Oh, and because I say it in public.

“So, Ms. McKenzie’s not going to stop until she gets to the bottom of what happened up there.”

“She’s not going to stop,” Jasons echoed.

“Out to make a name for herself?”

His man considered this, frowning. “It’s not like she wants a notch in her gun or career advancement, anything like that.”

“What’s her point then?”

“Putting bad people in jail.”

Jasons reminded Mankewitz again about being in the forest that night in April-an unarmed Brynn McKenzie on top of a cliff, launching rocks and logs down onto the men pursuing her, while they fired back with a shotgun and automatic pistol. She had only vanished when Jasons himself began firing with the Bushmaster.

Mankewitz knew without a doubt he wouldn’t like Deputy McKenzie. But he had to respect her.

“What’s she found exactly?”

“I don’t know. She’s been on the lakefront, Avenues West, the Brewline, over to Madison, down to Kenosha. Went to Minneapolis for the day. She’s not stopping.”

The running bulldog.

“Anything I can use? Anything at all?”

Speaking from memory-he never seemed to need notes-Jasons said, “There is one thing.”

“Go ahead.”

“She’s got a secret.”

“Give me the gist.”

“Okay, six, seven years ago-married to her first husband. He was a state trooper, decorated, popular guy. Also had a temper. Had hit her in the past.”

“Prick, hitting women.”

“Well, turns out he gets shot.”

“Shot?”

“In his own kitchen. There’s an inquest. Accidental discharge. Unfortunate accident.”

“Okay. Where’s this going?”

“It wasn’t an accident at all. Intentional shooting. There was a cover-up. Might’ve gone all the way to Madison.”

“The kind of cover-up where people’ll lose their jobs, if it comes to light?”

“Lose their jobs and probably go to jail.”

“This just rumors?”

Jasons opened his briefcase. He removed a limp file folder. “Proof.”

For a little runt, the man sure did produce.

“Hope it’s helpful.”

Mankewitz opened the folder. He read, lifting an eyebrow. “I think it’s very helpful.” He looked up and said sincerely, “Thanks. Oh, and by the way, Happy May Day.”

HE LIKED THIS town.

At least he liked it well enough as a temporary home.

Green Bay was flatter than the state park around Lake Mondac, less picturesque in that sense, but the bay itself was idyllic, and the Fox River impressive in that hard, industrial way that had always appealed to Hart. His father used to take him to the steel mill where the man worked in the payroll office, and the son was always excited beyond words to don a hard hat and tour the floor, which stank of smoke and coal and liquid metal and rubber.

His rental house here was on one of the numbered streets, working-class, not so great. But functional and cheap. His big problem was that he was bored.

Biding time never worked for Hart but biding time was what he had to do. No choice there, none at all.

If he got too bored, he’d go for a drive to the forest preserve, which he found comforting, especially since to get there he’d take Lakeview Drive-the name similar to the private road at Lake Mondac. He would go for walks or sit in the car and work. He had several prepaid mobile phones and would make calls about forthcoming jobs.

Today, in fact, he was just finishing one of these walks, and noticed a maypole set up in one of the clearings. The children were running in a circle, making a barber pole. Then they sat down to their picnic lunch. A school bus was nearby, a yellow stain on the otherwise pretty green.

Hart returned to his rental house, drove around the block, just to be sure, then went inside. He checked messages and made some calls on a new prepaid mobile. Then he went into the garage, where he’d set up a small woodworking shop, a tiny one. He’d been working on a project of his own design. It started out being just an hour or two a day. Now he was up to about four hours. Nothing relaxed him like working with wood.

As he sanded by hand, he thought back to that night in the woods, recalling all the trees there-oak, ash, maple, walnut, all the hardwoods that made up the medium for his craft. What he purchased as smooth, precisely cut lumber, with perfect angles at the corners, had begun as a huge, imposing, even forbidding creature, towering a hundred or so feet in the air. In one way it troubled him that the trees were cut down. In another, though, he believed he was honoring the wood by transforming it into something else, something to be appreciated.

He now looked over the project he’d been working on: an inlaid box. He was pleased with the progress. It might be a present for someone. He wasn’t sure yet.

At eight that night he drove to downtown Green Bay, to a woody, dark bar that served pretty good chili and had a bowl and a beer, sitting at the bar. He got another beer when he finished the first and went into the back room, where there was a basketball game on. He watched it, sipping the beer. It was a West Coast game and the hour was later here. Pretty soon the other patrons began to check their watches, then stand and head home. The score was 92-60 well into the second half and whatever interest had existed before the halftime show had evaporated.

Anyway, it was just basketball. Not the Packers.

He glanced at the walls. They were covered with old signs from Wisconsin’s breweries of the past, famous ones, he supposed, though he’d never heard of them. Loaf and Stein, Heileman, Foxhead. An ominous tusked boar stared at him from a Hibernia Brewing logo. A picture of a TV screen on which two women looked out at the audience. Penned below it was, Hey there, from Laverne and Shirley.

Hart asked for his check as the waitress passed by. She was polite but cool, having given up flirting with him when it wasn’t reciprocated the first time, a week or so ago. In bars like this one, once is enough. He paid, left and drove to another bar not far away, in the Broadway District. He stepped out of the car and into the shadows of a nearby alley.

When the man came out of the bar at 1 A.M., which he’d done virtually every night for the past week, Hart grabbed him, pushed a pistol into his back and dragged him into the alley.

It took Freddy Lancaster about fifteen seconds to decide that the impending threat from Hart was worse than the equally dangerous but less immediate threat of Michelle Kepler. He told Hart everything he knew about her.

One glance out of the alley and one single muted gunshot later, Hart returned to his car.

He drove back to his house, thinking about his next steps. He had believed Freddy when he’d said that neither he nor Gordon Potts knew exactly where Michelle lived but the man had disgorged enough information to allow Hart to start closing in on her.

Which he’d do soon.

But for now he’d do what he’d been obsessing about for the past several weeks. He yawned and reflected that at least he could get a good night’s sleep. He wouldn’t need an early start. Humboldt, Wisconsin, was only a three-hour drive away.

AT 2:30 P.M. on Monday, May 4, Kristen Brynn McKenzie was in the bar area of a restaurant in Milwaukee, having chicken soup and a diet soda. She’d just left appointments with an MPD detective and an FBI agent, where they’d compared notes about their respective investigations into the killings of the Feldmans and the meth dealers in Kennesha County in April.

The meetings had proven to be unhelpful. The goal of the city and the federal investigations, it seemed, was to find a link to Mankewitz, rather than capture those individuals who had slaughtered an innocent husband and wife and left their bodies ignominiously on a cold kitchen floor.

A fact that Brynn pointed out to both the detective and the Feebie, neither of whom was moved by her assessment to do more than curl his lips sympathetically. And with some irritation.