like she’d screwed this up royally. That was selfish. Seemed like no matter what she did, the timing was bad lately.

Connor fired up the engine and did a three-point turn in the road. He drove back her direction, slowed, leaned out of his open window. “Your back tire is low,” he said.

“I’ll check into it.”

“Alright.” He gave her one last look, then drove away.

---

The son of a bitch was dug in like a tick.

For a little while, Mike had been chasing Petrov up the street – River Street. Like he was going to the pea-green house, and it was a cook-house, and that was the damn smell the real estate agent couldn’t get out.

The whole reason for talking to Petrov, Mike had thought, scrounging for breath as he ran, was because Petrov was tied in to Gavin Fuller and Steve Pritchard, and Harriet could be dead because of some big meth deal, maybe Lavoie, too. Chasing him down under the beating hot sun, headed up River Street, he’d wondered if Petrov could be the one who’d killed Harriet, hired by Pritchard. Maybe Petrov had been using the house to watch Harriet from there, waiting for her to be alone.

But then Petrov had changed course and moved deeper into the forest.

Mike tracked him to some long-abandoned place – just the crumbling foundation of a house left in the middle of the woods, with the rotted, rusted skeleton of an old T-model Ford sitting nearby. And then Petrov did something Mike never would have expected a real adult human to do – he climbed a fucking tree. And he wasn’t coming down.

Mike had his gun out, aimed up at Petrov, and was catching his breath, still marveling that this was actually even happening. He moved a little closer, only able to see pieces of Petrov up in the tree – just his leg and part of his arm. He’d found a nice maple, plenty of branches, and was at least thirty feet in the air, still climbing. Bits of tree came falling down, landed on Mike’s face.

How did an overweight, out-of-shape, middle-aged man like Petrov climb a tree like a child? Pure adrenaline; he was panicked.

“Dmitri! Come on, man…” Mike struggled for breath. He’d run for so long his clothes had dried. “What are you… doing? You’re gonna… How are you even…?”

He heard crashing footsteps, turned, and saw Farrington huffing and puffing, coming up to where the ground leveled off. Farrington looked around at everything, the old foundation with the metal bed frame still in it, piles of rock and brick, everything covered with lichen. “What the hell?” Then he followed Mike’s aim. “Jesus, he’s up there?”

“Dmitri! Come on down, man. You can’t stay up there. Let’s go.”

“I want lawyer!”

Mike sighed, wiped sweat and tree leaves out of his face, spit something to the side. “Who’s your lawyer? You got one? Pritchard’s got a lawyer; maybe you can use the same one.”

“I want lawyer or I jump!”

“Dmitri… we were just talking…”

Petrov tried to climb higher.

Farrington bent forward, hands on his knees, still getting his wind back. He looked up at Mike with a bemused expression and said, “Should we just read him his rights?”

“Why are you running, Dmitri? What did you and Pritchard have going? Talk to me, man. Maybe you’ve done nothing wrong and this is all a big misunderstanding, right?”

Petrov called, “Yes. Misunderstanding!”

It was hurting Mike’s neck to keep looking straight up like this. He lowered his chin to his chest, rolled his head around a few times, then tilted back again. “Dmitri, let’s go, bud. Did you hurt someone?”

“No! I hurt no one.”

“Then you got nothing to worry about from us.”

“You’re not who I worry about.”

More shit fell out of the tree; Mike felt something go in his eye. He was getting angry. “Then who are you worried about? Huh?”

“You’ll make me try tell you, then they will come. They will kill me.”

Mike said to Farrington, “He’s talking about Dodd Caruthers and Chapman. All of them.”

“Yeah,” Farrington agreed.

“You got all these bikers driving all over the state,” Mike said, “a ready-group of couriers. They go around gathering precursors – Red P., iodine, pseudoephedrine – bring them to Caruthers, and maybe Chapman runs the meth lab. Or Chapman’s just collecting everything, transporting it to the lab in his trucks.”

Mike moved off, saying to Farrington, “Just keep him from jumping.” He took out his phone, called Wright with the DEA team.

“We’re just getting set,” Wright told him. “We got a guy going in now, using a UPS truck, gonna have a look around Chapman’s property.”

Mike explained the situation with Petrov. “Oh boy,” Wright said. “Yeah, he’s shitting his pants because he got in with these guys. Maybe Pritchard was trying to work the end with this family farm of his. Expand, maybe get a little closer to Truenol, who knows.”

“Keep me posted.”

“You still think this ties into your vic, or what?”

Mike used a hand to shield his face from any more debris – even though he’d backed away from the tree – and looked up at Petrov. Obviously, Petrov didn’t fit the narrative of a disgruntled, dejected parent or someone coming back around on DSS with this salvo of attacks. Maybe he was in over his head in some meth operation – maybe he’d even been the one to first talk to Pritchard about the use of Pritchard’s family farm downstate. But was he a murderer? Or was he just scared?

