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IT WAS TWO in the afternoon before Susan and I were evicted from Roger Dorrich’s apartment building by a surly Elloise Sharman, who’d become progressively twitchy about the time we were spending crawling through the remains of Dorrich’s life. We slipped silently into Shauna Bulger’s truck and coasted out of town, both locked in our own minds. There’d been no clue in the apartment as to who was threatening Dorrich. Not the name of a journalist scrawled on a slip of paper. Not the worrisome jottings of a man on the edge, written in a hidden diary. Nothing. Despite Dorrich’s family having taken his phone and laptop, the hub of modern man’s personal life, we’d been optimistic going in. But as we headed back to Gloucester, Susan’s disappointment radiated from her body like a wave of heat, and I couldn’t shake mine either. We drove almost all the way home in silence, Susan turning her watch around and around on her wrist, her eyes on the trees.

Though I’d made fun of her, Susan was right about Dorrich’s behavior on the morning of his suicide. It was unusual. And the bullet that had struck the bottle and the tile in his bathroom didn’t add up. But like the receipts in Dorrich’s wallet, it wasn’t enough to tell us what had happened that morning. The bullet casing from the shot to Dorrich’s head had been recovered from the scene. There was no casing found for the other shot. Which might have meant Dorrich was murdered, and the killer took the first casing. Or it might have meant the shot happened at a different time, maybe days or weeks earlier, and the casing was disposed of then.

Loose ends. Unanswered questions.

Lies. Lies. Lies.

I had spotted the pickup truck that was following us as we pulled onto I-95 just after Stoneham. I’d quickly written off the pair of men in flannel shirts and caps as construction workers heading to Gloucester after picking up supplies in Boston, preferring to focus on the problem of Dorrich’s death than on the road around me. The men came to my attention again as we started to see flashes of Sandy Bay between the trees on the home stretch. They were hanging back, maybe two hundred yards behind us. By the time we reached thick woods only minutes from the inn, a new disquiet was beginning to grow in my chest.

The driver closed the gap between us fast. Susan turned in her seat.

“What’s the deal here?” she asked. “You know these guys?”

I didn’t get time to answer. The driver slammed his foot on the accelerator, and the truck smashed into our tailgate. Susan screamed as our vehicle fishtailed and flipped, crunching and grinding on the empty highway, spraying sparks.