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second-class citizen who will never understand this place?”
    “Basically, yes.”
    “We apologize for the intrusion, Mr. Mandelbaum.” I pulled my gloves from my coat pockets. “I’ll be outside when you’re ready to hit the road, Sergeant.”
    I could feel Rivard’s eyes boring into my back as I left the room.
    I’d never missed Kathy Frost so much in my life.
    *   *   *
     
    When I was in high school, I was the straightest of straight arrows. All my teachers adored me, and the football coach made me a team captain despite my limitations as a tight end and linebacker.
    The only serious trouble I ever got into was a single fistfight. After school one day, I came across a kid who looked almost exactly like Barney Beal bullying a nerdy freshman, and I ordered him to knock it off. When the bully told me where I could shove my advice, I coldcocked him in the nose. Our fight was long and vicious, and by the time the phys ed coach pulled us apart, we both needed stitches.
    Afterward, the vice principal had confronted me in her plush office, not so much with anger as with hurt and disbelief. It was as if I had broken her heart in some way. I was such a great kid, she said. Out of what dark place had this violence suddenly come?
    “I don’t know,” I said, lying.
    The truth was that rage was twisted into my genetic code. It was my father’s enduring birthright. Every day I fought to deny the existence of my simmering anger, to push it back inside my dark heart.
    At the hospital, my mother looked at my fierce eyes and wounded jaw with horror, fearful that I had begun some lycanthropic transformation. Her greatest worry was that I was destined to become a bloodthirsty creature like her ex-husband. After the divorce, she did everything she could to keep me away from my dad. She’d moved us from the North Woods to the Portland suburbs. She discouraged me from talking to him on the phone. She even frowned on my own hunting and fishing pursuits, worried I was becoming increasingly like my old man.
    My mother now spent her winters in Naples, Florida, and we spoke less and less. My choice of a dangerous profession had seemingly confirmed her worst fears, and I think she fully expected that some night the telephone would ring and it would be Colonel Harkavy, telling her that I had been shot in the head by a Down East poacher. It was better not to think of me in that case, to pretend her doomed son no longer existed, to protect herself from future grief.
    *   *   *
     
    I waited for Rivard in the frigid parking lot, literally blowing off steam. Every shimmer of breath was visible in the air for several seconds before being swept away on the breeze. If anything, the sky looked even more ominous than when we’d arrived, but perhaps it was just my miserable mood.
    My sergeant didn’t speak until we were on the road again. “You could have backed me up in there.”
    “Mandelbaum was right. You lied to him.”
    “The guy’s living in a dream world. Beal is the one who robbed those cabins. Him and his buddies. Did you see his pupils? They were microscopic. The kid was high on Oxy or God knows what.”
    “If you’re so sure he’s robbing cabins to buy drugs,” I said, “you should turn your evidence over to the sheriff’s office or the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency. It’s their job to investigate that shit, not ours.”
    Rivard kept his eyes on the road, but he rolled his head around on his neck as if it were crimped. “I was trying to send that punk a message.”
    “I think you failed, Marc.”
    He turned his head, and once again I was confronted by my distorted reflection in his sunglasses. The anger I saw in my features stopped me cold. I felt like Henry Jekyll looking into the face of his other self.
    “You’ve got a lot to learn,” Rivard said.
    “So you keep telling me.”
    He flicked on the windshield wipers.
    I’d been so consumed with my grievances that I hadn’t noticed it was beginning to