Before I left their home, the Wolf sisters invited me to come back in a few days for Thanksgiving supper. They explained that they usually deep-fried a turkey for the large group of family and friends that gathered in their home, but this year they were planning to slow-roast something they called a turducken for the first time, and thought that I would be a perfect addition to their holiday table.

“You deep-fry your turkey?” I said. When I’d first heard about people preparing their birds that way, I thought it was an urban myth, like jackalopes. Then the Boulder Fire Department started answering calls for turkey-fryer fires, and I accepted that it was a real thing, though I still couldn’t figure out what people did with all the leftover oil.

Mary Ellen said, “It’s the best way to do it, absolutely. Moist? Oh, Mr. Purdy. But we’re going to try something new and finally do a turducken this year. Mr. Prudhomme, Mr. Paul Prudhomme from New Orleans”-when she spoke the name of the Louisiana city, it was only one word, and it was absent thew,and when she spoke Mr. Prudhomme’s name, it was with a reverence customarily reserved for heroes or saints-“recommends a very slow oven, so we’ll actually have to start roasting that delight before we go to bed on Wednesday evening. The house should smell like the Lord’s own grandmother’s kitchen when we awaken Thursday morning.”

Mary Pat was the one who recognized the ignorance in my eyes. “A turducken is a Cajun treat, Mr. Purdy. Oyster dressing and andouille sausage and a few other goodies are stuffed into a chicken that is then stuffed into a duck that is then stuffed into a turkey. More dressing is added between each bird during the assembly. It’s all boneless. It’s all delicious.”

I tried to imagine the cascade of flavors that Mary Pat was describing, and I was momentarily lost in the fantasy. My hand crept up the contours of my tummy until my thumb found the lower edge of my sternum. Sculpted in place, my hand could have been a monument to my ambivalence: Part of my hand-the part caressing my gut-honored my usually indulgent appetite, part of it-the thumb on my sternum-honored my cardiologist’s admonitions.

“And you roast this… thing for how long?” I asked. “It must weigh most of a ton.”

“We are doing a large one. Fourteen hours should bring it close to perfection. Then it will need to rest a while to stitch the flavors together before we carry it to the table.”

With a smile as warm as apple pie, Mary Pat said, “And you haven’t had a real Thanksgiving supper until you’ve tasted my sister’s gravy, or her cornbread.”

Mary Ellen savored the compliment. “Red pepper,” she explained. “Our mother’s secret. Abundant red pepper.”

“Can I let you know?” I asked them. “My plans for Thursday are still a little up in the air.”

“No need to call. You just come by if you can. We’ll have a place all set at the adult table for you, and you can be certain that the good Lord willing there will be no shortage of food beneath this roof on the day we give thanks. Mary Ellen will start carving right around two.”

Less than a mile from the twins’ home I stopped on the shoulder of a fallow field of what I was still guessing had been cotton and called Alan Gregory to catch him up on what I was up to in Georgia, and then I called Gibbs Storey to tell her that I thought it was premature to assume her husband was dead.

“He’s alive?” she replied, of course. What else would she say?

I’d told her I thought that was a premature conclusion, too. But I suggested prudence might be warranted, and counseled her to temporarily move someplace where her husband couldn’t easily find her.

“Sterling won’t hurt me,” she said.

“If I had a dollar for every time a woman’s told me that in the past twenty years, I’d be driving a Lincoln.”

She sighed at me and told me she’d think about it.

“Trust me, Gibbs. You’re not thinking straight. After what you’ve been through…”

“I’m fine.”

It’s what I expected. I’d done what I could do. I folded up my phone and started driving again.

An hour later I was on the outskirts of Albany, Georgia, trying to decide between two adjacent motels for a place to spend the night when Lucy paged me using our personal code that indicated an emergency. At full arm’s length I could barely read the code: 911 followed by the phone number. Imaginative, no. But it worked for us.

I picked the motel that wasn’t a national chain and finished checking in before I used my cell to return Lucy’s call. The motel room was full of my grandmother’s oldest chenille, the air was musty, and the background smells in the shadowy room were born of burnt tobacco and constant humidity and were as unfamiliar to me as the accents of all the people I was meeting in Georgia.

Lucy had left me her own cell number, not her office number. I figured that was important.

“Hey,” I said. “It’s me.”

“Hi, Sammy. I really miss you. You okay?”

“Later, what’s up?” She didn’t 911 me to ask me how I was doing.

“Listen, you’re not going to believe this, but Crime Stoppers-yeah, I’m serious: Crime Stoppers-got a tip, anonymous, of course, that Sterling Storey may be responsible for as many as four murders. All women, all in towns where he’s worked over the years. He travels around producing sporting events on cable.”

“I know about his job. Does the story check out?”

“At least one piece of it seems to. There’s a woman in Indianapolis who went missing in the same circumstances that the tipster reported. She’s the same general description as Louise Lake-single, attractive, late twenties-and she worked where the guy said she worked. Donald and I have just started putting it together. There are other teams tracking down all the other women, but I haven’t heard anything about their progress.”

“You have a name?”

“Julie Franconia. She worked in PR or marketing or something for the Indiana Dome or-”

“It’s the RCA Dome now, I think. The Colts play there. Peyton Manning. Good kid.”

“Whatever. She disappeared in 2000. Late March, I think. Just a sec… yeah, March twenty-third, 2000.”

“Remains?”

“We just got on this.”

“Circumstances?”

“She told her co-workers she was going to meet some girlfriends for a drink after work. Disappeared.”

“No body?”

“That’s what we’re trying to confirm. It was dumped on us as a typical without-a-trace, but a local cop told me he doesn’t know what all the fuss is about, that they have it as a cleared homicide. We’re waiting to hear back from the homicide guy. You know what it’s like with the holidays coming.”

“Is the press on this?”

“Nobody’s called me personally, but I think yes, probably.”

“Four? You said four?”

“Four total, including the California murder.”

“Where are the other two?”

“Augusta, Georgia, and West Point, New York.”

“That would be, what, the Masters and… I don’t know, the Army-Navy game?”

“I guess,” Lucy said. Other than occasional Broncos football, she didn’t pay much attention to sports she didn’t participate in, and she didn’t apologize for it.

I asked, “Any progress on the river search down here? Did Storey’s body show up today? Tell me yes. If you tell me yes, maybe I’ll come home.”

“I wish I could tell you yes, Sam. They’re still looking, but nobody seems hopeful about finding the body. The search is winding down. Oh, and in case it matters, you were right about Storey. He is, or was, a swimmer-a star on his college water polo team.”

“Water polo? Didn’t play that a lot when I was growing up in Minnesota.”

Lucy knew me well enough not to respond to my sarcasm. She asked, “You’re not in touch with the local authorities down there?”