“I don’t know yet.”
Silence on the line. "Watch that, Noah. Luther doesn't leave breadcrumbs by accident."
“Don’t I know.”
O'Connell paused. "Have you spoken to your father about the DNA results from that latex glove?"
"Not yet."
"What are you waiting for?"
"The same thing you are. Making sure I don't screw this up."
They agreed to talk again at the end of the week. Noah hung up and sat in the quiet of his desk.
The afternoon passed without event. Paperwork. A briefing on the Tupper Lake operation. A conversation with Declan about a burglary case in Wilmington. It was all normal. Routine. The machinery of the job turning the way it always did.
Noah leftthe office around five-thirty and headed home. Mia was at the kitchen table on her laptop, working on her class schedule. Ethan was in; however, the Luther card was gone from the counter. Noah checked the hallway. Ethan's jacket was hanging on the hook by the door. He slid his hand into the inside pocket and found his wallet. He opened it.
The card was tucked behind Ethan's school ID. Noah put the wallet back.
After dinner he sat in his office with the green lamp on and the desk cleared except for one thing. The manila folder from the bottom drawer. He hadn't opened it since he put it there at the end of the last case.
He opened it again and stared at the Parabon report. The DNA analysis. The familial match. Hugh Sutherland's biological profile had aligned with the Hale children. It came back with a father-child relationship. 3,400 centimorgans. The science was clean. The numbers didn't negotiate.
His father had kept a second family hidden for decades. And Noah had only found out because one of them was murdered.
He closed the folder. The lamp hummed. Outside, a loon called across High Peaks Lake. Noah drummed his fingers on the desk. He needed to talk to Hugh. He had needed to for weeks. Every morning he woke up and told himself today was the day, and every evening he sat in that chair and told himself tomorrow.
2
The call came in at 6:27 a.m.
Callie Thorne was already dressed when her phone lit up on the nightstand. She had been awake since four, sitting at the small table by the window in her apartment, reviewing case notes from an assault in Newcomb that wasn't going anywhere. Sleep had become unreliable lately. Not bad dreams, just a mind that refused to shut off.
McKenzie picked her up in the unmarked Tahoe twelve minutes later. He was wearing a plaid shirt that didn't match his plaid socks, which didn't match each other.
His bald head caught the first gray light coming through the windshield as she climbed in.
"Maggie Coleman," he said. “Editor of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise. Her neighbor found the window blown out this morning and called it in. First responders confirmed a body."
"Maggie?" Callie knew the name. Everyone in the county did. "Didn’t she retire?"
"Around a year ago. When the Ashfords bought the paper." He pulled onto Route 86 heading northwest. "Patrol says it’s a single gunshot."
"Robbery?"
"Doesn't sound like it. Nothing was disturbed." McKenzie was quiet for a moment. “Hard to believe she’s gone. I remember she covered that snowmobile fatality outside Saranac Lake back in ’23. Showed up at the scene before we had the tape up. Asked more questions in ten minutes than most reporters managed in a week."
"She was like that," Callie said. "Printed what you gave her and kept digging for what you didn't."
The road climbed through a corridor of spruce and balsam fir. Mist hung in the valleys, filling the gaps between ridgelines like poured milk. Dew coated every surface. It was the kind of Adirondack morning that belonged on a postcard, not a police report.
Callie pulled up the property address on her phone. It was rural. A quarter mile off the main road on a gravel drive. In some parts of the Adirondacks, a person could die and the nearest human being wouldn't know for days.
Two patrol cars were already parked at the top of the gravel drive when they arrived. Yellow tape stretched between a porch column and a birch tree at the corner of the yard. The house was a single-story clapboard, white paint gone gray at the edges, set on a wide lot that backed up to open grass and a tree line. Around back was a vegetable garden and a small shed. Beyond that, nothing but field and forest.
A deputy named Hargrove was standing near the front steps, logging arrivals. He nodded at them.
