“Theory. Linda Van Alstyne wasn’t the target of this murder. She was just the stand-in, either accidentally or incidentally, for her husband.” MacAuley slashed two heavy black lines beneath the chief’s name. “In other words, the intended victim isn’t Linda. It’s the chief.”

Russ Van Alstyne loved his house. After a lifetime of living in base housing or rental apartments, he had embraced the pleasures and pains of home ownership like an ecstatic embracing a demanding god. He restored the kitchen woodwork to its origins in the Second World War. He converted the cavernous walk-in attic into an all-modern-conveniences workspace. He reinforced the sagging barn floor so it could be used as a garage. He repainted it, clapboard, trim, and shutters, one side every summer.

Now he sat in his truck, in his driveway, looking at his house. Afraid to get out. Afraid he might throw up the moment he crossed the threshold.

“A cleaning crew’s already been in.” Lyle sat in the driver’s seat, waiting for him to get his act together. He had seen Russ in the station parking lot, fumbling with his keys, and roughly bumped him out of the way. “Shove it over,” he had said. “You’re not in any condition to drive.” Now he continued, “After the CS techs finished last night. The kitchen was cleaned.”

“That was fast.” There was a service in Albany that provided crime scene and biohazard cleanup, but it usually took a couple of days for them to make it to a job.

“I called in a few chips.”

“Oh.”

There was a silence.

“Russ, you have to go in sooner or later. And if you want the investigation to go forward, it’d better be sooner.”

“I know. It’s just-”

“I know.” Lyle nodded. “Look, how about we go in the front door?”

Except in the summertime, when they opened it to circulate air through the house, the formal front door was never used. In the winter, Russ didn’t bother to shovel it out, and he and Lyle would have to wade through several weeks’ worth of accumulated snow to reach it. But it was at the other end of the house from the kitchen. In fact, if he went in the front door, he might never have to set foot in the kitchen. He didn’t worry about later. He was living minute by minute now.

“Okay. Let’s.”

Lyle grabbed one of the guys and asked him to unlatch the double doors from the inside. The snow was as bad as Russ had feared, but the challenge of breaking a trail through knee-deep crust and powder distracted him sufficiently so that it wasn’t until he whacked his boot against the first granite step that he realized he was there.

He stomped up the steps-two, then a rectangular slab, then another two-shedding snow as he went. He pulled open the doors-tug, sweep, a kick of the boots against the jamb-and he was in.

Inside.

“You okay?” Lyle was crowding in behind him, forcing him to move forward in order to shut the doors behind them.

“Yeah.” And, in some way, he was. The awful blankness of the kitchen awaited him, but in the tiny hallway, with the stairs he climbed to bed every night in front of him, he was okay. Not great, but he wasn’t going to get sick all over the oriental carpet.

“What do you want to do first?”

He had decided on the way over that he would have to be methodical to get through this task. Take it one step at a time. “The workroom,” he said. “End of the hall at the top of the stairs.” Farthest from the kitchen. Although it was Linda’s space, it was also the most impersonal as far as Russ was concerned. She designed and cut and sewed for her custom drapery business there; a workplace and nothing more. When he flicked on the lights he saw what he expected to see, the worktables clear, the racks and shelves of fabrics and hardware neat and organized.

Lyle hovered in the doorway while Russ walked around. “Everything look good?” he asked.

“I gotta be honest with you,” Russ said. “Unless the place was tossed, I wouldn’t be able to tell. Once I finished the renovation, I didn’t come in here except to ask her if she was coming to bed.” Regret squatted like a heavy toad on his breastbone. All the time and energy she had spent on her business, and the extent of his interest had been to find out when she was getting home from her fabric-buying jaunts. Why hadn’t he put more effort into appreciating what she was doing? He turned toward Lyle. “Let’s check the guest rooms,” he said.

The two extra bedrooms were just as they always were, lavishly decorated and sterile. Once in a while they entertained couples from their army days, but most of the year they were alone. His closest relationships had always been among the people he worked with-relationships that closed Linda out without meaning to. Work had defined him and owned him. No wonder her friends were hers, and not theirs.

“Anything?” Lyle asked.

He shook his head. Stepped across the hall. Paused.

“This is your bedroom, right?”

He nodded.

“You ready to go in?”

“Hell, no.” That earned him a half-smile from his deputy chief. Christ, Lyle was looking almost as cut up as Russ felt. He had always liked Linda, had been one of the few guys on the force she could talk and laugh with. Russ wasn’t the only one who had suffered a loss. Not by a long shot.

Their bedroom was heartbreakingly normal. The bed neatly made. Several empty dry cleaner’s bags tossed on Linda’s side-she never used wire hangers. Her closet door open, a pair of high heels tumbled in front of the full-length mirror. He could see her, standing there, scrutinizing herself. Frowning, shaking her head, kicking them off. “Not these,” she would have said.

“Russ?”

Lyle’s voice shook him from his reverie. He forced himself to cross the plush carpeting to Linda’s vanity, where she kept her jewelry in a drawer.

The first thing he noticed was her wedding ring, sitting next to her engagement diamond and the diamond and sapphire eternity band he had gotten her on their twentieth anniversary. When had she taken them off? She had been wearing them at the therapist’s office.

The rest of the contents of the drawer were intact, a fact he could have told without further search. No one after easily shopped swag would have passed up those rings. He paused for a moment, trying to exorcise the ghost sitting at the vanity, examining her skin, dipping her fingers into the expensive little pots littering the mahogany surface. What else would thieves possibly take?

His gun safe was usually in his closet, but he had taken it to his mother’s when he left. Linda’s passport? No, it was still in her bedside drawer-always within reach for a quick getaway, she used to joke.

Lyle came out of the connecting bathroom. “It doesn’t look like anything’s been touched in here,” he said. “Did she have any prescriptions that might have tempted somebody?”

“Not unless estrogen’s suddenly become a black-market commodity.”

Lyle’s mouth quirked upward, and Russ found himself half-smiling, thinking of Linda cracking jokes about hot flashes, and in the next instant his eyes filled with a rush of tears and he had to turn away, fumbling for the doorknob. “Better get to the rest of the house,” he said, when he could make his throat work again.

He knew before they went downstairs that nothing would be missing, and he was right. The stereo, the DVD player, the silver collection she had amassed over the years-all of it was there. He and Lyle were headed for the small office off the parlor, where Linda paid the bills and managed her paperwork, when Kevin Flynn poked his head in from the living room. “Chief?” he said tentatively. “I’m sorry to disturb you…”

“What is it, Kevin?”

“It’s just-where did Mrs. Van Alstyne keep her purse?”

“Her purse?”

“I was going over the barn, and looking into her station wagon, and it made me think about my mom, who likes to keep her keys in the ignition in her car, so when I came back into the house I was sort of looking to see if you had some of those hooks for keys like folks sometimes have, you know, in the kitchen or the mudroom, except you don’t, so then I got to thinking where do ladies keep their keys if they aren’t in the car or on a hook and I figured their purses. Right?”