Goddamnit. I pulled out my cell phone. I almost had it, and then it would slip away. If Puhy worked at Jackson, he probably lived in the area. There were only a few small towns nearby. Plymouth. Ann Arbor.

I punched in the number for information and asked for Joe Puhy’s number. There were three of them. I jotted them down and called the first. I got a machine, but when the voice of the answering machine clicked on, I knew I didn’t have the right one. The Puhy I’d spoken to was older and gruff.

Exactly the voice I got on the second try.

“I’m very sorry to bother you at home, Mr. Puhy,” I said. “This is John Rockne, the private investigator. We spoke earlier about Rufus Coltraine and Laurence Grasso.”

“Oh yeah,” he said, not happy at all. “I remember. Look, we’re about to sit down to dinner.” I could hear voices in the background.

“I’m terribly sorry, sir. This won’t take more than a minute.”

He sighed. “You’re a friend of House, right?”

House was my buddy who worked on Cell Block A, who’d initially put me in touch with Puhy. Thank God for House. I owed him one.

“Yeah,” I said.

“All right, go ahead.”

“I was just looking back through my notes, and I saw that you said you thought Rufus Coltraine would go down South to see his family. Or that you thought he had family there.”

“Uh-huh.” More dishes clattering in the background. I had to make this fast.

“But you also said that you didn’t recall him getting any letters or anything from family members,” I said.

There was a pause as Puhy thought about the contradiction.

“Uh . . . right.”

“So how did you know he had family down there?”

This time the pause was longer. I heard more voices in the background, including a woman calling out, “Joe!” She had that kind of voice that you ignored at your own peril. Kind of like my wife’s.

“Uh . . .” he said.

Shit, I didn’t want to lose him.

“You know, this is really a bad time,” Puhy said.

“I know it is, but another person has died, Mr. Puhy.” I was starting to get mad. People were dying, and this guy’s Beef Fucking Stroganoff was more important.

He must have heard the tone in my voice.

“Hold on!” he shouted to the people in the background.

“All right,” he said. “Let me think.” We both waited. A freighter nosed its way out of the Detroit River, heading north. The clatter of silverware sounded from the Puhy kitchen.

“Okay, I think I remember,” he said.

“Shoot.”

“It wasn’t a letter or anything,” he said. “I think I overheard him talking about it.”

“Was he talking about it with Laurence Grasso?”

“Yeah. How’d you know that?”

“Just a hunch.”

“Yeah, I think I overheard Coltraine saying something about getting out and going there.”

“Where, Mr. Puhy?”

“Home,” he said.

“Home where?”

“I’m pretty sure it was, um, Tennessee.”

A shiver ran down my spine. The little thing that had been dancing around in my brain finally let itself be known.

“Where in Tennessee?” I asked, even though I already knew.

A giant block had slammed into place.

“Memphis,” he said.

Chapter Forty-One

Something about a house. Fuck. I was losing my mind: short-term, medium-term and long-term memory loss. All at the same time. I pounded the steering wheel with my hands. Think, think, think. I pulled onto Vernier from Lakeshore, heading toward I-94.

I needed to start making more connections. That feeling of being close wasn’t good enough.

Where had I been when I felt things starting to come together? At the party. The first time. Talking to Shannon’s entourage for the first time.

A car pulled in front of me, and I reefed the wheel to the right, sped up, and floored it past him.

Something about a farmhouse?

What the fuck was it? We were all sitting around, talking about escapes or something. And Memphis mentioned something about looking at a house. Was she buying?

Finally, it clicked.

A lighthouse. That’s right, a lighthouse. Because she said she was on Harsen’s. The island at the other end of Lake St. Clair.

I pounded the wheel again and roared onto I-94. Harsen’s Island. A lighthouse. And someone had said something about Memphis milking cows. A joke that I assumed meant she had a little farm or something. Farms on Harsen’s weren’t unheard of.

I glanced at the clock on the dashboard.

It’d been nearly three hours since Molly had been killed. If the same person was headed for Memphis’, he or she had a big jump on me.

I pushed the pedal all the way to the floor.

•

Harsen’s Island is the biggest of a small group of islands at the north end of Lake St. Clair. The lake narrows and eventually turns into the St. Clair River for a brief thirty miles or so before opening back up, this time into Lake Huron.

I exited I-94, sped across Harper and pulled into the parking lot at the ferry harbor. Fifteen minutes later, the ferry dumped us on the island, and I hit the road running. Even though Harsen’s has its own yacht club and for years was a miniature summer playground for Grosse Pointers, it still feels like you travel back twenty years or so. Mostly summer cottages and the occasional bait shop/convenience store.

The entire island is only a couple square miles with one main road that runs along the outside border. The road is aptly named Harsen’s Boulevard, and I steered onto it from the ferry dock. It had been over fifteen years since I’d been on the island, and then I was a high-schooler driving out to my buddy’s cottage to get drunk.

I’d never seen a lighthouse on the island, or if I had, I certainly didn’t remember, didn’t know that one even existed out here.

I also figured there weren’t many cops out here either. So I hammered the pedal down and turned Harsen’s into my own private Indianapolis 500.

After about five minutes, I sped around a steep curve and saw the lighthouse—although, technically, it was more like a light post you see in the suburbs. A tiny harbor had a few boats tied off, and I looked at the surrounding land.

No sign of a farmhouse.

I did, however, see an older woman walking a Bassett Hound. I pulled the car up next to her.

“Do you know of a farmhouse around here with a view of the lighthouse? It belongs to a songwriter named Memphis Bornais?” I said.

She looked at me with bloodshot blue eyes. They looked just like the dogs’. I thought she was going to tell me that Harsen’s residents were a private people and that if this Memphis woman wanted me to find her she would’ve given me directions.

Instead, she jerked an unusually large thumb in the direction behind her.

“Third mailbox down,” she said. The Bassett Hound gave a soft bark, and they went on their way.

I thanked her and sped down to the mailbox—instead of the little flag sticking up from the box it was a metal musical note. I knew I had the right place.

The driveway was dirt and gravel, and it immediately climbed. From the road, the tall trees blocked any view of the houses behind. But once I got near the top of the driveway, I realized there was a very small bluff. And perched on top was a little white farmhouse, with a picket fence and a red barn behind it.

It was a cross between Mayberry and Martha’s Vineyard, before Billy Joel moved in.

I skidded to a stop in the roughly hewn semi-circular drive and jogged to the front door. I rang the doorbell and waited, but I heard nothing from inside. I tried the knob. Locked.

I ran to the back of the house and saw a silver 7 Series BMW backed up against the house. I went up the back porch steps and was about to knock on the door when I saw that it was already open.