WE FOUND A TABLE off by ourselves. Sean sat without using his hands. He was looking at me in a way he never had before. I assumed it was because he was impressed at my performance, my accomplishment, the mere fact that I was here in the beer tent at the finish line.

He said, “Pretty good gig you got there on the Telford investigation.”

I drank because it gave me a chance to lower my eyes to my plastic cup.

“Office next to Reid Cunningham’s, huh?”

He knew it was. I just nodded.

“I saw all those uniformed officers delivering files, so obviously something big is going on.”

“It’s been going on for a while, Sean.”

“Cold case suddenly heats up, something new has happened.”

Sean was leaning forward, his wrists resting on the edge of the table, his hands still holding his beer and his cookie.

“You taking it before the grand jury?”

“Taking what, Sean?”

He smiled as if he recognized that a certain code had to be used, certain protocol had to be followed. “Rumors are going around that there’s new evidence the Gregorys might have been involved.”

I did not respond. This did not bother Sean in the slightest.

“Is the Senator going to testify?”

“Sean, tell me exactly what it is you’re hearing.”

He looked left and right. He lowered his voice. “I’m hearing there might have been an orgy going on at the Gregorys’ that night the girl was killed. I’m hearing she might have been there and seen too much.”

There was something childish about the way Sean was addressing me. Maybe it was the cookie.

“You believe that?” I asked.

“What I believe,” he said, his eyes sparkling, “is that Anything New Telford has been making the rounds for years telling people the Gregorys had something to do with the death of his daughter. What I hear is that he’s got your ear now. What I see is you’ve suddenly got prime office space and stacks of files. And I want in.”

“Want in how?”

“To assist you. To co-counsel with you. Whatever you’ll give me. I heard you turned down Barbara.”

He took a big bite out of the cookie, what I thought was a rather vicious bite. Crumbs shot all over the place.

“Guys are talking,” he went on, his mouth full. “They’re saying, ‘Why would he do that?’ People are saying, ‘Well, she doesn’t have enough experience.’ But me, I looked at it, I figured something else out altogether.”

He washed the cookie down with beer, dropped his voice even lower, and said, “I figure, Barbara, she’s from around here. She’s tied in with those people. You can’t have her going after them like you and I could.”

“By ‘those people,’ you mean the Gregorys?”

“Damn right.”

“And you wouldn’t care which Gregory might be involved, as long as it’s one of them. Is that what you’re saying?”

Sean Murphy looked at me as if I had just spoken a profound truth, one that was going to make us great friends now that we shared this understanding. “You got it,” he said. “Case like this, fucking career maker, I’d go after the Senator’s mother. Fry her ass, if I had to.”

2

.

SEAN WASN’T THE ONLY ONE WHO WAS EXCITED.

On Monday I got a call from the Cape Cod Times, then one from The Boston Globe, then The Wall Street Journal, and finally the dreaded Fox News. I referred them all to Reid, who repeatedly denied that there had been any developments. He said the matter had never been closed, and praised Bill Telford for his diligence in never letting them forget that the killer was still at large.

There was other news in the office, too—news that was not worthy of journalists’ attention, but that was of some significance to me. Barbara Belbonnet had unexpectedly announced she was taking a leave of absence. This threw operations into a tizzy because nobody wanted to cover her caseload. “Domestic relations?” a woman said to me as she was trying to talk her way onto my project, “yuck.”

THERE WAS PRECIOUS little in the police files that I had not seen already. I read them and reread them. I interviewed the officers who had responded to the crime scene and who either were still with the force or lived in the area. I explored the possibility that Heidi had been chased across the golf course and tried to get someone, anyone, to give me information about a drag path. There wasn’t any. Not even the last few feet, as Reid Cunningham had implied. Which meant that she had to have been killed somewhere else and someone had to have carried a hundred-and-fifteen-pound dead girl at least from West Street across a fairway to where she was found in the trees. Someone. Or some two.

Pick her up, put her over your shoulder in a fireman’s carry. Peter Martin was big enough to do that. Or one person could hold her under the arms, another hold her feet. Peter and who? Not Jamie, they were fighting. Not Ned, he was occupied. Not Cory, she was gone. Which meant it would have had to be either McFetridge, who spoke to me, or Jason, who ran from me.

I MET WITH DR. PARDEEP, the medical examiner. He was reluctant to say anything at first and kept telling me it was all in his report, but I got him talking about his role as a scientist and how really what he was doing was solving mysteries, and he got excited and told me that was what people did not understand about his job. It was all about hunting for clues. Finding them, assessing them, putting them together to come up with answers as to what had happened. He examined bodies to find clues and, yes, that was what he had done in this case.

As for the conclusion that it was a golf club that killed Heidi Telford, he pointed out that he had said only it was most likely a golf club. The reason? Well, the entry was obtunded, which meant it had not been made by anything sharp, like an ax. Also, it was clean. No dirt, no bark, no foreign organisms, as might be seen if it were made by a rock or anything organic. Could I, he wanted to know, think of any other object that would cause such a wound? He was more than willing to consider any proposal I had. I offered the possibility of a fireplace poker, and he grew animated and told me he had considered that, but that the geometry of the entry wound, deeper toward the top of the skull than the bottom, did not comport with a completely straight object.

He was lecturing me on the dynamics of blows inflicted by pokers, but my mind had gone back to the idea of a golf club being clean. The only times the heads of my clubs were ever clean were when I was a guest at a private course and the caddies wiped them down before loading them into my car.

I wondered if that ruled out a transient. Not likely to find one of those driving around Osterville late at night with a bag of clean clubs in his car, looking to pick up young girls walking home. Young girls leaving the Gregory compound. Having been pushed out the side gate. As the Gregory boys were wont to do. A family tradition.

I MET WITH DETECTIVE IACUPUCCI. He was more than happy to come to my office. He stopped and talked to three different female staffers between the front desk and my door. Pooch was about six-feet-three, devilishly handsome and dumb as a box of rocks. He could tell me nothing that he had learned since taking over the case from Detective Landry. But he was delighted to talk about the Barnstable High Red Raiders football team, for which he was the defensive line coach. They were starting their workouts now. I looked like I might have been a player at one time. Maybe I’d like to come out and give the DBs a hand.

I gave him a list of the people known to be at the Gregorys’ on the night Heidi was there and told him no, I wasn’t available to lend the boys a hand.