I make Brent comfortable. I know exactly how ridiculous this is, but I do it anyway, arranging his body on his sleeping mat and pulling up a blanket, as if tucking him in for the night. Dalton doesn’t say a word.

Then I stand and march to the exit. “I’m going to find Brady. I’m going to find him and put a bullet through his gut and leave him out there. Let him drag his ass to shelter so he doesn’t get eaten by a pack of damned wolves. I will watch him drag his ass, and I will pray that the wolves come. Wolves or a wolverine or ravens. I hope it’s ravens. I hope they find him, gut-shot, and they rip out his . . .”

I don’t go further. Dalton knows what I mean, and he doesn’t need to hear the details.

I stoop for the passageway, and Dalton grips my arm.

“Casey . . .”

“I’m going to find him.”

“You will. But Brady’s not waiting outside this cave.”

I wheel on him. “You think I don’t know that?”

“It’s been twelve hours.”

“I need to process the scene.”

“Twelve hours.”

The crime scene isn’t going anywhere. That’s what he means. He glances back at Brent’s body.

“No,” I say. “We’re not doing that right now. We need tools.”

“He has everything.”

“Later. He’s fine. He’ll be . . .”

Fine. He’ll be fine.

Brent is not fine. Brent is dead, and I don’t want to lay him to rest because it feels like acknowledgment. Feels like acceptance. Feels, too, like I’m stalling when I need to be acting.

“We need to—” I stop myself.

Find Jacob. Warn Jacob. That’s what I want to say, and that’s where I must draw the line. I can’t remind Dalton his brother is in danger, as if he doesn’t know that, as if he’s not holding himself back from running out to find him.

It has been twelve hours. Another hour won’t matter. Not for finding Jacob. Not for examining the crime scene.

For Brent, though . . .

“We made a promise,” Dalton says, his voice low.

“I . . . I . . .”

I look over at Brent’s body. And I burst into tears, and Dalton’s arms go around me, holding me tight as I sob against him.

* * *

We lay Brent’s body to rest, the way he wanted it, on an open platform, with him wearing his Canadiens jersey, a reminder of the season he’d played for the team, fifty years ago.

Afterward, I examine the crime scene. That’s what Dalton insists on for the next step. Jacob can wait—the crime scene could be disturbed.

Storm easily tracks Brent back to where he’d been shot. Blood and trampled grasses mark the exact spot, as do the grouse Brent shot. There’s a bow and arrows there, and I remember he was new to bow shooting, having finally agreed to let Jacob teach him.

Too old for this, he’d said, learning new tricks at my age. But it saves on ammo.

Dalton said he could bring more ammunition with his trades, but Brent had blustered that he needed the other items more. Which was a lie. He wanted to learn something new. Wanted to challenge himself.

Dalton takes the grouse. When we first met, I’d have been horrified by that. Stealing from the dead? Now I know better. It is a sign of respect. Brent killed these birds, and his efforts should not go to waste. Nor should the lives of those birds. We’ll eat them, and we’ll remember where they came from.

Dalton takes the bows and arrows, too.

“Jacob made these,” he says. “I’ll give them back when we catch up to him.”

Not when we find him. Certainly not if. There’s very little chance Jacob is in any danger, and it really is just a matter of catching up to him. I know that. Dalton knows that. Feeling it, though, is another matter.

Brent said he got my gun away from Brady, and he’s right. It’s there, hidden in the grass.

I see nothing at the crime scene to contradict Brent’s version of events. Not that he’d deliberately mislead us, but maybe he misunderstood. Maybe I’ll find something that proves the gunshot wasn’t an accidental discharge.

“What would prove that?” Dalton says when I admit what I’m hunting for.

“I have no idea. But I want it.”

He wisely says nothing and just lets me keep scouring.

“Brady is still culpable,” I say. “He held Brent at gunpoint. Whatever happens after that, it’s still murder, even if it’s second-degree.”

“It is.”

“And he ground his fist in the injury. I don’t care how desperate he was to find Jacob. That’s sadistic.”

“It is.”

I crouch and stare at the bloodied ground.

“You want proof he’s exactly what his stepfather says,” Dalton says. “Proof Brady is more than what he claims—a desperate man driven to desperate measures.”

“Yes.”

I want justification for my rage. I do want to see Brady gutshot for this. Gutshot and left in the forest. And that scares me. It’s the sort of thing Mathias would do, and I tiptoe around the truth of what Mathias is, alternately repelled and . . . Not attracted. Definitely not. But there’s part of me that thinks of what he does and nods in satisfaction. I could not do it, but it doesn’t horrify me nearly as much as it should.

“I should have come out last night,” Dalton says.

I look up at him, as I stay crouched.

“I decided not to come see him last night. I waited until morning.”

I rise and walk to him. “Doesn’t matter. This happened at twilight. We wouldn’t have made it here before Brent got shot.”

Dalton says nothing, and I know that will weigh on him. Like my poor choices with Val weigh on me. We haven’t discussed that yet. It’s not time. Not time for this either, as he pats Storm and then peers into the forest.

“Should see if she can find Brady’s trail.”

She can’t. The blood seems too much for her. It’s upsetting or confusing, and she grows increasingly anxious until I release her from the task.

Next we try to “catch up” with Jacob, while continuing to search for Brady and Val. We put up the markers, telling Jacob we need to speak to him. There’s no way to warn him otherwise. Despite Dalton’s best efforts, Jacob is functionally illiterate. Their parents taught them the language of the forest, the one they needed to know. I get the sense that Dalton had learned how to read and write before he came to Rockton, but presumably he sought that teaching from his parents and Jacob had not.

