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almost eight years ago. There had been a long period in Delia’s life when she had not felt welcome in town, and after that, she had retreated, had closed ranks around herself. Where once she had been a vivacious woman, even beautiful, she had become frightened, closeted. Hazel could not imagine Delia Chandler letting a stranger into her house. “We’ll talk to anyone she might have had contact with at the clinic here, Bob. Glen Lewiston was her oncologist, right? She saw him pretty frequently?”
    “Yes,” said Bob. “I took her at least once a week.”
    “He’ll know anyone she got referred to after she was diagnosed. We’ll follow that trail.”
    “You honestly think my mother was killed by some doctor or nurse?”
    “We have no idea yet. We’re trying to cover all the bases.”
     
    At the door, both officers shook hands in turn with the Chandlers. Hazel held on to Bob’s hand a little longer. “I’m sorry to have to follow all this procedure, Robert, when all I want to do is tell you how sorry I am. Do you know, when Andrew and I had

Emilia, your mother drove over to the house with a lasagna as soon as we got back from the hospital.”
    “She made a fantastic lasagna,” said Bob Chandler.
    “We lived off it for a week. I blame your mother for Emilia’s pasta addiction—she had as much of it that week as we did.”
    “It was the bechamel,” he said, laughing, and then, just as suddenly, he was crying. Hazel stood there holding the hand of her friend from childhood, whom she’d dated two or three times when she was a senior in high school and he was a sophomore, whose mother had had an affair with her father, whose family had gone back with her own family perhaps five generations, and to keep herself from crying in uniform, she stepped back up onto Bob Chandler’s stoop and held him.
     
    She asked to be dropped off at the station house. They sat in the idling car. “I can drive you home,” Greene said. “You should go home.”
    “My car’s in back.”
    “I know you. You go in there and you won’t come out until tomorrow.”
    “I just want an hour to think,” she said.
    He stroked the wheel, looking out the windshield. “There’s nothing a CO would be able to tell you right now that you don’t already know.”
    “Don’t read my mind, Ray. It’s creepy.”
    “I’m just saying.”
    She twisted in her seat to face him. “I should be able to lead this investigation without worrying there’s no one in there to look after the shop. That’s what a commanding is supposed to do. Did Central think this would never happen? That there wouldn’t come
a day when something would happen in this town that would need my full attention?”
    “I wouldn’t use the word
think
in connection with Central.”
    “Six years, Ray. And counting. And if we guff this, Mason will use it as proof that we should be amalgamated.”
    “So let’s not guff it, Skip. You have me and a dozen good men and women in there who will put in the time and effort. And, hey, you have Spere too.”
    “Don’t remind me.” She opened the door. “You going home?”
    “Eventually.”
    “Uh-huh,” she said. “Thanks for the pep talk.”
    She watched him drive south toward Main Street. His house was north. South was the Kilmartin Inn and the horse track.
    Back in her office, she put a call through to the operator and asked her how to bypass a direct connection to someone’s line and get right into their voicemail. She wrote down the method and then dialed into Gord Sunderland’s messages. “Oh hi, Gord,” she said. “I’m sorry I missed you. In any case, I’ll be making a statement on the station house steps Monday morning at nine. I’ll see you there.” She hung up and grinned at the silent receiver.

4
    SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 7 A.M.
     
    He passed out of Westmuir and into Renfrew County to the east. As the sun was coming up, he was within fifty kilometers of the Linnet County border, the last county before