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edges of the impressive roof gleamed with copper gutters that had seen few winters.
    He couldn’t identify the wood used for the home’s exterior. Whatever it was had been stained dove-grey — a dove-grey not natural to the trees of the north. Nor did the stones in the foundation, unusual in their patterns and colors, resemble any of the rock or boulders native to glaciated northern Wisconsin. No doubt imported — at significant cost.
    Though he was in a hurry, Osborne couldn’t help but notice the windows. The vertical lines echoed the height of the pines along the circle drive, glass panels meeting in seamless perpendiculars at each corner with not a post in sight: another architectural detail not offered at a discount.
    Just beyond the house was a six-car garage hosting what appeared to be a convention of Land Rovers, different models but all the same sleek grey to match the house. Seeing no place to park, nor any sign of Lew’s police cruiser, Osborne continued along the drive, which now ran beside a high stone wall. Even though he slowed as he rounded a sharp curve, he nearly rear-ended a parked pick-up truck. A battered blue pick-up with a shiny 14-inch walleye leaping from its hood. The very pick-up that shuddered into his own driveway at least once a day.
    Braking to a stop behind the truck, he spotted what his friend and neighbor would describe as “new and exciting additions” to the rusty bumper hanging cockeyed off the back of his vehicle: “Honk if anything falls off,” read one sticker. “If you can read this, I lost my trailer,” read the next. Any other time Osborne might have chuckled. Not today.
    • • •
    Loon Lake Police Chief Lewellyn Ferris did not deputize Ray Pradt unless she had good reason to employ a man whose misdemeanor file was thick enough to merit its own drawer. Even as state and federal penalties for smoking dope were easing, Ray was still a guy who could fire up the blood pressure of certain City Council members. That, plus his habit of poaching private water, kept the game warden on his tail as well — and only enhanced his reputation among certain Loon Lake locals who lived down lanes with no fire numbers.
    Eventually the mayor and his cronies would calm down and approve the hiring of the man known to be the best tracker in the region. Keen-eyed, quick and as alert as a deer — the joke over coffee at McDonald’s was always “that Ray Pradt can go into a revolving door behind you and come out ahead.”
    But that wasn’t his only talent. You had only to drive down the street behind the blue pick-up and watch everyone wave at its driver: from the MDs who had practiced with his father to the lawyers who’d gone to school with his sister to the kids whose worms he judged during the annual Loon Lake Worm Race and the nuns he charmed with stringers of fresh-caught bluegills. Not least among his pals were the miscreants whom he had entertained with bad jokes while spending random nights in the Loon Lake jail.
    “You want to catch a crumb bum, you gotta think like a crumb bum,” Lew would say when arguing her case to hire the guy. “Ray can do that. I’m not saying he is a crumb bum — but he knows ‘em all. And if he doesn’t know the one we want — he’ll find someone who does. And that, gentlemen, is what we pay for: Ray Pradt flips pancakes for people you and I never even see.”
    And while Ray could try Osborne’s patience with the dumb jokes and stories that went on w-a-a-y too long, the older man endured the antics of his neighbor, thirty years his junior, with respect and affection. After all, Osborne owed him. It was Ray who had watched and waited for the right moment to talk Osborne — so deeply depressed after Mary Lee’s death that his cocktail hours had started at noon — into the meetings behind the door with the coffeepot on its frosted window.
    Lewellyn Ferris’s final argument in favor of hiring Ray was always the same: “That guy’s got the