He couldn’t speak. He jerked his parka to one side, revealing his holster.

“Officer Entwhistle, take custody of that sidearm.”

“Oh, for the love of Mike,” Lyle said.

“No!” Mark lurched forward. “The chief didn’t do it. He couldn’t have! For God’s sake, we needed your help because nobody was looking at Reverend Fergusson as a suspect. Not because anybody suspected the chief!”

“We needed her help?” Lyle hitched his thumbs over his belt. “You were the one who called the staties down on us?”

Mark flushed red. Russ’s heart sank. Oh, no. Oh, crap. He had just about convinced himself it must have been Lyle. Not his best and brightest. Not the one he thought of as his protégé.

“Chief…” The naked pleading on Mark’s face was painful to watch. “I didn’t do it because I thought you were involved. I just thought… Reverend Fergusson had the means and the motive and no alibi and Lyle refused to even consider questioning her… and I thought, maybe if someone not so close to what was happening came on board…”

Noble stood stock-still, walleyed, a kid witnessing his parents’ marital meltdown on Christmas Eve. Lyle just shook his head, his face screwed up into an expression of disgust. “I’ve heard some stupid rationalizations for screwing someone over before, kid, but this takes the cake.”

The hypocrisy was more than Russ could bear. “He may have finked me out to the staties, Lyle, but at least he didn’t fuck my wife.”

Lyle’s face bleached white. Out of the corner of his eye, Russ could see Mark and Noble imitating widemouthed bass, and Investigator Jensen’s perfectly plucked eyebrows crawling into her hairline. But all his attention was focused on his deputy chief. His right-hand man. His friend.

“Aren’t you going to say something? Maybe a stupid rationalization? Let me guess. You couldn’t resist. Wait, I know. It didn’t mean anything. No, no, I got it. She came on to you.”

“Jesus Christ,” Jensen said. Her rounded, modulated voice had given way to a broad, flat central New York accent. “This is the most fucked-up department I’ve ever been sent to. It’s like a fucking Peyton Place.”

Lyle ignored her. He looked at his hands. At the ceiling. Finally, he looked at Russ. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s it? You’re sorry? For what? Me finding out? I mean, if you were sorry about screwing my wife, you might have mentioned it some time in the last seven years, right?”

“I-”

Someone cleared his throat in the doorway. They all turned. Sergeant Morin stood there, holding an old-fashioned rolled fax flimsy in one hand, not meeting anyone’s eyes. “Unh, sorry to interrupt,” he said. “Not that I heard anything. I mean, I just got here.”

Russ pinched the bridge of his nose. “Did you find anything?”

“Yeah.” Morin thrust the flimsy toward Russ. “Got a hit on one set right off. Nothing yet on the other.” He pointed toward the stairs. “I’m just going to go back up there and take my photographs, okay?”

Russ nodded. Morin bolted up the stairs. No one else moved. The flimsy curled in Russ’s palm, so light a breath of air could carry it away. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to remember his way back into being a cop. Trying to give a damn about whatever information Morin had uncovered.

“Chief?” Noble’s voice was tentative. “What’s it say?”

Russ breathed out. Opened his eyes. Unscrolled the flimsy. “Prints belong to Dennis Shambaugh. Why does that name sound familiar?”

“Dennie Shambaugh,” Lyle said, his voice thin. “You remember him. The Check Burglar. Must have been six, seven years ago. Right after you took over from Chief Brennan.”

“Oh, yeah. Didn’t he go up to Plattsburgh?”

“Was he from the Czech Republic or something?” Jensen asked.

“Not that kind of Czech,” Russ said. “His specialty was jimmying the locks on houses and camps and making off with extra checks and a signature sample. The victims didn’t even know they’d been ripped off until they got their bank statements. Sounds a lot like the operation you described here.” He held the scroll at arm’s length, trying to read the tiny print containing Dennis Sham-baugh’s record. “He got ten years. He must have been squeaky clean to get out this early.”

“He got a dime for theft by breaking?” Jensen said.

“Assault,” Lyle told her. “He accidentally picked a house where the owner was home. The guy had a gun and thought he’d go all self-defense on Shambaugh. Who yanked the weapon away from the homeowner and pistol-whipped the hell out of him.”

“Didn’t he have a fiancée?” Russ said. “I thought the DA’s office tried to get his girlfriend to roll on him.”

“She claimed she didn’t know anything,” Lyle said. “Just thought he was a well-paid arborist.”

“Arborist?” Jensen said.

“That’s a tree cutter,” Lyle said.

“I know what a goddam arborist is.”

“Anyway, there wasn’t anything that linked her to the burglaries or the money. I think she dumped him. I don’t recall her even being at the trial.”

“What was her name?” Russ looked at Lyle, then at Noble, who, while slow off the block when it came to original thinking, had a prodigious memory for names and dates.

He shook his head. “Sorry, Chief, I wasn’t involved with that one.”

“You thinking Audrey Keane may be the former fiancée?” Lyle frowned.

“She wouldn’t be the first woman to forgive and forget,” Russ said sourly.

“Is she working with him? Or just giving him bed and board and closing her eyes to whatever’s going on?” Lyle looked at Mark.

“If they’re stealing identities the way I think they are, I can’t see how she couldn’t know,” the young officer said. “Digging up passports, checks, credit card bills-that all takes time. What does she do, walk the dog unawares while he rifles the house? She’s got to be helping him.”

“Dennie’s previous offense certainly lines up with the scenario you two came up with,” Lyle said. “Mrs. Van Alstyne comes home, catches them in the act, and Dennie… shuts her up.”

“I think it lines up a little too conveniently,” Jensen said. “We still have nothing tying Shambaugh and Keane to the Van Alstyne house. Who’s to say you didn’t know about Shambaugh’s release, peg him as a perfect fall guy, and set the scene to mimic a home invasion?”

“I saw the autopsy report.” Mark bristled to the defense of his chief. “Even if you could believe the chief could kill his wife, there’s no way he could have defaced her like that.”

“That makes it more likely he did it than the Check Burglar,” Jensen shot back. “If you’re just shutting somebody up for good, you slice their throat and be done with it. Whoever defaced Linda Van Alstyne did so out of rage and hate. Does that sound like a guy rifling people’s closets for deposit slips? Or a husband whose wife refuses to fall in line?”

“Deface,” Russ said.

“I think you ought to just shut up right about now,” Jensen said.

“You both said ‘deface.’ ” He had seen a movie portraying the creation of a planet once-shards and shafts of matter and light falling inward, coalescing from a vaporous cloud to a brilliant, glowing core and a hard outer shell. That was what was going on in his head right now. “Deface.”

“Look, Van Alstyne-”

“Ssh,” Lyle said.

“What if the woman in our kitchen was mutilated deliberately? Not by someone playing with death, but by someone who wanted to disguise her identity?” He whirled toward Lyle. “Ethan Stoner said Audrey Keane was a good-looking blonde. He said even though she was his mother’s age, she had a great figure. Like Linda.”

Lyle shook his head. “Aw, no, Russ. Don’t start thinking-”

“What if that woman wasn’t Linda at all? What if it was Audrey Keane?”

“Russ.” Lyle’s voice was gentle. “It was her. I saw her, there on the kitchen floor.”

“What did you see, Lyle? A blonde with an unidentifiable face? How long did you look at her?”