It was getting late, the daylight turning salmon, the sunlight blinkering through the trees as Mike walked back to where Farrington stood looking up at Petrov. The barefoot man had at last gotten as high as he could climb. Mike heard more people walking through the woods, saw two Lake Haven cops step into the clearing beside the old foundation, giving everything a look, their eyes wide, breath coming hard. “Jesus,” one of them said.

From up in the tree, barely audible: “Think I am stuck.”

---

Finally back on the ground, his bare chest scratched and bleeding, leaves in his hair, Petrov agreed to cooperate as long as he stayed protected. Farrington arrested him with the local cops stepping in to assist. They led him out of the woods like an old-time posse who’d finally caught their quarry.

Mike walked slower, lagging behind, and clicked on his flashlight since it was almost full dark. He and Wright updated each other again by cell phone. Wright said their undercover UPS guy had a good scout, saw that the silo was definitely active, the door equipped with a huge padlock, tire tracks everywhere, signs of people coming and going.

“This is a major piece,” Wright said. “Chapman has got grain production going at his elevator, looks like he’s been up and running from everything we’ve seen. We’re still chasing the paper trail, but at first blush, he’s subcontracting for Truenol.”

It sounded like Wright was driving, road noise in the background. “They can process up to 40 million bushels of grain a year. And so that turns into something like 100, 110 million gallons of ethanol, dry distiller’s grain with solubles, and we’re thinking a shit ton of meth.”

“So, Chapman is sending down the grain. In what? Barrels?”

“Well, yeah. Corn. A bushel of corn weighs fifty-six pounds. We’re going to set up at the weigh station in North Hudson. We’ll have a good look at what’s inside the next truck Chapman sends down.”

“That’s my old stomping ground,” Mike said. He pulled a cobweb off his face. Almost out of the woods now, feeling good. “Hey, Wright, I got another call.”

“I’ll talk to you later.”

Mike picked up the other call. “Nelson here.”

“So while you were chasing Dmitri Petrov up a tree,” Lena said, “I was humbly cross-referencing away. Mike – Trevor Garris drives a dark blue, late-nineties model Buick LeSabre. I called the witness, the one who was camping and came back and saw the car the night of. I had her come down to the station, and she officially IDed the car.”

Mike thought it through. “But Garris is staff. He’s their IT guy. We did background checks on all the employees.”

“Not in this case: Garris was hired on a contractual basis, so no civil service exam, none of the typical background checks; physical, drug screening, nada. Apparently, their own IT people couldn’t do what was needed for the big upgrade, so they brought in Garris.”

Mike tried to picture Trevor Garris in his mind. Big guy, prematurely balding. Or receding hairline, was the right way to put it. “Shit. Bobbi Noelle told me that Lennox Palmer and Trevor Garris were friendly.”

“What’re you doing?”

“Getting out of the woods. Back to my car. Coming to you now.”

---

Mike pulled out Trevor Garris’s picture in Lena’s office, slapped it down on the table. Then he went rummaging around for something else in the file, mumbling. “The kid…”

Lena cautiously approached from behind her desk. “What kid? Durie? I had Stephanie run a check, like you asked, but he’s nowhere in the system.”

Mike found the class picture he’d photocopied from the school, and pointed out ten-year-old John Durie. “Look at him.”

“Alright. I am.”

“Now look at Garris.”

Mike put the pictures side by side on her desk and waited. He said, “Stephanie found out that the mother died about six months after that bust. Melissa Clay. She’d gone right into rehab as part of the sentencing for the charge – not jail. She comes out, gets her kid back at this point – her son, John Junior. But then she starts using again, this time heroin, and little John finally gets taken away. Then she O.D.s; dies in a bathtub in South Burlington. By then the kid was already in foster care – we just don’t know where. Two months later, the father completes a suicide in jail. So, this kid, John Durie, he’s an only child, has some brain damage maybe from the ammonia hydroxide, drug bust puts his father in jail, Child Protective Services takes him from his mother, who O.D.s. Now he’s an orphan.”

Lena took a couple of steps back from the table, her eyes on Mike, then she glanced away. “Ah shit, Mike.”

“They look similar, don’t they? In the eyes, the nose there. You see it?”

She nodded, unspeaking.

Mike went for the phone on her desk, picked it up. “Where is the contact information for DSS employees?”

She came around behind him, clicked through files on her laptop, and pointed out Trevor Garris’s cell phone. Mike punched in the number, waited, got a voicemail. “Mr. Garris, Mike Nelson with the state police. Give me a call back if you can – just have a few questions for you… Need your technical expertise. Thanks.”

Mike walked back to the file on the center desk. “If I can just find this Durie kid’s trail, where he went… Because he just disappeared.”