We head to the cabin Tyrone Cypher has been using as a base. There’s no sign of him. We leave a note, though I’m not sure that will do any good either. Cypher can read; he just might choose not to.

Back in Rockton, there’s been no word from the council. Petra and Diana have been taking turns with the radio. We aren’t even sure how often they make contact with Val. Maybe, with us being pissed off over our unwanted prisoner, they’ll just wait until we call and hope we don’t.

The search for Brady and Val didn’t stop while we were off with Brent. We join that, and by the time we return home, it’s after nine at night. Dalton and I are exhausted. We have one more task, though. Kenny has been in the cell over twenty-four hours, as Dalton lets him stew. We need to talk to him, as much as we’re both dreading it.

* * *

Kenny was the first true Rockton resident I’d met. My first taste of what to expect in this town. I’d spent time with Dalton, in my admission interviews and then over twelve hours of travel together, yet I had no idea what to make of him. There was so much about Dalton that reminded me of the worst kind of cops—swaggering through life, a bully with a badge. He seemed to fit that slot . . . and then he’d do something to pop him out of it. That was uncomfortable.

I’d met Anders, briefly, and he seemed more my kind of colleague, competent and personable. But after maybe five minutes in Rockton, they’d both had to rush off to an emergency, and I’d made my way to town alone.

Go in the back door of the station. Stay there. Anyone comes in, tell them we’ll be back.

Those were Dalton’s orders, which seemed a little disconcerting, as if the locals were wolves who might pick me off while the alpha was away.

It was Kenny who came into the station. As I discovered later, a bunch of the militia guys had drawn straws to see who got to introduce himself to the “new girl” first. That’s what I’d been to them. Not their new superior officer. Not the new detective. A new woman in town. An addition to Rockton’s meager dating pool.

Kenny had exactly two minutes with me before Isabel showed up and shooed him off. I remember her asking if I could guess what he’d done in his former life. Given the size of his biceps and the perfume of sawdust, I’d guessed carpenter or construction worker. High school math teacher, she said.

When he arrived eighteen months ago, he’d never have worked up the courage to talk to you. People come here, and it’s a clean slate. A chance to be whoever they want for a while.

What Kenny wanted to be was one of the cool kids. For a guy like him, cool meant tough. Except he lacked that edge and wasn’t terribly invested in finding it. So he settled for hitting the gym and joining the militia. He became the guy he wanted to be. And now he’d been about to leave his new life. Had he panicked at that? Worried he’d end up back in a job he’d hate because his new skills wouldn’t pay the bills? Had he been an easy target for Oliver Brady? I desperately want to say no. But the evidence must be acknowledged.

When we walk in to question Kenny, the first thing he says isn’t I didn’t do it or Guys, come on, you know me.

“I know how bad this looks.”

“Good,” Dalton says.

We pull up chairs outside the cell. Kenny has one inside. We’ve granted him that, in recognition that he’s had to wait a very long time for this interview.

“Your knife was found with the prisoner,” I begin.

He starts to speak, but Dalton says, “Be quiet and listen.”

“Brady used that knife to cut his bindings,” I continue. “He used it to take Val captive. You were his guard at the time—and you were in charge of the guarding schedule.”

“I—”

A look from Dalton silences him again.

“You assigned yourself to that time slot. You abandoned your post. The prisoner was left unguarded, with a weapon, while a fire brought everyone else running. A fire set in the lumber shed, which you know very well. It was a delayed-start fire, giving you time to go on guard duty.”

“I—”

“You brought Brady his breakfast. You offered to bring it. We realize now that it was poisoned—not to kill him, but to get him out of that cell. So Brady is in the clinic with his wrists tied and under guard. Fire breaks out. Everyone runs . . . including his guard. He is left with a knife and the perfect hostage.”

He slouches in his seat. “Shit. I’m not even sure where to start.”

“Well, that depends,” Dalton says. “If you’d like, you can start with explaining why you were the one bringing that food tray.”

“I took it from someone. She was in a hurry and complaining about her workload, and I wanted to be nice.” He lowers his voice to a mutter. “Even if she’d never do the same in return.”

“Jen,” I say.

“I’d rather not name names—”

“You have to,” Dalton says. “But in this case, you don’t need to. That description says it all.”

“So you volunteered to take the tray,” I say. “Then you volunteered for guard duty at the clinic.”

He shakes his head. “I was scheduled for guard duty with Brady here at the station. Will asked me to make up a twenty-four-hour schedule, with me and Sam alternating four-hour shifts. Will picked us two for it.”

He pauses and then hurries to add, “Which made sense. Paul’s in the doghouse right now, and Will wanted his best two guys. His two most experienced. That’d be me and Sam.”

“And the knife?” I say.

“After I offered to help you open that can, someone asked to borrow it, and I said sure, just leave it on the sawhorse when you’re done. When I went back to get it, it wasn’t there.”

“Who borrowed it?”

“I’m not even sure. I was cutting wood, and someone asked behind me. I never turned around. I barely heard him over the saw.”

“Tell me about leaving your post.”

“I heard the bell. I went outside, and someone said it was a fire. I ran back in. Brady was sound asleep. Val was doing one of her algebra puzzles. I’d talked to her earlier about it, said I remembered giving those to my students. She assured me this one was much more advanced.”

An eye roll and a slight smile. “You know Val. Anyway, when I came in, she was absorbed in that. I said there was a fire at the shed, and I should go, and she said, ‘Yes, yes.’ Those were her exact words. ‘Yes, yes.’ She never even looked up. I double-checked Brady’s restraints, and told Val I’d send someone to take my place. But then I saw you coming, Casey, so I thought it was covered.”

Kenny shakes his head. “I made a mistake. A big one. But my mistake was leaving my post. Not helping Brady escape. I’d never do that.”