Lyle shook his head. “Not yet. We have some theories, and that’s why we needed to talk with you.” He leaned forward. “Did Mrs. Van Alstyne talk to you about a possible, uh, rendezvous this weekend?”

Russ watched the blush turn her face red. Meg folded her hands over her cheeks and closed her eyes. When she opened them, she was looking, again, at Russ. “Yes,” she said, her voice barely audible.

“Pardon?”

“Yes.” She was louder this time. “Not in so many words, you understand. Just that there was something special going on and a man was involved. I told her to go for it.” She switched her attention from Russ to Lyle, sitting up straighter. “I told her what’s good for the gander is good for the goose.”

What Russ wanted to do was stand up and snarl, You idiot, know-nothing busybody! What he did instead was look out the window, as if the station wagon and pickup alongside the house were the most fascinating things he had ever seen.

“Who was Mrs. Van Alstyne thinking about seeing?”

“I don’t know his name. She was very discreet. She wasn’t the sort to flaunt it all over town.”

The pickup was rigged for plowing. One of the Tracey boys liked working outdoors-plowed in the winter and did landscaping in the summer. He and Linda had hired him a few times, but damned if Russ could remember the kid’s name.

“Do you know anything about him? Do you have any idea how she met this man?” Lyle’s voice was smooth as maple syrup. He was good at this.

“Through her work, I think.”

“Was he a customer?”

“I don’t know. He could have been. Or maybe someone she met on one of her fabric-buying trips. She didn’t share what she thought were the unimportant details with me. To Linda, what mattered, what she wanted to talk about, was the way he made her feel. Valued. Appreciated. Wanted.”

The kid’s name. The kid’s name. Maybe he should ask Meg. Maybe he should remind her that he wasn’t a scum-sucking bottom dweller when he hired her kid. Maybe he should-

“Did Mrs. Van Alstyne agree to go on a date with this man?”

“I don’t know what she decided! She asked me my opinion and I gave it to her. For chrissake, what does this have to do with finding who killed her?”

Eyeballing trucks and contemplating kids’ names wasn’t going to do it for Russ anymore. “I’m not being some sort of jealous asshole, Meg.” He was too loud. She flinched. “This guy who was promising her ‘something special’ may have been the one who killed her. That’s why we want to find him.”

Meg stood abruptly and walked to one of the windows. She yanked it open, pushed the storm window up a few inches, and dug a package of cigarettes out of her sweater pocket. She patted the other pocket. “Crap. Forgot my matches.” She looked at the cellophane-wrapped box. “I’ve been trying to quit.”

Russ heaved himself off of the sofa and pulled his Zippo out of his jeans. He tossed it to her. “Here.”

“Thanks.” Her hand shook as she lit the cigarette.

“I’m not the enemy here, Meg.” He dropped his voice. “I loved Linda. I may have done a half-assed job of it, but I loved her.”

She nodded. “She knew him before you two started having troubles. She told me that. I honestly don’t think she was all that interested in him as a man. He was more-when she talked about him, it was always with a reference to you. Comparing him to you, or how it would piss you off, or how you wouldn’t believe someone else would find her attractive.”

He shut his eyes. Linda had always been the most physically perfect woman he knew. Every man found her attractive. They would go out to dinner and busboys would trip over themselves passing their table. How could she not have known?

“She never told me his name or anything. However, I got the impression from some of the things she said”-she took a long drag on her cigarette-“that she had something going with him years ago.”

What? Russ squinted at her, as if he could make what she said come into focus. What?

“What do you mean, Mrs. Tracey?”

She had almost finished off the first cigarette. She flicked it through the window into a snowbank and tapped out another. “I mean I think she had a relationship with this guy several years ago. Not long after she moved to Millers Kill. She…” Meg lit her second cigarette with a much steadier hand. “She never came right out and said it was the same guy. But I-” She looked at Russ, finally meeting his eyes through a veil of smoke. “Oh, God, I’m sorry, Russ. I may be wrong about this. I may have been misreading what she said entirely.”

“You think… she implied she had had an affair?” He sounded as if he were the one who had been smoking. “Linda?”

Meg and Lyle both looked away.

“I gotta-” He could not have said what he had to do. His feet moved, and he was walking, and the next thing he knew he was standing outside, leaning against the bed of his Dodge Ram pickup, losing his breakfast.

He was scrubbing his mouth out with snow when Lyle caught up with him. “Chief?” He glanced down. “Oh, Christ almighty.”

Russ spat out some icy water and scooped up another handful. He stuffed his glasses in his coat pocket and washed his face with snow.

“This is all news to you.” Lyle pitched his sentence halfway between a question and a declaration.

Russ kicked snow over the mess he had made. “Yeah.” He replaced his glasses. The stinging cold over his skin felt good. He wanted to scour the inside of his head the same way, turn it cold and clean.

Lyle held out the Zippo. “I got your lighter back.”

Russ cradled it in one wet hand. “It was my dad’s.” He flipped it over. Ran his thumb across his father’s initials. “Y’know, I always thought he and my mom had a perfect marriage. It wasn’t until he was gone that I realized how much his drinking hurt her.”

Lyle’s wary look almost made him smile. “Don’t worry, I’m not about to start hitting the bottle again.” The doctors who said alcoholism was partly genetic got his vote. Like his father before him, he had been a drunk. The difference was, he had managed to stop before it killed him. Thanks, in large part, to Linda.

“Good.” Lyle opened the passenger door for him. “I’ve never seen you boozing, and I for sure don’t want to start now.”

Russ climbed in obediently and let his deputy shut the door behind him. God, he felt wiped out. And it wasn’t even noon yet.

Lyle took the driver’s seat and started the truck. “I’m not going to say I told you so. You know that. But goddammit, Russ, if this doesn’t show you why you ought to sit this one out, I don’t know what will.”

“You’re right.”

Lyle stared.

“Didn’t expect me to agree with you, did you?”

“No, frankly.”

“I’m not taking myself off the case. But you were right. I was nothing but a liability in there. I think maybe I need to leave the boots-on-the-ground work to you and stick to analyzing what you and the other guys bring in.” He pressed his lips together. The next thing he had to say was hard. “If we can, I’d like to limit the number of guys we have directly investigating this lead. If it turns out there’s something to all this… stuff that Meg Tracey says. I just-I don’t want to-”

“I understand.”

Russ relaxed against the seat. “Thanks.” He stared out the window. House, house, farm, house. Featureless fields, corn stubble and hay roots buried beneath December’s snows. “Where are we headed?”

“Back to the station. Look, as long as I’ve got you in a temporarily agreeable state, how ’bout you take my advice and go home for a while? You’ve had a hell of a morning.”

Funny how his mother’s place had become “home.” He wondered if he would ever be able to live in his own house again. “The autopsy report’s coming in,” he said.

“Dr. Dvorak won’t have anything until this afternoon at the earliest. You want to see it, right?”

There was nothing he had ever wanted to see less. “Yeah.”