“Foster parents have to be licensed by the State of New York,” Lena said. She pecked at the keyboard. “Once a DSS investigator gets a call and determines that there’s cause to remove a child from a home, they contact local county agencies to place the child and have them work the case. Right?”

“That’s my understanding.”

“Okay, so… Family Court matters are handled by court circuit – the 20th judicial circuit services Pierce County. If he lived here…” She squinted, looking at the screen, and Mike moved beside her. “The county where the child lived would handle the dependency case – the parents would be seen in that courthouse for all judicial reviews, and have to deal with DSS in that county, if there was one.”

“And there is one.”

“Yes,” Lena said. “But the child might not wind up placed in that county – maybe there’s not enough homes. So, foster homes can be outsourced, and on any given day a prospective foster parent can get a call from one of several local agencies with a child that they urgently need to place, adoptive parents too. Okay, I’m looking at the adoption actions we’ve got, hang on.”

Mike moved to the window, looked out at the main street, thinking. It all meant that if this was some kid who’d grown up with a chip on his shoulder, had snapped and gone after DSS caseworkers perceived to have ruined his life, he could have gone just about anywhere.

Lena said, “Got something. H. Garris in Saratoga.”

“Jesus, Lena… Saratoga… What if John Durie was adopted by someone down there, the Garrises? You got a number?”

“But,” she said, “different names?”

“Maybe they changed it to give the kid a fresh start, something like that.”

She gave him the number and he placed the call. The line rang until a young male voice answered. He identified himself as twenty-year-old Alex Garris when prompted. Mike said who he was, then asked, “Are your parents home, Alex?”

“They went out to a dinner. My dad has this thing with work.”

“Okay. Could you have him give me a call?”

“Sure.”

“Got something to write with?” Mike relayed the number, thought a moment. “Can I ask you one question? Can you confirm something for me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is your brother Trevor Garris?”

“Yes… Yeah, he is.”

“Okay. Thank you. Do you know if he had a different name when your parents adopted him?”

The young man shouted to someone else. “Toby! Did Trevor have a different name when Mom and Dad adopted him?” There was a muffled reply, then Alex came back to Mike, “Could be. We kind of… that was when me and Toby were little. He had another name, though, yeah, maybe.”

“Thank you, Alex. Be sure to have your father or mother give me a call, okay?”

“Yes, sir. I will.”

Mike hung up, pressed a thumb to his lip.

Lena was expectant. “So?”

“I don’t know. I mean, look, like I said, it’s just thinking. I could eat crow. I hope I do. But if there’s nothing there, then we’re back to zero.”

Her brows drew together in a tight scowl. “We’re not at zero – we have this whole thing. We have the DEA here. We have one of these guys – maybe more than one of them, a lookout, an assailant – possibly killing Harriet because of this farm in Gloversville they wanted.”

“Yeah, okay, but where’s Pritchard? His bail reduction just got denied and he’s still looking at a year for the assault. Why isn’t Chapman bailing him out?”

“Because for all they know he’s still a suspect in a murder investigation and they want nothing more to do with him. Or when he couldn’t wrest the property from Harriet, either he had her killed, or they did it, and now they’ve turned their backs on him.”

“I think Pritchard was nobody to them before any of this happened – before Harriet was murdered. I think he tried to get involved in this thing, tried shoehorning his way back into the will to get the farm and have something to offer them, something closer to this ethanol plant, Truenol. But it didn’t happen. So he’s still nobody to them. He was arguing with Petrov the other night, running his mouth about his sister because he’s impotent… angry…”

“So then that’s why he killed her, or like you said, had her killed,” Lena said. “He blames her for preventing him from getting in with this group. He finds some piece of shit who’s disturbed enough to do it for cash. Maybe one of these biker guys. Mike this is—” She bit off the sentence, exasperated.

He touched her arm. “We got Dmitri Petrov ready to flip on the whole meth thing. The guy ran up a fucking tree. He’s scared of these guys, Caruthers and Bates and all of them. He wants protection and he’s going to talk.”

Her gaze drifted, then she shut her eyes. “Mike, I want to be with you on this. But we’ve been looking at adults with an axe to grind, maybe a drug operation with collateral damage.” She looked at him. “You’re talking about a ten-year-old kid who was abused, a victim of his parents’ drug dealings.”

“Exactly. Ten years old – it’s not like he was three or four and has no memory of them. Or even six, like Tommy Caruthers, who seems to have come through alright. He’s hardwired. Kristen wasn’t much older when Molly died.”

“But he’s been marred by what they did,” Lena said, getting louder. “Brain damage? For that you blame your parents. Right? Or, again, you’re pissed at the cops who busted them, or the judge who put your mother in rehab.”

