Russ didn’t want to contemplate the amount of lung power it took for Flynn to get that sentence out. One of the advantages of being twenty-three. “Mrs. Van Alstyne hangs her purse on one of the coat hooks on the mudroom wall, Kevin. It probably has a coat tossed over it.”

“No, sir, I thought of that. There aren’t any purses on those hooks. I checked.”

Russ was through the living room, across the kitchen, and in the mudroom before he remembered to be afraid of the room in which Linda had died. He tossed the barn coats and parkas and rain slickers on the floor, one after another, until they blocked the door to the summer kitchen and the old-fashioned iron hooks gleamed dully in the morning sun streaming through the diamond-shaped window in the mudroom door.

There was no purse.

He swung toward Lyle. “AllBanc,” he said.

“I’m on it,” Lyle said, fishing in his jacket for his cell phone.

Russ headed back through the kitchen, all his dread evaporated in the heat of a possible lead. “I’ll get you the account numbers,” he shouted over his shoulder.

“You think the perp might have taken her bag?”

Kevin’s voice surprised him. He hadn’t noticed the kid tagging along in his wake.

“Yeah,” he said. He wanted to scream, Why didn’t you notice this last night, you idiots?! but he knew recriminations wouldn’t get him results. He opened the door leading from the kitchen into Linda’s office. Two file towers flanked her desk, one for home and one for her business. He yanked open the top drawer of the home file. He might as well use this as a lesson for Flynn. “The perp leaves behind fenceables but takes the purse. What does that tell you?”

“He’s an amateur,” Kevin said promptly. “An opportunist. He doesn’t know anyone he can palm stolen goods off on, but he can use debit and credit cards.”

“Good.” Russ opened a folder marked BANK STATEMENTS/CHECKS. It was empty. He bit back a curse. She was so organized, she had already moved last year’s statements to the next drawer down. He slid it open. And there they were, along with folders marked VISA and MASTERCARD and oh, shit, he had to look in her business drawers, too, because she had a corporate American Express and MasterCard and checking account.

“Here, hold these,” he said, thrusting the folders into Flynn’s hands. He tore open the other drawers, rifling through tabs marked OROCO FABRICS and SOCIAL SECURITY and ACCOUNTS PAYABLE-SEAMSTRESSES until he found the financial materials, which he pulled without examining and laid in Kevin’s arms. He was consumed with a sense of urgency. Linda’s murderer had already had nearly twenty-four hours. What if he had already emptied their accounts and vanished?

“Take those to Lyle,” he said.

Kevin sprinted out of the tiny office, leaving Russ alone with the paper trails of his life together with Linda: mortgage payments and electrical bills, credit card statements and snowplowing receipts. It struck him how oddly impersonal their house was without her actual presence, the office organized but not personalized, the rooms decorated but not inhabited. His mind flashed on the St. Alban’s rectory on Elm Street-tabletops cluttered with photographs, books, and mementos spilling off the shelves to sit heaped by squishy armchairs. A note of longing hummed through him, the urge to go to that house and drop into one of those chairs and lay his sorrow before the woman who lived there…

He jerked upright. God, what sort of a monster was he? His wife was on the medical examiner’s slab, and he was comparing her to another woman? He scrubbed at his face as if he could wash his guilt away, knocking his glasses askew. He steadied them, looking more intently at the files. He pulled open the desk drawers. There must be something personal here. Something connecting him to his wife and the two of them to the world at large.

Her computer. He pushed the on button, riffling through more files while it booted up. He never used the thing-he preferred taking phone calls at the station and being left alone at home-but Linda e-mailed friends, her sister, everybody.

The screen, which used to feature a slide show of fabric designs, now came up with a mostly naked guy who had more than the usual number of muscles. O-kay. Maybe that was part of the process her therapist wanted her to go through. Getting in touch with who she was in addition to being a wife. His mouth twitched upward. He’d wanted to find something personal. Well, here it was.

He sat in the rolling desk chair and clicked on the e-mail icon. A sign beneath the window informed him he was downloading mail, and a pulsing bar flashed on and off for almost a minute. When it finished, multiple windows popped up, one laid over the other. One said DEBBIE-her sister. One said SEAM-STRESSES, one IN, one MEG, one eSBW-he clicked on that; it seemed to be a mailing list for the Small Business Women’s Association she belonged to.

Suddenly, he understood. Organized in cyberspace as well as in the real world, Linda had her e-mail filtering into multiple mailboxes. He clicked on DEBBIE. It looked as if she and Linda had been e-mailing several times a day since November. The most recent one-the one she would never read-was titled “You go, girl!”

There were a number of e-mails going back and forth that he guessed concerned him; they had subject lines like “That dickweed!!!” and “Men are bastards.” He sagged against the back of the chair. What the hell did he think he was going to find in here? He had told his wife of twenty-five years that he was in love with another woman. What did he think she would be saying to her sister and girlfriends? What a swell guy he was?

With a masochistic sense of deserving whatever abuse he got, he clicked on the last e-mail from Linda to her sister. The subject, which appeared on a whole slew of e-mails, read “Mr. Sandman.”

D-

I’m going to do it. 1. Don’t care 2. Don’t care 3. Don’t care. Give me a call!

Love, L

A few messages down, there was one from her sister to her.

Hi, Lin,

You need to ask yourself this: 1. Am I doing this just to get back at Russ? 2. Am I ready to be considered a bitch when I slap down Mr. S’s pass? (yes, he will, and yes, you will) 3. Is having some man validate my attractiveness really going to help me figure out what I want?

You’ve been down this road before, cupcake. Be careful!!

Love, Deb

Who the hell was Mr. S, and what was he doing making passes at Russ’s wife? He found the next previous e-mail from Linda.

D-

Mr. S knows all about what’s going on with me and R. (In fact, he knows and respects R, which helps.) He’s not going to cross any lines. Meg says I should go for it-escaping from my problems with the help of a handsome man;) should be good for what ails me.

Love, L

Russ sat back in the chair. Someone who knew him. Who knew and respected him. He double-checked the date of the correspondence. The e-mails had all been written during the middle of last week.

Hi, Lin,

I think it’s too soon to be dating, if that’s what you mean. Yesterday you were bawling about what you need to do to get your idiot husband’s attention back. Mr. S is looking for love in all the wrong places and he’s pegged you as ND and D (Newly Divorced and Desperate). Except you aren’t divorced and don’t think you want to be. I know you want to give Russ a kick in the teeth but this isn’t the way to do it.

Love, Deb

The part of him that was a husband was trying to fit the words “Linda” and “date” together. Even tossing aside their therapist-mandated separation agreement-how the hell could she be thinking about dating? The last time either of them had been out on a date, the Village People had been at the top of the charts and Tug McGraw was telling the Mets “You gotta believe.”