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girlfriend, saving the county the trouble and expense of a trial. At the news of those tragedies, Nick had felt only relief. He wasn’t responsible anymore. Let Pam Harrison handle them.
    This, though, was the first case that was unusual, compelling. Nick instantly felt a familiar zip of adrenaline, and a slight fizz across the top of his brain, as if someone had doused it with ginger ale and then wiped it dry again, all within seconds. He said good-bye to Vince Dobbs and heard the man on the other end of the line hang up, but Nick still held the phone, aware of a faint tremor in his hand. There arose within him the old fire. He felt a poke in the back, prodding him. That force had a voice, and the voice was his own, and it said, What the hell happened to Ed Hackel? , and after that he automatically began to assess, recollect, calculate, speculate. He couldn’t stop himself. He took the known facts and he spread them out like the greasy parts of an engine, the tiny levers and gears and washers and springs and bolts, and then he started to put the thing back together again, reverse-engineering it, trying to figure out how the pieces all worked together, how the crime had been committed, and why.
    The resort was the biggest new project around here in a long, long time. Tens of millions of dollars were on the line, and Hackel had been right at the center of it. And Royce Dillard—he was an unusual character, you bet, strange as all get-out, but capable of murder? Or maybe it was an accident. Tempers flare, angry words are hurled back and forth, Dillard grabs a weapon—a sledgehammer, maybe, or a post hole digger—and, blinded by hurt and fury, he takes a wild swing, and …
    â€œNick?”
    He looked over at his wife. But he didn’t see her.

 
    Chapter Eight
    The Raythune County Courthouse at night was a different place from what it was during the day. In daylight, it was a haggard, benign-looking building where forms were filled out, licenses applied for, parking tickets either paid or argued over, and copies of birth certificates issued, a place at which people also tended to congregate even when they didn’t have specific business there, just because they might run into somebody they liked talking to. At night, though, it was a cold, forbidding Gothic pile that exhaled the sour breath of its buried secrets: a multitude of criminal trials and the systematic passing of judgment on overlapping waves of human souls. The ground-floor windows at the rear—where the booking office of the jail was located—were illuminated all night long, as if the courthouse itself suffered from bad dreams and needed a nightlight.
    â€œSheriff’s waiting for you in her office,” Mathers said.
    Bell had gone to the side entrance, the one that led directly to the interrogation rooms, in case Harrison was still in there with Royce Dillard. Deputy Mathers met her. He was a large, dark-haired man with a gut that tormented the bottom two buttons on his brown uniform shirt. He was a reassuring presence in the courthouse. He’d been doing this job a good long while and even if all hell was breaking loose, chances were that Charlie Mathers had been through worse and was happy to tell you about it; he could make you feel as if the present crisis maybe wasn’t so bad by comparison.
    â€œYou just missed the guy who found the body,” Mathers added. “He and his wife finally went home. Wanted to make sure we didn’t go all CIA on Royce Dillard, I guess. Victim’s boss just got here. The head of Mountain Magic.” He waggled his eyebrows suggestively. “She’s a piece of work, lemme tell you.”
    The halls were dim and empty at this hour on a Saturday. The office doors were shut and locked, with no lights behind the frosted glass fronts, no rise and fall of voices—except for the sheriff’s office, where the thick door was propped open, its strong orange light