Mike said, “You know, the other night, when we had our thing, you asked me about my father, and I started thinking about when I’d go down, live with him in the summer. There was this kid from the neighborhood, Neil Johnson, I’d play basketball with him. Real angry kid, rotten home life, mother was never around – her drugs of choice were coke, crack. Anyway, she’d leave Neil and his brothers and sisters alone for days in their stiflingly hot little third-floor walk-up in Brooklyn. She’d come home every once in a while and pass out, and the kids – Neil – he’d stroke her hair, rub her feet, get her some water, and eventually they were taken from her. Neil went downhill pretty fast. He was violent, he did a stint in juvie and by eighteen was at Rikers.”

“Okay…”

“Here’s the thing, though – you could never say anything bad about his mother. Ever. He’d kill you for it – or he’d try to. He loved her no matter what. So, he took it out on the system. And now here’s this other kid, John Durie. He gets taken from his mother at ten years old by Child Protective Services, and she goes off and O.D.s in a bathtub. You know… I think it’s just human nature. You love your parents, even when they’re the worst thing.”

She pulled away from him and started back to her desk. Mike watched her. “You pissed at me or something?”

“No, Mike. Getting you a tissue – you’re bleeding.”

Mike touched his neck, saw blood on his fingertips. From chasing Petrov through the woods, no doubt. She handed him the tissue and he dabbed at the blood.

“You’ve got leaves in your hair,” she said. “Look at your pants, your hands are all cut, your nails look like you clawed your way out of a grave.”

They’d drawn together again in the middle of her office. A train of motorcycles rumbled past outside.

“It’s this,” Mike said. “It’s Durie, it’s Trevor Garris… or I don’t know what.”

---

Bobbi sat staring at the wall, sitting at a table with Rachel and two guys she didn’t know. The guys were part of a group; some of them played darts and laughed over the loud music, too drunk to hit the board. Rachel was telling the two of them about hikers finding the body of Corina Lavoie, then Lennox disappearing the next day.

Bobbi didn’t want to listen to anymore, so she got up and headed for the bathroom.

Just before she stepped in, someone walked into the bar, and she waited, hoping maybe it was Connor, but it wasn’t.

She closed herself in a bathroom stall, sat down on the toilet, pulled out her phone, and opened her text messages. Nothing from Connor. She’d blown it. Or was she playing some stupid game with him? He comes on with charm and confidence and she panics. Tells him she needs to think about it, needs some space, and he gets upset and backs off. Then she can’t stop thinking about him. Pathetic. Not who she’d planned to be. She’d planned to be straight-up. No games. And right now she wanted him; right or wrong, she wanted him, and so she started dabbing with her thumbs.

She finished peeing, cleaned up at the sink, and her phone vibrated on the porcelain.

Connor:

She dried her hands, quickly typed back:

Too long, kind of invasive. She erased it, tried again:

She sent it and waited. Someone else came in and Bobbi offered a quick smile, began to feel awkward just standing there as the woman closed the door to a stall.

Her phone jiggled. Connor wrote:

She thought of a response, typed it out, heart fluttering:

Her thumb hovered over the Send button, but she erased the text, muttering, “God,” under her breath. Then she wrote it again, erased it again. He wasn’t looking for someone to be his kid’s mother; he’d said as much. But wasn’t that the default position for her? Regardless of what Connor said, how else did it work? She became Jolyon’s friend? What about discipline? How did that get sorted? She practically choked on the irony: Here she was, a caseworker trying help children and their parents, and she felt like she didn’t know anything.

Her father always told her that her mind went too far ahead – but jumping in with both feet, that was the bold advice for people when there were no kids involved.

It was her work that was making her cynical, afraid. Had to be. Worried about mistakes she hadn’t even made. No one was expecting her to be stepmother of the year, right? It was just people. Just life. You had to take it one day at a time.

She sent:

She waited some more, bit at her fingernails, realized she was doing it, and stopped. The other person in the room flushed. The jukebox song changed to a country tune, blaring through the thin walls.

His reply came back:

Another flip of her heart. He was receptive. That was progress.

Bobbi stepped aside so the other woman could use the sink. She’d have to ditch Rachel, though. Maybe Rachel was okay now and would understand – Bobbi was on the rocks with this guy, needed some time alone with him. Of course, Connor could still have his co-worker with him. Maybe bringing Rachel, if she wanted to come – and Bobbi figured she would – would be the right move. Rachel was between men. Bobbi didn’t know much about Connor’s co-worker, just that he seemed shy. Rachel loved shy, then she could dominate.

Resolved, Bobbi walked out of the bathroom. The music was louder than ever, foot-stomping bass with twangy lyrics. Rachel was in the same place and it looked like one of the guys mooning over her had bought a fresh round of drinks. Bobbi made it halfway across the bar when someone else came into the place.

She stopped, cold, in the middle of the room, and stared.

The door swung shut behind him, and Jamie just stood there.